China’s small-town girls give ex-boyfriends the edge over the galaxy’s last Jedi knight
A new generation of Chinese movie goers - many of them born after Mark Hamill’s third act as Luke Skywalker in 1983 - draw a collective blank when asked about Jedi knights or The Force
Walt Disney’s eighth instalment of the Star Wars movie franchise, the fifth-biggest opening in filmdom, is ending its run in the world’s largest movie market as the studio’s biggest flop in five years, upstaged by a small-budget romantic comedy that resonated with Chinese viewers.
All but 10 per cent of China’s cinema screens are already kicking The Last Jedi off their schedules, leaving the movie with 259 million yuan in ticket sales after 15 days of airtime, according to the Hollywood Reporter. That would make this Star Wars outing the worst-performing blockbuster in China since Disney’s The Lone Ranger in 2013, Forbes reported.
Every Chinese movie goer would either have an ex-boyfriend or an ex-girlfriend ... not everyone appreciates galaxies or stars in Star Wars
At the opposite end of the box office stands Ex-File 3: The Return of the Exes, a Chinese movie about two relationship break-ups made at 2 per cent of the Hollywood space saga’s budget, grossing 1.8 billion yuan (US$281 million) after 22 days’ of screening, and showing no sign of slowing down.
“Every Chinese movie goer would either have an ex-boyfriend or an ex-girlfriend,” so they can relate to Ex-Files 3, said Li Chao, a script writer for animated films. “Not everyone appreciates galaxies or stars in Star Wars.”
Disney’s misadventure upends the prevailing notion - reinforced by box office records of previous years - that Chinese audiences craved the action-filled, effects-laden blockbusters that were the forte of Hollywood studios. As China imposes a quota on the number of foreign movies that can be shown every year across the country, Hollywood executives have jostled to get their movies on to the limited slots for a slice of the expanding box office, to the extent of escalating the dispute to the World Trade Organisation.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi – the Chinese themes in the eighth instalment of the franchise
They had reasons for optimism. Of the 50 top grossing movies in China, 17 were American productions, while five were joint US-China productions. And China’s income levels were rapidly rising, and younger people were spending more of their disposable income on entertainment. Avatar of 20th Century Fox, the highest-grossing movie of all time, also topped China’s box office when it screened in 2010, grossing 137.87 million yuan.