According to the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) China's annual boxoffice gross topped 13 billion RMB ($2.03 billion) mark at the end of 2011, which figure includes tickets sales in urban cinema chains, cinemas in the second tier cities and rural areas. That is an increase of 28.93% when compared to year 2010. Total admissions tumbled 27% to around 370 million in this year, increased by 80 million from year 2010. With an additional 800 new-built cinemas and 3000 new-set silver screens, China has witnessed a mushrooming of modern cinemas nationwide in recent years, with an average daily increase of 8.3 screens.
The boom of China film industry is closely integrated with the fast development of movie theaters, which is regarded as terminal of film industry. The cinema circuit system in China was established in 2002. After going through an adaptive phase from 2002 to 2004 and a period of Mergers and Acquisitions from 2005 to 2008, the reform of China cinema chain system has entered a fast-growth phase back to 2009. We saw that it is fully developed throughout the business of the film industry, and the industrialization of the film business has emerged in year 2011.
According to the upcoming China Film Industry Report 2011-2012 which is set to be issued by EntGroup Consulting in very short future, China film market appeared the features as below:
Film production: It is getting unbalanced between in-put and out-put in mainland film market.
In 2011, over 230 new movies were released in the Mainland China market, 38 of which brought in over 100 million RMB each and accounted for 9.2 billion RMB in revenue. This means that 16% of all movies released accounted for 70% of box office revenue. The polarization of the Chinese film market is already very obvious, concentrating in well-funded, large-scale domestic movies and imported Hollywood films, resulting in a severe imbalance in the Chinese film industry.
According to EntGroup analysis, when it comes to content and producing quality, local films still have long way to go comparing to Hollywood blockbusters. For domestic films producers, they could barely benefit from either the State’s protection policy or the huge amount of films, due to audiences’the strong favor to imported films. With an additional 14 foreign-made films allowed into China every year, native producers are facing a huge challenge of gaining boxoffice profit. The key points for local filmmakers to survive in this fierce competition are content quality enhancement and film subject well selection.
EntGroup is China’s leading entertainment research service center, focusing on the Chinese film and TV industry. We provide consulting services through comprehensive industry reports, customized research, and entbase to meet the requests concerning the Chinese entertainment business. EntGroup also operates an online platform for the entertainment industry at http://english.entgroup.cn/index.aspx
entbase is an up-to-date database system developed by EntGroup. It contains detailed information on more than 300,000 films and television shows, including information on distributors, directors, cast, etc as well as film box-office records and audience attendance rates.
For more information, please contact
Leon (President) Tel: 86-10-85899985-813 E-mail: leon@entgroup.cn;
Amy (Vice President) Tel: 86-10-85899985-847 E-mail: amy@entgroup.cn
