Box Office: ‘Mulan’ Plunges 82% In China As ‘Eight Hundred’ Tops $400M Global

It’s still possible/probable that Black Widow, No Time to Die and Wonder Woman 1984 will challenge Bad Boys For Life and The Eight Hundred as 2020’s biggest global grosser.

In Chinese box office news, The Eight Hundred earned another $5.02 million on its fifth Friday, down just 8% from last Friday, to bring its cume to $406.49 million. So, yes, The Eight Hundred is the second movie of the year, after Bad Boys for Life ($428 million), to pass $400 million in global grosses. And it has done so with $406 million entirely in China. If this keeps up, we could see a $16 million weekend and new cume of $417.5 million. With another month in Chinese theaters, it has been extended to October 21, it is now possible that the $80 million, shot-on-IMAX war epic will indeed pass Will Smith and Martin Lawrence’s Bad Boys for Life to become the year’s biggest global grosser.  

It’s still possible/probable that Black Widow (October 30 overseas and November 6 until Disney
DIS
says otherwise), No Time to Die (November 12 in the UK and November 20 in North America) and Wonder Woman 1984 will challenge the over/under $430 million likes of Bad Boys 3 and The Eight Hundred, to say nothing of any additional Chinese blockbusters that may still open in 2020. My People, My Homeland is expected to be very big when it opens early next month, and if Detective Chinatown 3 (a sequel to a flick that earned $575 million in early 2018) sneaks into November or December, all bets are off. I was planning to drive down to IMAX to see Detective Chinatown 3 back in January just before China closed its theaters.

Walt Disney’s Mulan plunged 82% on its second Friday, earning $1.47 million to bring its eight-day total to $31.17 million. We can expect a $5 million second-weekend gross and a $35 million ten-day cume. Even with the caveat that big Hollywood movies tend to drop hard in China (for the same reason that legs have become shorter in America, namely the marketplace expanding to meet more of the demand right away), this is a clear sign that Chinese audiences (generally speaking) either don’t like or don’t care about Disney’s attempt to play to frankly stereotypical presumptions about what Chinese moviegoers happen to like and the marketplace as it existed in 2015 as opposed to today (whereby China loves Marvel/DC superheroes, embraces the weird and has plenty of local blockbusters from which to choose).

At this rate, Niki Caro’s $200 million action drama will barely crack $45 million in China, which is close enough to Aladdin ($53 million) that it would merely be a moral blow had the film otherwise opened as intended back in March. Yes, it would have been hilariously ironic if Mulan had succeeded and/or thrived everywhere (it was tracking for an $80-$90 million domestic launch before it was delayed) except China. However, Disney would have just shrugged its shoulders, counted its money from everywhere else and prepared for Black Widow to crush it in China a month later. And if Shang-Chi kicks butt in China next summer, it’ll be as much because it’s a Marvel movie as because it’s a Marvel movie about Chinese superheroes.

Tenet earned another $1.1 million on its third Friday, down 47% from last Friday, for a new 15-day cume of $56.25 million. We can expect around $4 million for the weekend and a new $59 million cume. While below pre-release expectations, that’s still above Dunkirk ($51 million in 2017) and The Dark Knight Rises ($53 million in 2012). It may have just enough gas left in the can to crawl past the $68 million cume (in 2010) of Inception. That Interstellar earned $122 million in 2014 (one of the biggest grosses ever for a Hollywood flick in China at the time) and earned another $18 million via a reissue last month does not necessarily mean that Tenet was automatically going to pull comparable numbers.

Exchange rates and marketplace expansion notwithstanding, Tenet will end up well below the likes of Gravity ($70 million in 2013) and The Martian ($94 million in 2015), although it has already passed Passengers ($45 million in 2016). At least some of the commercial reaction to Tenet is about the movie itself. The film is, for better or worse, a cold and clinical plot-driven exercise with little in the way of character development or even conventional drama. Nonetheless, under normal circumstances, had Tenet opened in July amid a crowded summer season and performed decently in America and elsewhere, an over/under $65 million cume in China (which sends just $16 million back to Warner Bros.) would be a bonus toward a sexier global total.

China may still be Tenet’s single-biggest territory. The sci-fi actioner had $29.5 million domestic in 11 days after a $6.7 million Fri-Sun weekend, a solid drop of 29%, meaning it may or may not even reach the $58 million earned by the current domestic Labor Day champion, Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake (from a $30.5 million Fri-Mon debut in 2007). That coupled with The Eight Hundred and presumably big numbers for My People, My Homeland, shows, at the very least, that China has finally become as important to the global theatrical movie industry as everyone has merely pretended it was since 2014. But a theatrical industry that A) only thrives in China and B) prioritizes Chinese biggies over Hollywood tentpoles cannot sustain itself for long.