Regulators in the country have clamped down on Hollywood imports and narrowed the range of Chinese films deemed politically acceptable.
As of Monday, China’s box office total for 2022, thus far, was $3.88 billion, down 33 percent from the equivalent point in 2021, and down nearly 50 percent from 2019, the last year prior to the pandemic, data from Artisan Gateway shows. During China’s recent National Day holiday weekend , usually one of the biggest earnings periods of the year, total ticket sales reached $88 million, a slide of 67 from the 2021 holiday total of $271 million.
Analysts point to several factors behind the precipitous decline in earnings: Beijing’s draconian “dynamic zero Covid” policy, which has caused regular lockdowns and eroded consumer activity; tightening censorship control, which has narrowed China’s commercial film output to a reliance on propagandistic war movies; a steep decline in imports of high-earning Hollywood titles; and, in response to all such factors, declining investment in content and infrastructure by both private and state-backed...
In his keynote report delivered to the 20th National Congress of China’s Communist Party on Sunday, Xi made clear that he wouldn’t be pivoting away from any of the political priorities that have driven such dramatic changes in China’s movie business. In the section of his speech devoted to culture, which broadly includes issues of content creation and consumption, as well as China’s soft power development, Xi spoke first about prioritizing “social benefits” — i.e.
“That’s very clear in terms of priorities,” says Stanley Rosen, a professor at USC who specializes in China’s film industry. “We used to always say that China’s film regulators were trying to achieve two things: Maintain a 50 percent to 60 percent market share for domestic Chinese films and make sure the market overall was growing at a steady clip, with the goal of China becoming the biggest national box office in the world.
Much the same way Xi now seems willing to accept slower GDP growth if that’s the cost of achieving his ideological aims, Beijing’s film regulators appear willing to let the domestic film business dwindle — both creatively and commercially — if that’s the price of keeping all content propagandistically on message.
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