Before the “Aquaman” sequel was released in China last month, Warner Bros. did everything it could to maintain the success of the original film.
The Hollywood studio posted movie clips, behind-the-scenes footage and a video of an Aquaman ice sculpture at a winter festival in the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok. It sent the series’ star Jason Momoa and director James Wan on a promotional tour of China, the type of outburst that has disappeared since the coronavirus pandemic. Momoa said the sequel was released there two days before its U.S. release because China liked the original Aquaman.
“We’re very proud that China liked this movie. That’s why we brought this movie to you, and you’re going to see it in front of the whole world.” he said in an interview with China’s state-run film channel CCTV 6.
A big push didn’t work.
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom only collected about $60 million in China just weeks after its release. This was a far cry from the 2018 original’s $90 million opening weekend in China, which grossed $293 million, a quarter of the film’s $1.2 billion box office gross. occupied.
Aquaman’s producers are not the only ones who recognize that China has become a lost kingdom.
In 2023, despite expectations for sequels to Mission: Impossible, Fast and Furious, and Spider-Man, no American film ranked in the top 10 box office in China.
According to Maoyan, a Chinese entertainment data provider that has been tracking ticket sales since 2011, last year’s biggest Hollywood hits, “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie,” both ranked among China’s top 30 box office grossers. There wasn’t. Hollywood was shut out of China’s top 10 in 2020, amid the pandemic.
Chinese movie fans who once flocked to Hollywood movies are steadily disappearing. China is by far the largest film market outside the United States and is where American studios rely for growth and profitability as the industry struggles.
Stanley Rosen, a professor at the University of Southern California who studies Chinese politics and the film industry, says, “The days when Hollywood movies could make hundreds of millions of dollars in China are over.”
China’s film industry is producing more high-quality films that resonate with domestic audiences. The country’s top two films of last year highlight the diversity of the work. The dialogue-heavy suspense thriller “Full River Red” and the special effects-heavy sci-fi blockbuster “The Wandering Earth II.”
Against a backdrop of rising tensions with the United States, the Chinese government is advancing its cultural influence ambitions, supporting efforts by local filmmakers to make films that align with the ruling Communist Party’s tenets.
Some of the highest-grossing films in recent years have had stronger, more assertive Chinese themes. The highest-grossing Chinese film of all time is the 2021 film “The Battle of Changjin Lake,” which depicts the unexpected defeat of the United States during the Korean War. and “Wolf Warrior 2,” a 2017 nationalist action movie that pits a Chinese Jason Bourne-like character against an American soldier of fortune.
Shi Chuan, vice president of the Shanghai Film Association, said many American film studios once viewed China as a lucrative market. That’s no longer the case. Alarmed Chinese consumers are cutting back on spending, and box office revenues have not returned to pre-pandemic levels.
“I’m now telling American film companies that this way of thinking can no longer survive,” Shi said. “You need to study deeply to understand the Chinese market, Chinese audiences, and Chinese pop culture.”
Hollywood’s relationship with China goes back many years. 1994’s “The Fugitive” became America’s first imported blockbuster, and a year later, China began allowing 10 foreign films to be released domestically each year. In 2012, seven of the 10 highest-grossing films were made in the United States. At the time, U.S. movie attendance had been in slow decline for decades. DVD sales were strong. Streaming was in its infancy.
Desperate for growth, Hollywood studios saw the rapidly expanding Chinese market as a solution. When Joseph R. Biden Jr. was vice president, he helped expand Hollywood’s access to Chinese movie theaters, which were opening at breakneck speed. China has increased the number of American films allowed into the country from 20 to 34. China has agreed to share 25% of ticket revenue from movie tickets, up from about 13% previously.
The extra revenue from China was valuable, as most films struggle to make a profit. Studios began changing the content of their films to appeal to Chinese ticket buyers. In: Visual effects-driven glasses. Out: Dramas and comedies with a lot of dialogue.
Studios often bent over backwards to appease Chinese censors and heeded what they knew were China’s red lines in advance. In a highly publicized example, the Japanese and Taiwanese flags featured on Tom Cruise’s bomber jacket in 1986’s Top Gun were replaced with vague patches of the same color scheme in the trailer for the 2019 Paramount Pictures sequel. had been replaced by The flag was restored by the time Top Gun: Maverick was released in 2022.
But as trade and diplomatic tensions between China and Washington worsened, Hollywood was caught in the middle. Studios have come under intense scrutiny for their capitulation to China, particularly in 2020, when the watchdog’s scathing report drew the attention of American politicians, both Democratic and Republican.
Last year, studio executives decided that, at least for now, the demand for American movies in China had changed so much that they needed to readjust their film budgets. Even though the number of movie theater screens has quadrupled over the past decade, sequels to the franchise will have to be made at lower costs, as China can no longer expect the same level of revenue.
In 2014, Transformers: Age of Extinction topped China’s box office with $280 million. Last year, the latest entry in the series, Transformers: Rise of the Beast, brought in about a third of that, ranking 24th.
Part of the problem is that Hollywood has been slow to promote its films in Douyin, where Chinese citizens spend vast amounts of time.
Qiao Jing, CEO of Parallax Film, an international film sales company in Beijing, said Hollywood studios are reluctant to release storylines and important scenes on social media before a film is released, but in China, audiences He said it was essential to do so in order to raise awareness of the issue. .
“Hollywood blockbusters have not yet caught up with Chinese marketing,” Zhao said.
Many of last year’s Hollywood blockbusters, including the “Transformers” sequels, the latest “Mission: Impossible” films, “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie,” did not have their own official Douyin accounts.
Hannah Li, 27, works at a technology company in Beijing. She used to only watch foreign movies, but that has changed recently, she said. She said her favorite movie of the past year was “The Wandering Earth II,” about how the world came together to save Earth from being swallowed by the sun. Ms. Lee said the film’s message promotes a kind of collectivism rarely seen in Hollywood films, and should send a signal to U.S. producers.
“If we don’t want to come down from the heights to see what we like, it’s natural to be swept away,” Lee says. “Hollywood movies can no longer bring novelty to Chinese audiences.”