Despite rampant piracy, China’s box office sets record
BEIJING: Box office figures for China’s competitive Spring Festival period reached a record high this year, despite rampant piracy that likely incurred losses of an estimated one billion yuan (RM621 million), Chinese reports said.
But the record gross came on the strength of higher movie ticket prices, not from more viewers hitting the cinemas.
“The Spring Festival period is the prelude to the rest of the year, and so this (performance) indicates that the Chinese film market in 2019 will be full of uncertainty,” commentators on the WeChat account Entertainment Capital said.
The total box office intake for the Feb 4-10 period reached RMB5.83 billion (RM3.61 billion), an increase of 1.4 per cent yearon-year, according to data from online ticketing platform Maoyan.
But the number of actual cinema visits was down 10.3 per cent year-on-year to 130 million.
Rising ticket prices were a key factor contributing to the decrease in cinema-going. For the first day of the festival, ticket prices in some lower-income third- and fourth-tier cities skyrocketed to as high as 100 yuan (RM62) apiece, making a trip to the movies much less affordable for families.
In past years, pirated versions available immediately after a film’s debut were still quite amateur, with poor sound and picture quality. But this year, just three days after opening, all four of the top new releases had been leaked in HD, with some versions boasting resolution as high as 1280p.
They circulated online for as little as one yuan (about 60 sen) apiece, with some bundled into gift packages of multiple titles for even less.
Pirated versions “of this quality are more likely coming from people within the industry rather than amateurs,” wrote analyst Wu Yuting on industry WeChat account Pufferfish Film Archive, citing insiders.
The Wandering Earth director Frant Gwo put out a call on Weibo for internet users to send leads on pirates directly to Gong, while China’s National Copyright Administration set up its own tip hotline.
“Let’s work together to combat online copyright infringement and piracy, protect excellent domestic movies and purify our online copyright environment!” it urged on its official Weibo account.