According to China film box office statistics by enbase, mainland box office gross in the second week (Jan 9, 2012- Jan 15, 2012) reached $47.66 million, showing 26% box office growth from last month. Moviegoers in this week counted as almost 9 million in total, 38% up compared to last month.
New released film "The Great Magician" managed to steal the top spot away from competitors at this week box office. The Bona distributed action romance film directed by Derek Yee and starring all stars debuted at top spot with $11.55 million, while hit Chinese animation series "Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf", waltzed into No. 2 position with $11.3 million. Both films helped boost mainland market after a sluggish New Year holiday season. Domestic films make up 88 percent of the total revenue in mainland market.
"The Great Magician” debuted with $11.55 million over four days and managed to wrestle the first place from the highest-grossing hit of the year 2011“The Flowers of War”. “Magician”is the latest film directed by Derek Yee, who is good at balancing commercial success with artistic integrity very successful. The film has a terrific team starring with Sean Lau, Tony Leung, Xun Zhou and Ni Yan, even having some of the cameo appearances of Daniel Wu and the legendary Hark Xu smack of gimmickry. But due to lack of market campaign, the film’s gross in opening week is lower than expected.
Hit Chinese animation series“Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf”, based on the popular eponymous TV series, ranked second among four new-released films this week with a debut to $11.3 million over four days run. This year “Pleasant Goat” featured a new dragon-themed and as usual, it once again dominated the animated film box office sales in this season. The series' adorable characters and tales of adventure have won the hearts of children and adults alike, and that guaranteed its outstanding performance at box office.
Two blockbusters“The Flowers of War” and “Flying Swords of Dragon Gate”that both leading box office chart for fourth weeks, taking in $4.51 million and $4.29 million respectively this week, experienced a steep 60% drop in their fifth week, coming in at No. 4 and No.5. Despite having some scenes cut by mainland censors, the on-line novel adapted movie "You Are the Apple of My Eye" has sold $9.89 million tickets since it hit cinema screens in mainland nine days ago, making it the dark horse in terms of box office profit.
Much anticipated 3D version of the 1961 classic animated film "Havoc in Heaven"-- "The Monkey King 3D”, debuted one day in advanced "pleasant Goat”. The classic animated film widely considered to be a masterpiece and already had a solid audience base since 1960’s. Speaking of the revived version “Monkey King 3D”, one of its highlights is the three dimension vision effect, the other is the voices. The producers invited dozens of domestic A-list stars including Daoming Chen, Kaige Chen and Xiaogang Feng to voice the classic characters. Even with all these selling points, this animated film just debuted $2.88 million in the opening week, failed to meet the expectations.
According to statistics by enbase, “The Great Magician” and “pleasant Goat”enjoyed 16% and 19% screening time slot respectively in their first week of release. Benefiting from the good reputation from the audiences “Apple” took 17% screening time schedule, higher than that of “The great Magician”.”Flowers” and “Swords” ended their dominated market share, both dropping to 11% of screening time slot.
In the upcoming Week (16-22, Jan 2012), films as below are set to be released in mainland China, including two flat-fee imported films "Nutcracker in 3D” ,“Shotgun Love” and the others are local films. The interesting coincidence is that all these set-to-be released movies are all distributed by China Film Group Corporation, the stated-owned film company.
EntGroup is China’s leading entertainment research service center, focusing on Chinese film and animation industry. We provide consulting services through comprehensive industry reports, customized research as well as enbase to meet the requests concerning Chinese entertainment business. EntGroup also operate online platform for entertainment industry at http://english.entgroup.cn/index.aspx
enbase is an up-to-date database system developed by EntGroup. It contains detailed information of more than 300,000 films and television shows, including information of the distributors, directors, cast, etc as well as film box-office record and audience attendance rate.
For more information, please contact with
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
