New at The Numbers: Single-Territory Records

August 24, 2017

Wolf Warriors 2

Here at The Numbers, we strive to improve your reading experience by adding more features we believe you will find interesting. Today, the new feature is top single-market hits. As the chart shows, the biggest single-market hit is Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which earned $936.66 million in North American. The top of the chart is still dominated by releases in the United States, and second place used to belong to Avatar. But this week, Wolf Warriors 2’s Chinese box office topped that figure and it currently has $783.02 million. This is game changing … although we’ll have to see how it plays out.

Wolf Warriors 2’s success could turn China into a market like India: one of the few places that can regularly produce films that appear in the top five on the international chart. However, India is also a market that is unfriendly to foreign films. At the moment, some of the all-time biggest hits in China are Hollywood blockbusters, including this year’s The Fate of the Furious and Transformers: The Last Knight. However, if China can produce more homegrown monster hits, then Hollywood films could lose their appeal. Additionally, like India, most international markets don’t have an audience for Chinese films. In fact, Bollywood films have a larger audience in North America than Chinese films do.

So it is too soon to tell what will happen, but keep track of the top single-market hits for some idea. If Chinese films continue to rise and Hollywood films start to tumble, it could spell a major change in the international box office.

Filed under: Analysis, Transformers: The Last Knight, Zhan Lang 2, Star Wars