Streamlined Guides: Imports At The China Box Office In 2024
It’s been a familiar story over the past few years – Chinese audiences have been focusing on local movies to the extent that even Hollywood films are not performing well at the China box office. But it’s easy to lose sight of what success looks like in such a huge market.
This edition of the Streamlined Guides takes a close look at last year’s numbers to identify the best-performing titles across five categories – US studio, Japanese anime, rest of Asia & Russia, US independent and European titles.
It’s not a pretty picture – Hollywood is slowly coming back but is nowhere close to pre-pandemic market share; the highest grossing US indie took around $15m; Japanese anime films were released in abundance, but results did not match the success of Suzume and The First Slam Dunk in 2023; and the highest-grossing European title, Anatomy Of A Fall, ranked at number 127 in the year-end chart with $4m. It’s a far cry from 2019, when US indie Green Book grossed $65m (RMB477m) and Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum pulled in $51m (RMB374m).
And yet this is still the world’s second biggest box office market, which despite a 23% decline in year-on-year box office, was still worth $5.9bn in 2024. There are currently fewer regulatory restrictions on foreign imports than in pre-pandemic days, so what are the factors holding back recovery? While this edition of the Streamlined Guides looks at the numbers, a second report, providing additional analysis and profiling the leading Chinese buyers, will be published before Cannes.
