Box office revenues in China fell by nearly a quarter last year as users turned to streaming services for entertainment due to a lack of blockbusters and tough economic conditions.
While China’s film industry surpassed North America’s in box office receipts for the first time in 2020, its post-pandemic recovery has been weaker. The world’s second-largest film market recorded total revenues of Rmb42.5 billion ($5.8 billion) in 2024, down nearly 23 percent from Rmb54.9 billion a year earlier, the Film Administration of China said.
That compares to a 3 percent year-over-year decline in the North American box office to $8.7 billion in 2024, according to Comscore and Deadline.
“The lack of domestic industry supply has definitely hurt, but that hurt has been compounded by the bad economy,” said Chris Fenton, a US-China analyst and adjunct professor at the University of Southern California.
On the usually busy Christmas Eve, box office receipts are high China it fell to Rmb38 million from Rmb170 million in 2023 and was the lowest in at least 13 years, according to Chinese ticketing platform Maoyan.
“[We are] hit by a reduction in spending,” said Wang, a cinema manager in Beijing. “Simply put, it’s an economic crisis.” Attendance is estimated to drop by up to 35 percent in 2024 in many of China’s major cities, and many theaters are operating at a loss, he said.
Instead of going to the cinema, many viewers are opting for online streaming platforms and short video content available on their mobile devices, according to industry analysts at Chinese entertainment data provider Beacon Professional.
Another factor was “not enough quality domestic films on the market to generate buzz and enthusiasm for people to go out,” said Ying Zhu, the book’s author Hollywood in China: Behind the scenes of the world’s largest film market.
But while streaming services have “certainly hurt cinema revenues”, Zhu said the decline in China’s box office was “more related to general economic stagnation, with high youth unemployment leading to a reduction in entertainment allowances”.
Kenny Ng, a film scholar at Hong Kong Baptist University, said the pandemic still “has a lasting impact on consumer behavior in China, especially in the entertainment industry.”
“The move to home entertainment has gained momentum, and many consumers remain hesitant to return to crowded venues like movie theaters,” he said.
Sun, a 27-year-old tech worker in Shanghai, said he only went to the movies twice last year, compared with more than 10 times in previous years, and domestic streaming platforms such as Tencent Video are becoming more attractive.
“Many theatrical releases do not give me a strong desire to watch them in theaters. . .[and]there were not many attractive films,” he said.
The highest-grossing film in China in 2024 was a domestically produced comedy-drama YOLOan adaptation of a Japanese film about a woman who lacks self-confidence and takes up boxing to change her life. YOLO took 3.4 billion Rmb, according to Maoyan, lower than the more than 4.5 billion Rmb achieved by 2023’s top film, the Chinese comedy-mystery Full red river.
China has experienced poor consumer confidence, with youth unemployment as high as 17 percent and slowing wage growth, while growing social tensions Chinese leaders were also worried.
“The comeback of comedies, while helping to calm social tensions, also confirms viewers’ fatigue with big-budget propaganda films,” said Zhu, who is also a professor at Hong Kong Baptist University’s Film Academy.
The Chinese market accounted for up to 30 percent of global Hollywood blockbuster revenues before 2020, according to USC’s Fenton, but their appeal has faded in recent years, with many big films accounting for 10 percent or less of total Chinese box office receipts. income. Only one Hollywood production — a sci-fi action franchise Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire — made the 10 highest-grossing films in China last year, according to Maoyan.
Hollywood films are increasingly “failing to connect with local audiences,” Zhu said. China’s state news agency Xinhua noted in an opinion piece last year “a lack of novelty and creativity in Hollywood films with their formulaic stories that have saturated Chinese audiences.”
“Hollywood films are losing their luster with Chinese Gen Z audiences,” said Shi Chuan, vice president of the Shanghai Film Association, referring to the declining influence of Western culture on the country’s younger generations.
Shi cited the lukewarm reception as the last Mission: Impossible as an example. “This is a high-quality film, but it disappointed at the box office [many] Chinese movie-going generation Z doesn’t know who Tom Cruise is,” Shi said.
In the meantime, there has been a decline in funding, censorship and changing tastes blame the movie producers and industry analysts to brake the domestic industry.
The box office would likely continue to grow over the next few years “because of the enormous size [China’s] population,” said Fenton. Her film industry is hoping for domestic blockbusters, including a fantasy epic Making of Gods II: Demon Clash and martial arts prices The Legend of Kondor’s Heroes: The Great Hero, both slated to release during the peak of the Lunar New Year season at the end of January, could revive box office sales.
“As always, the quality of the films is important,” said Stanley Rosen, a professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in Chinese society, adding: “An improving economy in China would help a lot.”
