US films don’t command as big a share of the global box office as they once did, but they have more international currency than Chinese blockbusters.
American movies are losing their stranglehold on cinema screens around the world. Their share of the global box office has shrunk from 92% to 66% in the last two decades, while that for movies produced in Asia has increased. Nine of the top 10 highest-grossing movies of all time were produced in the US, but the most recent addition to that list is China’s Ne Zha 2, an animated film about a young boy endowed with supernatural powers who battles monsters from Chinese mythology. US films still dominate box offices at home and in Canada, but their international receipts have been in decline. The number of movie screens in China has almost quadrupled since 2014, according to the China Film Administration. There are now more than 90,000—the most of any place in the world. However, Hollywood has failed to capitalize on this expansion for two reasons. The first is a decision by Chinese authorities to progressively lower the cap on the number of foreign movies that can be shown in the country. (The number of approved US releases peaked at more than 60 in 2018, the year that US President Donald Trump launched his trade war.) The other is a big leap in local-language films, both in quantity and quality. Chinese productions have netted 20% of the global box office on average in the five years since 2020, double the 10% they earned in the five preceding years. But almost all of those earnings—98%—have come from China’s domestic market. 2025 may go down as a watershed year for Chinese cinema: Ne Zha 2 has grossed $2 billion worldwide as of Sept. 18, equal to 12% of the entire global box office, placing it at the top of this year’s list of blockbusters. That’s roughly equivalent to the amount grossed by the three biggest Hollywood releases of the summer, as shown in the graph below. Yet whereas those US releases made two-fifths or more of their box office internationally, just 2% of Ne Zha 2’s take came from abroad. This makes it the highest-grossing film in a single market, more than double the $937 million earned by Star Wars: Episode VII, which previously held this record in North America. The US and China are the biggest producers of global box office hits, but there’s a key difference: Even as more of its profits come domestically, the US industry still relies on the global market for more than half of its revenue. China relies on the global market for just 2%. The US and China are the two largest movie markets in the world, but just over half of the global market is elsewhere. The chart below shows how other countries are making out in the competition for moviegoing audiences. Germany and Japan have had success finding US co-productions, while the top French films released were all English-language movies co-produced with the UK among other countries, and did more business in the UK than in the US or China. With cinema owners around the world struggling to fill seats—in China, theaters that were 20% full before the pandemic are now only 5% or 10% full—the battle for box office is a rumble for a shrinking pie. bloomderg.com
