Comparatively, not even a $228m haul for Paramount's Transformers: The Last Knight (over $100m less than Age of Extinction), a $213m gross for Universal's Warcraft or $171m for Universal's The Great Wall could turn those $150-$215m releases into hits since they essentially bombed everywhere else. Both films were relatively cheap ($40m and $85m respectively) and didn’t need to break records to break even. It was just this year that we saw China turn Sony's Resident Evil: The Final Chapter ($312 million worldwide) and Paramount/Viacom Inc.'s xXx: Return of Xander Cage ($346m worldwide) into genuine hits thanks partially to $160m+ China grosses. China isn’t yet trapped in franchise/IP cyclone.Ĭhina cannot be counted upon to bail out big-budget movies that bomb in North America and elsewhere. Say what you will about Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall (courtesy of Legendary and Universal/Comcast Corp.), but the mere fact that it was a not-based-on-anything fantasy that made $332 million worldwide in late 2016/early 2017 made it one of the biggest “Hollywood” original live-action releases of last year, behind only La La Land. And if you look at the very biggest Chinese blockbusters, you’re just as likely to see outright originals like The Mermaid or Monster Hunt or a star-driven biggie like Jackie Chan’s Kung Fu Yoga as the 8,000 th version of The Monkey King or Chow-Yun Fat's The Man from Macau II. We’ve been on this road for a while, at least since early 2015 when China’s February box office topped the North American box office with mostly local titles. Long story short, if Chinese movies can deliver approximate thrills and chills with local talent and Chinese movie stars, the English language/American action spectaculars are going to be slightly less essential. To be blunt, this isn’t the world’s best news for a Hollywood somewhat counting on China to deliver mega-bucks results for its blockbuster franchise offerings. Obviously, we’ll know more this weekend, and there is a difference between slowing down after a month and slowing down after two weeks when the numbers are this big. Plenty of big films ( Spider-Man, American Sniper, The Passion of the Christ, etc.) have followed up huge opening weekends with superb legs only to quickly wind down merely due to the sheer amount of demand being met in those first 10-17 days. Or maybe the demand will dry up, as it always seems to even when you think a film is unstoppable.
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