Avengers: Endgame vs Jinpa – can a Tibetan art house film survive a clash with Marvel?

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.

But in a classic case of David taking on Goliath, Paths of the Soul rose from the ashes and regained its footing across the country, especially in cinemas signed up to the Nationwide Alliance of Art House Cinemas. According to China Box Office, the film eventually took 100 million yuan – a record for a Tibetan-language film on the mainland.

A repeat of this might be on the cards. While most Chinese producers shied away from the black hole that is the Marvel universe, a Tibetan-language film has dared to deny Endgame’s total domination of Chinese screens.

Jinpa, which opened in China on Friday, revolves around a truck driver’s pursuit of spiritual redemption through his attempt to stop the perpetuation of a deadly blood feud.

Directed by veteran art house auteur Pema Tseden, Jinpa is an attempt by the Tibetan filmmaker to restore his reputation after the abysmal box office performance of his previous film, the critically acclaimed Tharlo (2015), which grossed just 1.1 million yuan following a limited release in China.

Jinpa also serves to gauge the level of support for alternative fare in a market where simultaneous releases of big-budget Hollywood films are becoming common­place. This, perhaps, is the real endgame for Chinese art cinema.