The Chinese box office will reach 22 billion remnibi ($3.6 billion) in revenue this year, according to Amy Liu of China-based analytics company EntGroup. That would be a 25 percent increase over last year, when the box office accounted for $2.7 billion in revenue.
“That figure is staggering,” Liu said at the Asia Society of Southern California’s U.S.-China Film Summit on Tuesday.
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Liu was speaking on “Year in Review” panel, and in particular was speaking about her company’s efforts to provide research and analysis about the industry’s irrepressible growth on the mainland.
The box office has more than quadrupled in the past five years, and EntGroup has formulated a new model to predict the movie market three months in advance. It focuses on online data in particular.
“According to the latest figures, 600 million people are online,” Liu said via a translator. “The information they receive about movies or anything else comes from the Internet.”
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China Daily reported in July that box office revenue over the first six months of the year would surpass 10 billion reminbi ($1.6 billion), and that local movies grabbed a 63 percent share of the market.
The continued growth of the Chinese market solidifies its position as the second largest film market in the world. The U.S. remains the largest market, as its box office hit $10.8 billion last year. But that may soon change.
“In the next five years, we maybe overtake the United States market to be the biggest one globally,” Ning Ye, group vice president of the Wanda Cultural Industries Group said at the subsequent panel.