China’s box office growth slows dramatically amid ‘weak crop’ of films

China’s rapid ascent towards the top of the world’s film market has ground to a virtual halt, with box office takings for 2016 edging up just 3.73 per cent to 45.7 billion yuan, compared with an astonishing 48 per cent expansion in 2015.

The anaemic growth, marking the slowest rate in the last decade, will have surprised many analysts and industry observers who had predicted that China would overtake North America as the world’s largest big-screen market in 2016 with ticket sales tipped to top60 billion yuan.China’s market had expanded more than three-fold between 2010 and 2015.

In fact, North American movie theatre receipts dwarfed China’s at US$11.4 billion (79.3 billion yuan), according to box office tracker comScore.

The five-year boom in mainland cinema - a rare sweet spot, seemingly untouched by China’s economic slowdown - reached a zenith during the Lunar New Year, when Stephen Chow’s The Mermaid earned 3.39 billion yuan to become the country’s top grossing movie of all time, before losing steam soon afterwards. The Mermaid was co-produced by China Film Group and Alibaba Pictures, a unit of the company that owns the South China Morning Post.

Both the summer and golden week holidays saw contractions in box office receipts, despite an aggressive build out during 2016 that put the mainland ahead of the US in terms of cinema screens for the first time in history.

“A chief issue is the weak crop of films. There are very few blockbusters, unlike in 2015 when dark horses like Monster Hunt gave a boost to the phenomenal growth,”said Angela Han, an analyst with China Merchant Securities.

Many big budget films turned into dismal flops that failed to break even on their investments. Chief among them were China’s most expensive film The Great Wall and fantasy L.O.R.D: Legend of Ravaging Dynasties, which stars China’s best-paid actress Fan Bingbing.