China’s film market experiences growing pains as quality falls

By Wang Yi Source:Global Times Published: 2019/6/16 20:28:40

A poster for Chinese sci-fi movie The Wandering Earth Photo: IC



China's film market is contracting for the first time in nine years, which is an inevitable stage for the market to go through to become the world's largest, analysts and industry insiders said.

Box office revenue in China dropped 6.35 percent year-on-year to 24.9 billion yuan ($3.6 billion) from January to May, and the number of tickets sold fell by 100 million to 689 million, according to data from domestic ticketing and rating platform Maoyan.

It was the first time that declines have been recorded since 2011, and the main culprit was a lack of quality movies, an analyst said. The market, which expanded rapidly driven by investment in past years, is forecast to  surpass the US and become the world's largest in the next year.

Except for Chinese science fiction movie The Wandering Earth and the US blockbuster Avengers: Endgame, all other movies' performances fell short of expectations during the period, according to media reports.

The Wandering Earth's box office reached 4.66 billion yuan, beating the Avengers: Endgame's 4.24 billion yuan in China, accord to box office platform cbooo.cn.

"If there were no backlash among Chinese consumers toward US products amid the escalating China-US trade war, US films could have fared better," Zhang Yi, CEO of iiMedia Research Institute, told the Global Times on Sunday.

In March there are usually more foreign movies, mostly US films, than Chinese films in cinemas. The weak box office performance in the past few months was partly caused by sentiment, Zhang said.

China is set to overtake the US as the country with the biggest box office takings in the world next year, PWC said in its latest report.

According to PwC's study, Chinese cinemas will gross $12.28 billion in 2020, compared with $11.93 billion in the US.

The gap between the Chinese and US markets is narrowing. US box office revenue dropped 12.5 percent year-on-year in the first quarter, Box Office Mojo's data showed.

China's cinema industry has emerged from the stage of capital-driven, overheated growth, a screenwriter surnamed Guo in Beijing told the Global Times on Sunday.

A shortage of quality domestic films is the only weak link in China's  market, Guo said. "More quality products will be generated amid tougher competition."

Posted in: INDUSTRIES

blog comments powered by Disqus