Are Hollywood films losing appeal for Chinese audiences?

In 2009, when James Cameron’s Avatar debuted in Chinese cinemas, it was a bona fide cultural phenomenon. Local audiences rushed to theaters to witness the spectacle, with some reportedly shelling out $100 for tickets from scalpers and others spending hours in serpentine queues for admissions at regular price. The film ended up grossing a whopping $259 million in China and becoming the highest-grossing movie ever released in the country at the time.

Thirteen years later, when the long-anticipated sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, came out in Chinese cinemas, core crowds of cinephiles still showed up for premieres at midnight. But it was less of a flock-to-the-theater event for Chinese people across the board. After a six-week theatrical run, the film raked in $229 million in China — an admirable haul but nearly half of what analysts predicted. Its disappointing results at the box office even prompted Yú Dōng 于冬, the chairman of Bona Film Group, China’s top-grossing movie producer and distributor, to claim: “Foreign productions are no longer able to keep up with Chinese audiences’ watching preferences.”

While the flow of U.S. movies into China has essentially returned to pre-pandemic levels, Hollywood seems to be struggling to lure Chinese audiences back to the multiplex. Even Marvel properties, which traditionally made bank in China, have underwhelmed. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the first Marvel franchise movie shown in China since 2019’s Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home, pulled in $15.2 million, which was below the expectations of the Chinese online ticketing and statistics provider Maoyan.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania — another Marvel superhero tentpole that was released in China on February 17, the same day it came out in the U.S. — hoped to take advantage of timing: February is generally when China’s Spring Festival holiday releases begin losing steam. But Quantumania made only $19.4 million in its opening weekend, more than 70% below the $66 million start of its predecessor, Ant-Man and the Wasp, in July 2018. In the following weeks, the movie’s momentum slowed significantly. The final Chinese earnings stood at $33.4 million.

More recently, Warner Bros’ superhero sequel Shazam! Fury of the Gods, one of the last vestiges of the outgoing DC Extended Universe, grossed just $4.3 million in China over its opening weekend, far lower than initial expectations. For comparison, 2019’s Shazam! opened to approximately $30 million over its opening weekend in the region.

Chinese moviegoers have “seemingly grown tired of such movies in which one man saves the world,” proclaimed the Global Times. “In a country where collective heroism is often praised, movies featuring group efforts are often better received when they tell a great story,” it said, citing examples including the Avengers franchise and China’s own sci-fi series The Wandering Earth.

Besides an ideological mismatch, Dr. How Wee Ng, a lecturer with the School of Humanities at the University of Westminster in London, suggested a different reason for Chinese audiences’ superhero fatigue. “For franchises and adaptations of comic books, they are often driven by superhero narratives with stunning visual effects, which may have become too formulaic and predictable for Chinese audiences,” he told The China Project.

Speaking on the perilous future for superhero films, Michael Berry, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, told The China Project that the growing dissatisfaction with the genre is not an entirely Chinese phenomena, adding that Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Shazam! Fury of the Gods also underperformed at the U.S. box office.

Hollywood products outside of the superhero genre are also falling short in the Chinese market. M3GAN, an evil-doll horror flick that far exceeded box-office expectations in the U.S. thanks to word-of-mouth and viral memes, failed to translate its local success to China. Released last week, the thriller opened in fifth place at the Chinese box office with just $1.6 million, and the cumulative earnings are predicted to be below $3 million.

For most of the past three years, the Chinese moviegoing business was in shambles. Under Beijing’s strict zero-COVID policy, cinemas closed, release dates were postponed, film festivals were canceled, and production came to a halt. According to Maoyan, Chinese box office receipts tumbled more than a third from $6.83 billion in 2021 to $4.36 billion in 2022, relinquishing the crown to the U.S. for the first time since surpassing it in 2020.

After Beijing relaxed COVID-19 restrictions last December, ​​China’s box office made a strong comeback during the weeklong Lunar New Year holiday in January, taking in $988 million, up 14 percent from the equivalent stretch in 2019, the holiday prior to the pandemic. However, the box-office bonanza was exclusively led by domestic productions. Excluded from this lucrative period, most foreign films released in the country flatlined at the box office in the next few weeks.

The tepid reception to Hollywood titles recently might be a result of the reduction in American cinematic imports in the past few years, which might have killed Chinese audiences’ appetite for Hollywood fare. Beijing typically permits the release of 30 to 40 foreign films a year, but that number fell during the pandemic, with only 20 Hollywood films granted theatrical releases in China in 2021.

“Over the past three years there has been a dramatic surge in anti-American sentiment and neo-nationalism in China. Under these circumstances, going to see American blockbusters might be viewed as ‘unpatriotic’ by some,” Berry said. “While things have begun to open up a bit, there has not been a major policy shift in U.S.-China relations. And tensions between the two countries remain high.”

Against this backdrop, “the Chinese local film industry has been expanding by leaps and bounds, especially when it comes to the technical side of filmmaking,” Berry noted. Films like Frank Guo’s big-budget sci-fi spectacle The Wandering Earth 2, which dominated January’s Lunar New Year holiday season, “are by no means inferior when it comes to special effects, CGI, and action choreography,” he said. “This means that Chinese audiences no longer need Hollywood to provide an essentially ‘Hollywood-style cinematic experience’ — they can do it themselves.”

In the declining presence of Hollywood blockbusters on China’s cinema screens, domestic productions aren’t the only ones that have found growing popularity among Chinese cinephiles. “Increasing numbers of viewers are looking beyond Hollywood and have become followers of Bollywood, East Asian, and European cinema. In other words, the Chinese box office is undergoing a readjustment and moving towards diversity in terms of taste and market share,” Dr. Ng noted. “Even though this diversity may not necessarily mean relaxation of film censorship in China as a whole, we might want to ask if Hollywood domination for any country should be welcome in the first place?”

For Hollywood studios still looking to make big bucks in the Chinese market, streaming is where opportunities lie. Like their American counterparts, who have exhibited a preference toward watching new releases at home, rather than in a theater, according to a 2021 poll, Chinese consumers are increasingly getting accustomed to an on-demand world. A 2020 survey of 1,530 respondents by the China Film Association and Maoyan revealed that Chinese people had watched more movies during the pandemic, with more than 70 percent of the participants having paid to stream films online.

But for now, a slew of Hollywood films that already have secured Chinese releases have to see things through. Those include star-studded, board game-inspired epic fantasy Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, female-led action drama The Woman King, and Adam Driver’s sci-fi thriller 65. Their box-office results in China will largely set the stage for other Hollywood products in the rest of the year.

“Given the political tensions, Hollywood’s access to the Chinese market will continue to be erratic and unreliable for the foreseeable future,” Berry said. “Hollywood’s losses in China are, in large part, representative of largely political failures on the part of the U.S. administration in dealing with China. There may be many issues that the U.S. and China do not agree upon, but they remain our largest trading partner; engagement and dialogue is essential. Instead, we are in a situation where each side is increasingly living within its own insular bubble.”