Box office boom
Local films a success at Spring Festival
The just-ended Lunar New Year holidays proved a roaring success for China’s box office as it recorded a new high with several local films possibly earning more than Western blockbusters half a world away.
The country’s top regulator for the sector said that box-office revenues from Feb 19 to 24 touched 1.73 billion yuan ($280 million), 36 percent up from the same period last year, according to Xinhua News Agency.
The action thriller Dragon Blade starring Jackie Chan and directed by Hong Kong filmmaker Daniel Lee led the way with 451 million yuan, followed by the casinothemed comedy The Man From Macau II in 3D that earned 416 million yuan and French director JeanJacques Annaud’s Wolf Totem at 297 million yuan, Box Office Bar, a major Chinese online box-office tracker, said on Wednesday.
In comparison, Fifty Shades of Grey, an erotic romance between billionaire Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) and college graduate Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson), topped the North American box office with $22.3 million (139.6 million yuan), in the weekend ending on Feb 22, foreign media reported.
British spy comedy, Kingsman: The Secret Service, was second with $18.3 million (114.6 million yuan) and The Sponge Bob Movie: Sponge Out of Water followed with $16.6 million (103.9 million yuan).
On the first day of the Lunar New Year, which fell on Feb 19, nearly 10 million Chinese moviegoers went to the cinemas to create the highest single-day ticket sales record of 360 million yuan in China.
With New Year holidays considered the golden period for China’s box office, eight films premiered on Feb 19.
But the trend among Chinese to watch films at theaters during Spring Festival is relatively new. The entertainment business was so bad during the season that cinemas were kept shut for the first three days of the New Year until the early 1990s. With family taking precedence over all else in China during the celebrations, filmmakers usually kept box-office expectations low.
In 1995, when it became public knowledge that Chan’s Rumble in the Bronx — the story of a Hong Kong policeman taking on a New York gang — would be screened on the mainland on the first day of the Lunar New Year, trade analysts doubted it would be watched at all.
But when the film hit the halls, large crowds showed up, making it the second-highest grossing movie that year (95 million yuan), after Arnold Schwarzenegger’s True Lies, the first Hollywood blockbuster to be cleared for general screening on the mainland.
Since then filmmakers have looked to hesuidang, or the period of festivities from Christmas to the Chinese New Year, to make profits.
This year’s hesuidang also proved to be the most competitive in China’s box-office history.
With Dragon Blade, Chan, a hesuidang draw, was back with his 13th movie release on the mainland. But this year, the 61-year-old star faced off with a number of strong rivals including Chow Yunfat in The Man From Macau II in 3D, Chen Kun in the fantasy adventure Zhong Kui: Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal that grossed 263 million yuan, Feng Shaofeng in Wolf Totem and Louis Koo in the romance Triumph in the Skies that made 105 million yuan.
Even relatively “weaker” films such as Where Are We Going, Dad 2 and Emperor’s Holidays witnessed large audiences.
China, the world’s second-largest movie market, grossed a total of 29.6 billion yuan at the box office in 2014, with homegrown films making up 54 percent of the market.
About 1,015 cinemas and 5,397 screens were added to the mainland last year, with most across small- and middle-size cities.
An interesting movie trivia this year is that nearly half of the eight Chinese movies that premiered on Feb 19 had some foreign connection while being made.
Zhong Kui, inspired by the tale of a Chinese god, for instance, made use of New Zealand director Jack Peterson’s special-effects company Weta Workshop. Wolf Totem hired well-known Canadian animal trainer Andrew Simpson to tame a pack of Mongolian wolves for three years.
Dragon Blade, which is about a fictional war between ancient China and Rome set in the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220), also stars American actor John Cusack, who is known to Chinese fans for his role in Hollywood hit 2012, and Adrian Brody, the Oscar-winning American actor.
Cusack and Brody were in Beijing earlier this month to promote Dragon Blade.
“I have long loved Chinese cinema, especially the martial arts films. Before I started to be an actor at a very young age, my father used to take me to Chinatown in New York City to watch kung fu movies,” Brody, 41, said at a media event.
For Chinese movie fans who have grown up watching Hollywood, it may also be a dream come true that respected Western actors are now starting to act in Chinese-language movies. Contact the writer at xufan@chinadaily.com.cn