Not Even Tom Cruise Can Charm China’s Moviegoers Into Seeing Hollywood Films
Over the past decade, Fang Fang, a retiree living in Shanghai, has grown acquainted with Hollywood’s biggest exports: James Bond. Tom Cruise. The Fast & Furious crew.
But more recently, Fang has found movies made in his own country more compelling than what America has to offer. “Hollywood movies are more and more nonsense nowadays," Fang, 60 years old, said in the lobby of a Shanghai movie theater this week. “Superheroes like Spider-Man and Captain America are so superficial, I won’t even watch them in IMAX 3-D." Fang and millions of other Chinese moviegoers are forcing Hollywood executives to confront an alarming new reality: The country that once embraced their films is now turning away from them.
This summer has been a bloodbath for the U.S. entertainment industry in the world’s second-largest market, cementing a yearslong gravitation among Chinese consumers toward movies made at home. Total box-office sales for U.S.
films in China hit $592 million in the first six months of the year, down from $1.9 billion grossed in the first half of 2019, according to Artisan Gateway, the year before Covid-19 restrictions crippled moviegoing. Two U.S. movies cracked the top 10 in China in 2021 and again in 2022, but only one has so far this year.
That is a marked change from 2014 to 2018, when U.S. films accounted for at least three of the top 10 releases in China each year—twice accounting for five of the 10. The shifting tastes of 1.4 billion people in China have considerable ramifications for Hollywood studios that had grown to rely on their ticket sales—and for Chinese leaders, who have long seen the multiplex as a venue for influencing their people through cultural messaging.
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