Dear Gossips,

A couple of weeks ago, Lainey wrote about Ne Zha 2, the animated Chinese film breaking box office records and “shocking the movie industry”. Well, the industry shocks continue as Ne Zha 2 has crossed $2 billion at the box office, becoming the first non-Hollywood film to break the $2 billion barrier. 

 

How it became so big is pretty clear—it’s the sequel to a popular film, people like it, they’re going to see it multiple times, and even travelling to see it in IMAX. Those are factors that fuel billion-dollar hits in Hollywood, too. Unique to Ne Zha 2 is that its success has become a point of national pride in China, which in turn only boosts its box office more. The pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth about What It All Means For Hollywood has already started, but I think it’s simple—Chinese audiences are still excited to go see movies, American audiences aren’t.

 

Hollywood spent the last ten-plus years training audiences to stay home and think of movies as “content”. The result is palpably less enthusiasm for movies and going to the movies—to the point that Conan O’Brien made a joke during the Oscars about tricking younger people into going back to movie theaters.

You can throw in the over-saturation of the blockbuster class, a dearth of “good” movies—in quotes because every year there are plenty of good movies people refuse to go see—and all the pitfalls of the modern movie-going experience as the theatrical experience has drastically degraded over the last twenty years, never mind the “I’ll just wait for streaming” mindset. Some of that is an easy fix, though. For instance, just stop calling movies “content”. Stop conflating films with the videos we scroll past while on the toilet.

 

The theater owners and movie studios could also partner on improving the theatrical experience; perhaps studios could agree to let theaters keep a higher percentage of ticket sales as long as the money goes to material improvements to the theater itself. Studios and distributors could recommit to an exclusive theatrical window of at least 90 days, if not 120, to retrain audiences to expect to see movies in a movie theater, not wait for it to stream at home in two weeks. And audiences can prioritize seeing movies in theaters, turning out for mid-size and indie films, not just blockbusters. 

But there’s also just the basic math of it all. When we talk about domestic box office in re: Hollywood films, we’re really talking about the combined box office of the US and Canada. Those two countries together have a population of around 380 million. The population of China is 1.4 billion. Simply put, Hollywood needs the rest of the world to make a billion-dollar hit, China doesn’t. For instance, about 99% of Ne Zha 2’s box office is home grown, while Star Wars: The Force Awakens pulled almost 55% of its audience internationally. Ne Zha 2 is currently poised to overtake The Force Awakens on the all-time box office list (unadjusted for inflation, of course). 

 

With the monster success of Ne Zha 2, undoubtedly someone will want to take another shot at cracking the Chinese market for Hollywood, which I suspect won’t be as fruitful as it was in the 2010s, and it was barely fruitful in the 2010s. There was some success with superhero movies, Avatar, and the Fast/Furious movies, but since the pandemic, Hollywood movies have been flopping more often than not in China, if they even get released there at all. Maybe the real lesson of Ne Zha 2 is just to make something your homegrown audience wants to see, and wait for the rest of the world to catch up. 

Live long and gossip,

Sarah

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