China to the rescue once again.
We’re already sixty(ish) days into the year and each week brings new movies to hopefully take the top spot of the box office chart.
Everyone who loves movies has at least a passing interest in the box office results each week, with Jimmy Kimmel working a reference into his opening monologue in the Oscars earlier this week, making fun of Matt Damon’s “ponytail movie” The Great Wall for having already lost $80 million.
The thing is, while the $150 million production has barely made a dent in the U.S., where it has made barely $35 million so far, it has made $170 million in China alone, and worldwide the film is currently sitting pretty with $300 million.
Same goes with what is, surprisingly, the biggest box office hit of the year so far:
xXx: The Return Of Xander Cage.
The $85 million action flick has currently made $330 million worldwide, and $137 million of that has come from China, as opposed to just $45 million in the States.
Clip via Zero Media
In fact, out of the current top ten of the year, four of the movies are Chinese releases – Your Name, Kung Fu Yoga, Duckweed, Journey To The West: The Demon Strikes Back – while another three are blockbuster movies that flopped in the States but did gangbusters in China: The Great Wall, xXx3 and Resident Evil: The Final Chapter ($40 million budget, $26.5 million in US box office, $94.5 million in just three days at the China box office).
One thing that those three movies have in common is that they all have Chinese money involved in the form of China owned production companies, and all three have major Asian stars in the cast.
American production companies are finally releasing that the US is not the be-all-and-end-all for making their money back on large investments, as more and more movies turn to China and the rest of the Far East in order to make a profit.
Of the top ten so far, only Fifty Shades Darker, Split and The LEGO Batman Movie have predominantly made their money in the US marketplace.
That should change soon enough as China have a cap on how many non-Chinese movies they allow into their cinemas – just 34 per year – and impose total foreign movie blackouts during late February, early October and most of the summer.
This was all part of a deal struck between China and the US film industries, where the Chinese cinemas would only have to pay 25% of the ticket costs back to the American film companies, as opposed to the worldwide industry standard which would be closer to 40%.
However, that was a five-year deal which was struck in 2012 and is due for re-negation this February.
