With the dawn of 2021, China shot straight out of the box office with a new record. On Friday, the market hit a milestone for New Year’s Day.
Estimates are coming to January 1 at about RMB 600 million (US $ 92 million), surpassing the same day in all previous years. The great result was generated in large part by the new local title A small red flower that blossomed through mouth to mouth strong. All of this happened when China ended 2020 as the largest box office market in the world, overtaking North America for the first time. As noted earlier, this was on the horizon already in October. Comscore estimates that the total box office in Middle Kingdom 2020 was $ 2.74 billion, although the China Film Administration has it slightly higher, at $ 3.12 billion (RMB 20.4 billion). The domestic box office is estimated at $ 2.28 billion, by comScore.
Longer term
China showed a strong recovery during the pandemic that almost a year ago became one of the first markets to close cinemas, and forced it to miss the typically lucrative period of the Lunar New Year. Epic local war The eight hundred is the largest film in the world in 2020, with $ 461 million (mostly from China) and the rest of the Top 10 includes the launch of National Day My People My Homeland and animated photo Legend of the Deification.
The Middle Kingdom was expected to regularly outperform the domestic market at some point, although it is not clear whether the market would have done so this year without the impact of the virus. Many industry executives we spoke to, however, believe it will continue to lead in 2021.
China has its own New Year coming up and the signs are pointing to a massive picture starting on February 12th with, more significantly, Detective Chinatown 3.
For the time being, the current weekend has been led by a touching local drama A small red flower, the story of two families battling cancer. Comes from Go away Mr. Tumor director Yan Han and raised RMB 255 million ($ 39 million) on Friday after the previews started at 6 pm local time on Thursday. The peak running until 7 pm local time on Sunday is RMB 740 million ($ 113.3 million) and continues to rise.
Also being embraced by the Chinese audience, this session is comedy Warm hug with RMB 160 million ($ 24.5 million) on January 1 and a total by Sunday night of RMB 509 million ($ 78 million). Other films showing near the top of the charts include last weekend’s global leader Shock wave 2 (RMB 812M / $ 124.3M as of tonight) and Disney / Pixar’s Soul which has benefited from strong word of mouth and has seen strong daily increases. Its consumption after 10 days is over US $ 25 million.
We will have a complete update of the international box office today.
Best of time
Sign up for the Deadline Bulletin. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.