China’s Box Office To Surpass America’s In 2017

A new prediction (via Quartz/Vox), one that is most likely accurate, puts China’s box office ahead of America’s in 2017.

Both are looking set to rise, but China’s is rising faster, next year probably faster than ever.  It’s tipping $10 billion and well on its way to $15 billion.  This is because of the rise of China’s exploding middle class which is projected to near 475 million by 2020.

China is now also building 27 new cinema screens a day and has more total screens than the United States right now. This makes China set to become the largest movie market in the world very soon.

All of this is good news.  Firstly the Chinese are not going to want to consume or produce political rot vein of what Hollywood is doing, for example if something is overtly patronising coming from Hollywood, the Chinese censorship board will probably just say ‘take that shit outta here!’ and the bean counters and propagandists in Hollywood might be scared into making movies we can enjoy, instead of movies that talk down to us.

Secondly the Chinese are producing more and more movies up our alley.  Movies where a man is still a man (shock!) and does manly things.  Nothing bad can come from this either, because if Hollywood were to implode, we always have Asians to bail us out.

And competition is always good anyway.