Communist China Dethrones Hollywood as Box Office Revenue Becomes Highest in World
The Battle at Lake Changjin collected a record 5.772 billion yuan in China’s box office
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China is celebrating its recent film industry boom, which left Hollywood in the dust in 2021.
The communist nation's box office revenue became the highest in the world last year, with most income coming from movies like The Battle at Lake Changjin.
The Chinese Communist Party-run newspaper, The Global Times, wrote:
The Battle at Lake Changjin collected a record 5.772 billion yuan in China’s box office market, which is also a new record high as the highest-grossing film in Chinese history. The film is set during the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea (1950-53) and depicts the Chinese People’s Volunteers soldiers’ brave fight in a key campaign at Lake Changjin, or Chosin Reservoir, during freezing temperatures.
China is expected to account for 34 percent of global box office revenue, compared to just over 28 percent in 2020, according to Gower Street Analytics projections. The US is estimated to take the second rank with a likely 22 percent share.
The year 2021 marked the second year that China beat the US to become the world’s largest box office market, a result caused by the two countries’ vastly different responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to media reports.
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China banned most American films from late 2021, some of which included superhero movies.
One of Hollywood's biggest releases in history is Spider-Man: No Way Home, which is still yet to be released in China.
Despite the success of the movie, Hollywood is still scrambling to return to the pre-pandemic audience numbers.
Accordng to Business Insider, China is trying to continue blocking Hollywood movies and developing its own film industry, a “five-year plan” developed in Beijing to make China a “strong cultural power."
Analysts at Variety said China was “decoupling from the broader global film industry as a whole as the country turns inward under President [sic] Xi Jinping.”
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Some also believe China is using the pandemic as a tool to block Western influences in order to push its own film product overseas.
According to some filmmakers, China had funded joint film projects in order to steal secrets for making big Hollywood blockbusters.
“I think about every moment of my career with China, and it’s so obvious now,” said former studio head Chris Fenton.
“We could sell them fish as long as we taught them how to fish.”
“They wanted to create imitators and an industry that can compete with us on a world-class level,” Fenton said.
"Now that they’ve done that, they have no motivation to allow any of our movies in. We need to stop trying to keep the status quo because the status quo is gone."
And where there is china, there is also Biden close by.
In 2019, Neon Nettle reported that Biden played a crucial role in helping Hollywood gain access to the lucrative Chinese box office.
The L.A Times notes:
"Several of the candidates vying for the Democratic presidential nomination have significant support in Hollywood — [Jeffrey] Katzenberg, for example, has kicked in $2,800 each to 14 of them already — but none has as long a history of delivering for the industry as Biden."
