Why recent Chinese films released in China couldn’t match Hollywood fare, and what that says about Chinese film-goers
Despite winning rave reviews and awards overseas, The Summer Is Gone was seen by an average of four people per screening, a reminder that Chinese audiences’ tastes are still pretty mainstream
March turned out to be the worst possible month for Chinese films to get a domestic release, given the market was flooded with Hollywood productions. Anything vaguely arthouse, no matter how well received at film festival overseas, didn’t stand a chance at the box office. Take The Summer Is Gone, for example.
The film, by first-time director Zhang Dalei, received rave reviews during its extensive tour of festivals in Asia (Tokyo), Europe (Rotterdam) and North America (New York), which will continue next week with screenings at the Hong Kong International Film Festival. The film also won the best film and best new actor prizes at the Golden Horse Awards ceremony in Taipei, often seen as the Oscars of Chinese film.
Financed and distributed by iQiyi Pictures – the filmmaking arm of China’s largest online video-on-demand operator – the film has been given an incredible push as its release date nears, with its cast and crew embarking on a week-long, seven-city promotional tour. The film is in fact quite good, a beautiful, well-acted black-and-white drama about a provincial schoolboy’s (and China’s) growing pains in the mid-1990s.
However, since its release in China on March 24, The Summer is Gone has generated takings of barely 4.1 million yuan (HK$4.6 million, US$595,000). Figures from the Chinese entertainment business research portal Entgroup show each screening of the film was watched by an average of four viewers during the first week of its run, a number which subsequently halved as the film entered the second week of its run. On April 6 there were just 71 screenings of the film in China’s first-tier cities – Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai and Guangzhou – a minuscule number compared to, say, the Hollywood production Kong: Skull Island, which had more than 2,400 screenings in the capital alone.
If it is any consolation, the film’s poor showing capped off a miserable March for Chinese-language cinema in China. Of the 19 domestic productions that opened last month, only two others had box-office takings of more than 1 million yuan: Top Funny Comedian: The Movie, the awfully incoherent spin-off from a TV series featuring a multitude of product placements and ludicrous cameos from Rowan Atkinson (as Mr Bean) and American ex-boxer Evander Holyfield, and Death Ouija 2, a horror movie which features a moral and no ghosts (hardly a spoiler given that, by law, Chinese films are not allowed to “promote superstition”).