When Star Wars: The Force Awakens opened in Beijing over the weekend, it took $53m (£37m).
That is still under a fifth of the $238m that it took on the opening weekend in the United States, but the Chinese market is growing at a phenomenal rate – up 35% in 2015 over the previous year.
As the country gets more affluent, its people want to spend money on leisure – like in cinemas. There are about 15 cinema screens being constructed every day in China.
The snag for Hollywood is that there is a strict quota on foreign films being shown in Chinese cinemas – 34 a year. They have to pass the Chinese censors, so the ones that arrive are usually apolitical blockbusters.
So a canny businessman might wonder how the pent-up huge demand for films in China might be satisfied, given the quota.
The answer may have been found by China’s richest man, Wang Jianlin. The Wanda Group which he runs has bought Hollywood’s Legendary Entertainment, the maker of blockbusters Jurassic World and Godzilla.
If he gets Legendary, now part of his Chinese group, to make films in China, he, in effect, gets “Hollywood” movies without being subject to the imported film quota. He gets nearer to the movie-mogul nirvana of producing truly global films which can sell in both the United States and China, the world’s two biggest markets.
There is a snag – and that is the Chinese censor. Films for a global market would have to pass the censorship laws in all bits of that market and the Chinese censor is ultra-strict on politics.
So making films that sell big in both the US and China runs the risk of producing emasculated and boring ones.
Legendary Entertainment, now part of Wanda Group under the deal, have a film called Great Wall on the way. It is, according to Legendary, “the story of an elite force making a last stand for humanity on the world’s most iconic structure”. It is an alien movie somewhat removed from the realities of modern-day China.
Legendary specialise in blockbusters, heavy on noise, effects and action, and light on political implication – just the sort to go down well with the censor and a large chunk of the audience in both the United States and China.