Before the “Aquaman” sequel opened in China last month, Warner Bros. did everything it could to maintain the success of the original film.
The Hollywood studio covered Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, with movie clips, behind-the-scenes footage and a video of an Aquaman ice sculpture at a winter festival in Harbin, a city in northeastern China. It sent franchise star Jason Momoa and director James Wan on a publicity tour of China, the kind of storm that had disappeared since the Covid pandemic. Momoa said China's affection for the first “Aquaman” was the reason the sequel debuted in China two days before the U.S. premiere.
“I'm very proud that China loved it, that's why we brought it to them, and you're going to see it in front of the whole world,” he said in an interview with CCTV 6, China's state-run film channel.
The big push didn't work.
“Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” has grossed only about $60 million in China after a few weeks of its release. That was nowhere near the $90 million opening weekend of the 2018 original in China, on track to gross $293 million, which is a quarter of that $1.2 billion box office success. movie.
The producers of the “Aquaman” movies are not the only ones discovering that China has become a lost kingdom.
In 2023, no American films ranked among China's top 10 grossers despite the highly anticipated sequels to the “Mission: Impossible,” “Fast and Furious” and “Spider-Man” franchises.
Neither “Oppenheimer” nor “Barbie,” two of last year's biggest Hollywood hits, cracked the top 30 at the box office in China, according to Maoyan, a Chinese entertainment data provider that has tracked ticket sales since 2011. The only other recent year when Hollywood fell out of China's top 10 was in 2020, during the pandemic.
Chinese moviegoers who once flocked to Hollywood movies have been steadily disappearing. China is by far the largest film market outside the United States and a place that American studios depend on for growth and profitability as the film industry struggles.
“Gone are the days of a Hollywood movie making hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars in China,” said Stanley Rosen, a professor at the University of Southern California who studies Chinese politics and the film industry.
The Chinese film industry is producing more and more high-quality films that resonate with domestic audiences. The country's two biggest films last year highlight the diversity of offerings: “Full River Red,” a dialogue-rich suspense thriller, and “The Wandering Earth II,” a special effects-laden sci-fi blockbuster.
Against the backdrop of rising tensions with the United States, Beijing has advanced its ambitions to become a cultural influence, supporting the efforts of local filmmakers to create films that are in line with the doctrines of the ruling Communist Party.
In recent years, some of the highest-grossing films have addressed themes of a stronger, more assertive China. The highest-grossing Chinese films of all time are “The Battle at Changjin Lake,” a 2021 film depicting an against-all-odds defeat for the United States during the Korean War; and “Wolf Warrior 2,” a 2017 nationalist action film in which a Chinese Jason Bourne-like character faces off against an American soldier of fortune.
Shi Chuan, vice president of the Shanghai Film Association, said many American studios once saw China as a market where they could always make money. That is no longer the case. Cautious Chinese consumers are spending less and box office sales have not returned to pre-pandemic levels.
“I am now telling American film companies that this mentality is no longer viable,” Shi said. “You have to study deeply to understand the Chinese market, Chinese audiences and Chinese pop culture.”
Hollywood's love affair with China goes back years. “The Fugitive,” in 1994, was the first box office hit imported from the United States, and a year later China began allowing 10 foreign films to be released in the country each year. In 2012, seven of the 10 highest-grossing films were made in the United States. At the time, movie attendance in the United States was in a slow, decades-long decline. DVD sales were faltering. Streaming was in its infancy.
Hollywood studios, desperate for growth, saw the rapidly expanding Chinese market as the solution. When Joseph R. Biden Jr. was vice president, he helped Hollywood gain greater access to Chinese movie theaters, which were opening at a dizzying pace. China increased the quota of American films allowed into the country from 20 to 34. China agreed to share 25 percent of ticket revenue for films that made it in, up from about 13 percent.
With most films struggling to make a profit, the additional revenue from China was valuable. Studios began changing the content of films to appeal to Chinese ticket buyers. In: glasses based on visual effects. Out: dramas and comedies with lots of dialogue.
The studios went to great lengths to appease Chinese censors, often paying attention to what they knew in advance were Chinese red lines. In a highly publicized example, the Japanese and Taiwanese flags on Tom Cruise's bomber jacket in 1986's “Top Gun” were replaced by ambiguous patches in the same color scheme in a 2019 preview of the Paramount Pictures sequel. The flags had been restored by the time “Top Gun: Maverick” was released in 2022.
But when trade and diplomatic tensions between Beijing and Washington worsened, Hollywood was caught in the middle. The studios came under increased scrutiny for caving in to China, most notably in 2020, when a scathing surveillance report caught the attention of American politicians, both Democrats and Republicans.
Over the past year, studio executives have decided that demand for American films in China, at least for now, has changed so dramatically that movie budgets must be recalibrated. Franchise sequels must be made for less money because China can no longer be counted on to bring in the same level of revenue, even though the number of movie screens has quadrupled in the last decade.
In 2014, “Transformers: Age of Extinction” topped the Chinese box office with $280 million. Last year, the franchise's most recent installment, “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” grossed about a third of that amount and ranked 24th.
Part of the problem is that Hollywood has been slow to promote its movies on Douyin, where Chinese audiences spend a lot of time.
Zhao Jin, chief executive of Parallax Films, an international film sales company based in Beijing, said Hollywood studios were reluctant to reveal plots and key scenes on social media before a film's release, but doing so It was essential in China to generate interest in the audience. .
“Hollywood blockbusters have not yet reached China's level of marketing,” Mr. Zhao said.
Many of Hollywood's biggest releases last year, including the “Transformers” sequel, the latest “Mission: Impossible” installment, “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie,” did not have their own official Douyin accounts.
Hannah Li, 27, works at a technology company in Beijing. Before she only watched foreign films, she said, but that has changed recently. She said her favorite movie last year was “The Wandering Earth II,” a story about how the world came together to save the Earth from being engulfed by the sun. The film's message, she said, promotes a type of collectivism that she rarely sees in Hollywood films and should send a signal to American producers.
“If you don't want to get off your high horse to see what we like, then it's natural that you'd be discouraged,” Ms. Li said. “Hollywood movies can no longer bring new things to the Chinese public.”
