At its peak, the cinema market in China was worth hundreds of millions to Hollywood studios. We look at its rise and sudden fall.
One year after it earned Oscar nominations and box office glory in America, 1993’s The Fugitive found an audience in a more unexpected territory: China. At the time, it was unheard of for a relatively new Hollywood film to get a release in the country’s cinemas, but The Fugitive had broken through, playing in several major Chinese cities and selling hundreds of thousands of tickets.
The LA Times quoted one local cinema manager as saying that people were going back to see the Harrison Ford thriller multiple times; there were also reports of scalpers trying to sell tickets for twice their face value.
As pointed out in a 2018 feature published by We Minored In Film, however, there was a reason why The Fugitive made its way into Chinese cinemas where other Hollywood films didn’t. Tempted away by rival forms of entertainment and pirated media, Chinese audiences had stopped going to the cinema.
With theatres facing financial oblivion, the Chinese government therefore decided to lift restrictions on foreign films somewhat, allowing 10 of what it considered the “best” overseas movies to appear in its cinemas. It was a considerable climbdown from the state’s previous handling of Hollywood output, where, if films were granted a release at all, they didn’t appear until years after their debut in the US.
The Sylvester Stallone thriller First Blood didn’t emerge until 1985, four years after its US release; 1978’s Superman finally debuted in Chinese cinemas in 1986, but was pulled within weeks when it was criticised by the state-owned Peking Evening News because it “attempts to tell the audience that America represents truth and justice.”
The Fugitive, almost despite itself, cracked open a market that saw further Hollywood films find success. True Lies followed in 1995, and was a big success with Chinese audiences. Titanic was an even bigger hit when it opened there in 1998 – though, in a sign of things to come, director James Cameron was forced to trim out a brief nude scene in order to get it approved for release.
(Titanic’s 3D re-release was similarly censored, reportedly because Chinese authorities were concerned that audiences would try to reach out and touch Kate Winslet’s breasts.)
As the 90s gave way to the 2000s, the number of cinema screens across China grew at a remarkable pace, from around 4,400 in 2005 to roughly 75,000 in 2020. Today, it’s reckoned that there are over 90,000 screens in the country – a number far exceeding the US, which has around 41,000.
And as the number of cinemas in China grew in the 2000s, so too did the box office grosses of foreign films; DreamWorks Animation’s Kung Fu Panda (2008) and Quantum Of Solace collectively brought in $45m in 2008, while 2009 and 2010’s Chinese box office charts were dominated by Hollywood movies. Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen made $65m in 2009; Avatar made a phenomenal $182m the year after.
All of which led to a period in the early 2010s when Hollywood studios began to think about ways of tailoring their films to a Chinese audience of some 1.4bn people – a focus that led to some unusual, shall we say, commercial decisions. Films were sprinkled with product placement to China-specific brands; some of the region’s biggest stars were brought in for additional scenes. On occasion, scripts were amended to avoid offending China’s strict censors.
From 1994 onwards, the Chinese government continued to ease its restrictions over foreign films. What began as 10 movies per year soon grew to 20 in 2002; the figure changed again in 2012, when President Xi Jinping announced that the number of major Hollywood films that could be released in China was to be upped to 34. Even more enticingly, studios would receive a 25 percent share of box office revenues rather than 13 percent.
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All of which brought about a golden age – if we can really call it that – of Hollywood blockbusters in China. Iron Man 3 (2013) did its best to court far eastern audiences not just by significantly altering the nature of comic book villain The Mandarin, but also by adding four minutes of footage starring Fan Bingbing, one of Asia’s biggest stars.
The following year, Bingbing was brought in for a similarly fleeting appearance in X-Men: Days Of Future Past, while Transformers: Age Of Extinction (also 2014) featured a handful of brief additional sequences starring another Chinese star, Li Binbing (no relation). Along with guest roles for big-name local actors, these films and others like them were commonly studded with product placement for brands familiar to Chinese audiences – things like Yili Milk or Meters/bonwe clothing. (Transformers: Dark Of The Moon went a step further in 2011 by introducing a charmless robot named Brains, capable of turning into a Lenovo laptop.)
In several instances, the Chinese state co-produced some of the 2010s’ biggest blockbusters. The aforementioned Age Of Extinction was a joint venture between Paramount, China Central Television and another company from the region, Jiaflix Enterprises. High-octane sequel Furious 7 (2015) was similarly funded by the China FilmGroup Corporation, with as much of 10 percent of the film’s considerable budget coming from that state-owned company.
This approach paid off in business terms: of Age Of Extinction’s $1.1bn global take, around $301-320m came from China. Furious 7 broke records, ultimately making $391m at the Chinese box office.
In fact, looking back at the 2010s, it’s possible to see how Hollywood’s courting of Chinese cinemas affected the types of films it made over the next decade or so. Beijing’s relaxation of imported US media came with a catch: the additional 14 films allowed to be distributed in China had to be shown in IMAX or 3D formats. Hollywood was also quick to observe that culturally specific genres like comedies and dramas didn’t fare well with Chinese audiences – all of which meant that more resources were put into making huge, four-quadrant 3D movies filled with special effects.
As Hollywood began tailoring its output for a broader audience, there were growing concerns that studios were essentially censoring themselves in order to appease China’s censors. The 2012 remake of Red Dawn originally saw the USA invaded by Chinese forces; the film was then delayed and heavily retooled to make the aggressors appear to be from North Korea. James Bond sequel Skyfall was edited to (among other things) remove a sequence in which the super spy kills a security guard in Shanghai. As the BBC pointed out at the time, “China routinely censors foreign films to remove content deemed to be morally or politically damaging.”
Age Of Extinction, on the other hand, went so far out of its way to portray the Chinese military as a force for good that it reportedly had audiences in Hong Kong laughing in derision.
“The movie then cuts to a bunch of slapdash scenes in Beijing that show mainland fighter jets taking off and an official declaring that ‘the central government will defend Hong Kong at all costs!,’ South China Morning Post columnist Jeremy Blum wrote in 2014. “When that part came on, nearly everyone in the theatre with me laughed out loud.”
Hollywood actors also found themselves having to mind their language while promoting their movies. In Shanghai to drum up business for Maleficent, Angelina Jolie was forced to apologise when she said director Ang Lee was Taiwanese rather than Chinese, implying (correctly) that Taiwan is a separate country.
Similarly, John Cena was forced to make contrite noises on social media when he called Taiwan a country during the promo tour for Fast 9. As far as the Chinese state is concerned, Taiwan is a province of China, even though it’s internationally recognised as a sovereign country with its own currency.
As Hollywood’s success in China reached its peak in the late 2010s, studios began launching films in the far east before the US. Aquaman (2018), for example, came out in China two days before it debuted in America, ultimately making $293m in the region – thanks in no small part to a vastly expensive marketing campaign. Avengers: Endgame represented what was in retrospect the peak: it made around $592m in China alone.
By the early 2020s, Hollywood’s intent on tailoring its output for China began to be questioned by academics and journalists. The Atlantic’s Shirley Li described a “culture of acquiescing to Beijing’s censors” in her 2021 piece, How Hollywood Sold Out to China. A 2020 report published by the non-profit organisation PEN America laid out how Hollywood filmmakers’ creative decisions were increasingly “based on an effort to avoid antagonising Chinese officials who control whether their films gain access to the booming Chinese market.”
That self-censorship didn’t go unnoticed by western movie-goers, either. Casting Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One in Doctor Strange (2016) led to accusations of whitewashing, for example. Bohemian Rhapsody was censored to an almost absurd degree in order to secure a Chinese release, with anything even alluding to Freddie Mercury’s homosexuality, drug use and battles with AIDS chopped out. (The Communist Party’s prickliness over anything related to LGBTQ material was such that even Rami Malek’s use of the word ‘gay’ was taken out of his acceptance speech when the Oscars aired on Chinese television.)
The past five years, however, have seen Hollywood’s dominance over the Chinese box office wane. A combination of the global pandemic and a set of tariffs established by Donald Trump during his term of US President played a factor, but so too, seemingly, did changing audience tastes in China. Once reliable franchises like Transformers and The Fast And The Furious saw their ticket sales fall precipitously in the country; 2023 was notable for being the first year (aside from 2020, struck as it was by the pandemic) that didn’t feature a single Hollywood film make China’s top 10 list at the box office. Instead, Chinese audiences flocked to see home-grown movies specifically tailored – albeit within the confines laid out by the state – to their cultural tastes.
Comedy adventure Full River Red topped the box office with takings of $670m in 2023. Another comedy, YOLO, made $484.5m in 2024. This year’s big success story is Ne Zha 2, an animated fantasy adventure sequel that, with a box office haul of over $2bn, is now the world’s highest-grossing film of 2025. It’s a sign of just how huge the Chinese film industry has become, and how much effort the country’s government is putting into making and promoting movies for its own population.
As Stanley Rosen, a political science professor, put it to the LA Times earlier in April, China’s desire to “beat Hollywood” has become “a patriotic issue as well as an economic issue.”
Trump’s latest trade war will likely hasten Hollywood’s already dwindling presence in China. On the 10th April, the Chinese National Film Administration announced its intention to “moderately reduce the number of imported American films” in response to Trump’s tariffs on the country’s imports. At present, US films are still being accepted into Chinese cinemas – A Minecraft Movie recently made $15m in China, while Marvel’s Thunderbolts* is still set to appear in China on the 30th April.
But with US-Chinese political tensions growing, and China unlikely to actively promote American films if they do make it through those new restrictions, the boom years that peaked in 2018 are already a distant memory. As in the 1990s, Hollywood and China are now separate markets with diverging audiences; the difference this time is that it’s China’s film industry that is booming, while Hollywood mulls its place among streaming giants and dwindling ticket sales in cinemas.
There is a silver lining, however: with China now less of a key destination for major Hollywood films, studios are no longer putting the same energy into self-censoring their output. In 2022, it emerged that Chinese censors wanted Sony Pictures to cut out shots of the Statue of Liberty from Spider-Man: No Way Home; a few years earlier, the studio might have been more accommodating. Instead, Sony refused. No Way Home never got a release in China, meaning Sony lost out on potential revenue; the Spider-Man sequel still made almost $2bn worldwide all the same.
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