Hollywood studio executives should start their summer Mondays by bowing and praying to the east. That's because this Monday, as in so many recently, Chinese audiences have bailed out a high-profile blockbuster that underperformed on its home turf. Chinese movie-goers are becoming the saviors of summer for an industry that's having trouble connecting with franchise-fatigued American movie-goers.
Over the weekend, China came to the rescue of Paramount Pictures and Transformers: The Last Knight, which opened at a franchise-low $69 million domestically but made a franchise-high $123 million in China over the weekend. It's a pattern that mirrors the lopsided performance of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales ($170 million in China vs. $154 million here) and Universal’s The Fate of the Furious ($393 million in China vs. $225 million here).
“China loves the spectacle,” said Megan Colligan, Paramount’s worldwide president of marketing and distribution. “More mature markets like the U.S. and Europe are atrophying. But in newer markets like Latin America and Asia, they like it when their favorite movies come back bigger and better.”
For now, anyway. China’s marketplace is maturing fast, and its appetite for Hollywood grandeur may slow. “That’s the big unknown,” says one source who conducts box-office research for movie studios. “They’re eating up all of our franchises now. Will they always? It’s hard to please every audience.”
At the moment, studios have one major advantage they've lost at home: Chinese moviegoers rely less on critic-review aggregation sites like Rotten Tomatoes, and more on the audience scores posted on ticketing Web sites, according to Colligan. “You can have audience playability even if your critical reaction is not super strong,” Colligan said. Certainly that helps on a franchise like *Transformers,, which film critics have never cared for—the Rotten Tomatoes score for the latest is a dismal 15 percent.
Without critics to stand in the way, studios just have to build enough hype for their projects—or “Create the heat,” in the words of Duncan Clark, president of Universal Pictures International. For the latest Transformers, Paramount packed 5,000 people into a sports stadium in the southern China city of Ghanzhou for the world premiere. Director Michael Bay thanked Chinese fans for their loyalty; Chinese pop singer Jason Zhang performed a ballad; and Chinese social-media sites live-streamed the event to fans, including those in 400 theaters owned by China's Dalian Wanda Group.
Paramount was specifically targeting average Chinese movie-goer, who is 20 years old and extremely active on social media. The studio took part in a $58 million Coca-Cola campaign—the soft drink company’s largest movie tie-in ever—which featured a TV ad shot by Bay and 240 million custom, branded Coke cans featuring franchise characters like Bumblebee and Optimus Prime.
Universal and Disney took similarly ambitious tacks in China with their recent sequels. In May, Disney became the first Hollywood studio to hold a world premiere in China for its fifth Pirates movie, capitalizing on the Shanghai Disney resort’s popular Pirates attraction, and on Johnny Depp’s enduring allure there. In April, Universal lit up China’s 118-story Ping An Finance Center, the fourth-tallest building in the world, with a show featuring logos, racing cars, and speedometers from the eighth Fast movie.
Paramount has refined its approach in China since its last Transformers film, which featured Chinese actors like Li Bingbing, with significant scenes shot in China and Chinese product placement. That movie knocked out Avatar to become the country’s highest grosser, but it also inspired some snickers on social media for what Chinese audiences perceived as pandering. (They're far from the only ones.) “Throwing in willy-nilly Chinese elements and Chinese faces, the local audience didn’t buy into that,” said Jonathan Papish, industry analyst at China Film Insider. “Transformers 4 made a boatload of money, but people were asking, ‘Why is somebody drinking a Chinese milk box in this scene?’”
With few exceptions, China’s affection for Hollywood movies is mainly restricted to one genre: the kind of movies China can't make itself. “They make romances that they love,” Colligan said. “They make dramas that they love. So all they want from Hollywood is big action, big spectacle.”
China, however, is also in the midst of building huge studios of its own, including Wanda Studios Qingdao, an $8 billion facility on China’s eastern coast that will become the biggest movie studio in the world when it opens in August 2018. While unveiling the studio plans at a gala event in Los Angeles last October, Dalian Wanda Group chairman Wang Jianlin cautioned the crowd about underestimating Chinese movie-goers, and offered a possible warning to studios who may not be able to rely on China to bail out their blockbusters much longer.
“To purely depend on scene and on effects will probably not work forever,” Wang said. “Now that Chinese audiences are smarter, they are not made happy so easily.”
