China’s film industry has been rocked by a dramatic slump in box office revenues during the crucial summer holiday period, triggering concerns about the market’s long-term prospects.

With only two weeks of the summer period remaining, Chinese theaters have recorded only 9.67 billion yuan ($1.35 billion) in sales, according to ticketing platform Maoyan. That is less than half of the 20.6 billion yuan in box office revenues generated last summer.

A weak slate of releases appears to be partly to blame for the decline. The highest-grossing movie this summer — the comedy “Successor” — took 3 billion yuan at the box office, followed by thriller “A Place Called Silence” with 1.3 billion yuan. No other film released this summer cracked the 600-million-yuan mark.

In 2023, by contrast, eight summer releases took more than 600 million yuan, with two of those racking up over 3.5 billion yuan in ticket sales.

Several blockbusters that Chinese studios were banking on flopped badly this summer. The highly anticipated adaptation of the hit novel “Decoded,” directed by star filmmaker Chen Sicheng, has grossed only 300 million yuan since its release 12 days ago.

Jackie Chan’s latest action film “A Legend,” meanwhile, has grossed only 80 million yuan in its first five weeks, despite reportedly having a production budget of over 360 million yuan.

The topic “dismal summer box office” topped the trending list on China’s X-like microblogging platform Weibo on Wednesday, receiving over 47 million views, with many users bemoaning the poor quality of recent releases.

Sun Yi, a Shanghai-based college student, told Sixth Tone that he had been to see several blockbusters last summer — including “Chang’An” and “No More Bets” — but he hadn’t been to the cinema at all over the past few weeks.

The 20-year-old said this was partly because he’d been watching the Paris Olympics all month, but added that he hadn’t heard about any films going viral or receiving great reviews recently.

On the review platform Douban, most of this summer’s biggest releases have received a lukewarm response from users. The highly anticipated releases “Decoded” and “Upstream,” for example, received average ratings between 5 and 7 out of 10. Of the top five grossing films released this summer, only two have average ratings above 7: “Successor” and the Marvel blockbuster “Deadpool & Wolverine.”

But industry insiders also highlighted longer-term factors acting as a drag on the film market. Audiences are increasingly choosing to consume different media such as short videos and ultrashort dramas, film critic Tan Fei told domestic media, making it harder to convince viewers to sit through a two-hour movie.

“Considering the average age of the film-watching demographic, this issue appears insoluble,” Tan said.

China’s film industry has never fully recovered from the pandemic, with consumers often reluctant to splash out on cinema tickets. Though box office revenues bounced back to 85% of 2019 levels last year, many analysts cautioned that this improvement would be difficult to sustain.

In 2023, there was a large backlog of major blockbusters waiting to be released. It was always going to be difficult to keep audiences as engaged in 2024.

Despite a strong performance during the Spring Festival holiday in February, China’s box office has been sluggish throughout most of this year. During the first half of 2024, total box office revenues reached 23.9 billion yuan, down from 26.3 billion yuan in 2023, according to Maoyan.

Speaking with domestic outlet iFeng, cinema managers said they were pessimistic about things improving during the National Day holiday in October — another crucial period in China’s film industry — given the uninspiring lineup of upcoming releases and weak consumer sentiment.

(Header image: At a movie theater in Shenyang, Liaoning province, July 30, 2024. VCG)