Box Office: ‘Mulan’ Flops In China With Poor $23M Weekend

Walt Disney’s Mulan couldn’t compete in a landscape now filled with genuine Chinese blockbusters and genuine comic book superhero movies.

Mulan debuted in China with $23.2 million in its opening weekend, with little hope that the film would leg out beyond the often-standard 2x-2.2x multiplier for Hollywood releases. So we’re looking at a Chinese total of between $46.2 million and $50 million. Now to be fair, that’s the second biggest Hollywood debut of 2020, behind Tenet’s (also somewhat soft) $30 million launch last weekend. And under normal circumstances, Disney
DIS
wouldn’t necessarily be chasing Chinese box office with any additional fervor. When Aladdin grosses $353 million in North America, it’s less of an issue when it grosses $53 million in China. But with Mulan’s domestic theatrical release canceled in favor of a (middling at best) Disney+ PVOD release, and for a film that was seemingly green-lit with the intent of kicking butt in China, yeah, $23.2 million is a disaster.

To be fair, Niki Caro’s Mulan would have been likely notched a good ($550 million) to great ($850 million) global theatrical total had it opened in March, complete with global theaters running at conventional capacity. Even while I’ve noted for awhile that the film wasn’t going to automatically break out in China just because it features an all-Asian cast (in China they call that “a movie”),  the $200 million action spectacular would play well in North America and good enough internationally that it didn’t necessarily have to crush it in China. Whether Disney green-lit the film in 2015 with dreams of Transformers: Age of Extinction ($320 million in 2014) or merely Avatar ($206 million in 2009), the intent was to score globally to an extent that even Iron Man 3 ($122 million in 2013) would be an acceptable comparison.

However, in a broader sense, the final product, which turned Mulan into a superhero/Jedi and seemed more aimed at pleasing Chinse government officials than entertaining Chinese moviegoers, seemed like a misreading of what works in China’s theatrical landscape. First, yes, the notion of a local Chinese blockbuster was mostly theoretical in early 2015, with Journey to the West having earned $197 million out of its $215 million cume in China alone. But over the next five years, Monster Hunt ($385 million in 2015), The Mermaid ($550 million in 2016), Wolf Warrior II ($854 million!! In 2017), Detective Chinatown 2 ($575 million in 2018) and The Wandering Earth ($692 million in 2019) changed the landscape in terms of what Chinese moviegoers could expect from non-Hollywood biggies. By 2020, a big-budget action spectacle starring Chinese actors was just another big movie.

By around 2017/2018, Chinese moviegoers were less likely to flock to an American blockbuster that seemed sanded down for Chinese consumption (Skyscraper) and were showing up for either pulpy China/Hollywood co-productions like The Meg or unapologetically foreign offerings like Coco, Ready Player One, Zootopia and India’s Dangal. And by the end of 2018, yet another shift had occurred whereby the obsession with DC and Marvel comic book movies had begun to dominate in China as it has in North America in recent years. As of mid-2018, no non-Avengers superhero flick had earned even $125 million. By the end of 2018, Venom had grossed $262 million and Aquaman had earned $298 million. Marvel ruled China as much as it did America, with Avengers: Endgame earned $620 million, Spider-Man: Far from Home grossing $200 million and Captain Marvel nabbing $154 million.

Meanwhile, the likes of Godzilla: King of the Monsters ($135 million), Alita: Battle Angel ($133 million) and Pokémon: Detective Pikachu ($93 million) struggled against the Marvel machine. Ill-advised sequels (Terminator Dark Fate and Dark Phoenix) to films that comparatively broke big in China crashed and burned, earning under $65 million each despite their predecessors earning $113 million in 2015 and $122 million in 2016. The only exception to the rule was Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, a spin-off from the incredibly popular Fast & Furious franchise, which earned $200 million in China last summer. The notion of big “not a Marvel or DC” tentpoles earning over/under $165 million in China (Pirates 5, Resident Evil 6, xXx 3, Bumblebee, etc.) may (save for already popular franchises) be a thing of the past. Into this new normal stepped Mulan.

It wasn’t part of an existing franchise. It was one of those doomed “take this non superhero property and make it into a superhero movie” flicks. It was a splashy Chinese mega-movie in a world where the mere idea of a Hollywood movie with an Asian cast is no big deal in China, as we saw with Crazy Rich Asians ($1.65 million), The Farewell ($566,664) and Abominable ($16 million). Mulan ran headfirst into China’s “shot entirely on IMAX” war epic The Eight Hundred ($380 million-and-counting), which was less nationalistic (it’s somewhat critical about rich men sending poor men to die for symbolic victories) than the Hollywood action melodrama. The Hollywood imitation, one so obsessively “respectful” that it played like oatmeal to Chinese audiences used to crazier fantasy blockbusters like Aquaman and Ne Zha, couldn’t compare to a blockbuster version of the genuine article.

Again, in a normal year with a normal release slate, a soft performance for Mulan in China would have been bitterly ironic but not a death sentence. With $37 million worldwide and still-unknown PVOD numbers (it’s been hovering between fifth place and tenth place on Disney+’s trending titles list) along with mixed word, what looked at the beginning of the year like one of Disney’s biggest 2020 grossers is probably going to be a financial bomb. The failure of Mulan in China isn’t that much of a surprise, both due to the current Chinese theatrical landscape (to Chinese audiences… it was Tuesday) and the final product played painfully square for an audience used to more onscreen lunacy. That’s something to keep in mind as Marvel’s Shang Chi continues production. If you’re going East, don’t be afraid to go weird.

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