The Projector | Avengers: Endgame vs Jinpa – can a Tibetan art house film survive a clash with Marvel?
- As Pema Tseden’s latest movie takes on the Avengers in China this weekend, the David-and-Goliath battle is reminiscent of another in 2017
For those allergic to superhero franchises, it’s perhaps a good time to hit the road and get some fresh air in the mountains, because that’s probably the only place you’ll be able to escape all the biff-bang-pow brouhaha surrounding Marvel Studios’ latest spectacle – Avengers: Endgame.
The film vaulted the hallowed 100 million yuan (US$14.9 million) mark just 10 hours after sales began, on April 12 (11 days and 12 hours before its April 24 opening) setting a record for pre-release ticket sales in China, according to Maoyan, the country’s biggest online film-ticketing platform.
Unsurprisingly, cineplexes across the country are out to exploit this feeding frenzy by allocating most of their screening slots to Endgame. Its share of total screenings during the opening week will probably be on a par with – if not exceed – that of last year’s Avengers: Infinity War, which took up more than 70 per cent of the slots (and a whopping 90 to 95 per cent of box office gross) on its first weekend.
Such dominance is nothing new. According to figures from Entgroup’s China Box Office portal, Revenge of the Fallen and Dark of the Moon, from the Transformers franchise, took 72.8 per cent and 71.8 per cent of the total screenings slots in the country upon their releases, on June 24, 2009 and July 21, 2011, respectively. These were followed closely by Avatar (70.9 per cent in 2010), the Jackie Chan-starring The Forbidden Kingdom (70.7 per cent in 2008) and T ransformers: The Last Knight (69.4 per cent in 2017).
Two years ago, on a visit to the comparatively upmarket Coastal City Cinema in Nanshan, a middle-class suburb of Shenzhen, I witnessed how The Last Knight monopolised the cineplex on its opening day, June 23, 2017. The only alternative was an art house film about a group of villagers undertaking a journey on foot across Tibet. Having opened just days before Michael Bay’s high-octane autobot fantasy, Zhang Yang’s Paths of the Soul seemed destined for total annihilation. And during its first weekend after release, that seemed to be the case, as its share of screenings across China fluctuated at about 2 per cent while The Last Knight flourished.