The Force is no match for ex-boyfriends in China as Ex-File 3 trumps Last Jedi at the box office

The Force wasn’t quite strong enough with Walt Disney’s eighth instalment of its Star Wars movie franchise, as The Last Jedi lost at China’s box office during its opening weekend to a locally produced romantic comedy.

The Last Jedi, with Mark Hamill reprising the role he played 34 years earlier, was the fifth-biggest opening in world movie history, raking in US$1.21 billion in global box office receipts as of January 7. In China, its opening weekend took in US$28.7 million, a third of the 563 million yuan (US$86.7 million) reported by Ex-Files 3: The Return of the Exes over the same weekend.

The stellar performance by Ex-Files 3 is a David-against-Goliath victory for China’s movie studios, as they claw their way out of their 2016 box office doldrums using home spun scripts and low-budget production against Hollywood’s multimillion-dollar production and marketing budgets. Themes closer to home also resonate better with the new generation of Chinese movie goers, who weren’t yet born when Hamill last played Luke Skywalker in 1983, analysts said.

“The excellent performance of Ex-File shows the overwhelming passion by Chinese audience toward domestic movies,” said Caitong Securities’ analyst Tao Ye, who recommends investors buy Chinese movie studios like Beijing Enlight Media and China Film. “We are bullish on China’s domestic films this year.”

Ex-Files 3, the second sequel to the 2014 Ex-Files by China’s Huayi Brothers Media Corp., was produced on a budget of 30 million yuan, a drop in the bucket compared with the US$200 million spent on The Last Jedi.