Movies With Butter

For the last three weeks, the box office in China has been dominated by animated features. For the previous week, locally produced Boonie Bears unseated Universal’s Despicable Me 2 with $13.3M. The latter took in $12M.

Boonie Bears’s total now stands at $30M. That’s a record for a Chinese animation, beating the $26M total of 2012’s Mission Incredible: Adventures On The Dragon’s Trail, the fourth film in the lucrative Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf franchise. Within the last couple of years, China has seen solid growth in the animation genre.

Despicable Me 2 has accumulated a stupendous $46.3M after three weeks, pushing it’s worldwide total to a monstrous $965M.

In third place is Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit with $11.6M, pushing its total to a solid $21.4M after two weeks. Worldwide, it’s at $77M. With a $60M budget, it’ll need another $50M or so to break even. At its current pace, that’s not very likely.

Another local animation, Meet the Pegasus, took the fourth spot with $4.5M. After two weeks, it’s total is a somewhat disappointing $12M. It’s the latest film in the Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf series. As I mentioned above, the previous film did $26M and each film in the franchise did progressively better since the first film debuted in 2009 and grossed a then record $15M (for an animation). Before Boonie Bears, the top four highest-grossing Chinese animations were all Pleasant Goat films.

Hello Babies, a Hong Kong comedy with an ensemble cast, took the fifth spot with $3.4M. After two weeks, its cumulative is a decent $12M. It seems like every Lunar New Year, Eric Tsang and Raymond Wong would each gather a bunch of their friends and make a competing comedy. Only this time, they made one together.

“Ender’s Game” took the sixth spot with $3.4M and an ok $21M total. Worldwide, it has taken in just slightly more than its $110M budget. Since a studio only gets to take home 50% of worldwide ticket sales for their films, Lionsgate will have a hefty write-down for “Ender’s Game.”

Another live-action adaptation of the animated series Balala the Fairies took the seventh spot, but with an underwhelming $2M after four days. The previous film did $7.6M early last year.

Police Story 2013 captured another $1.6M, boosting its total to an impressive $86.3M. It’s Jackie Chan’s second-highest grossing film in the region behind Chinese Zodiac (aka CZ12).

With another $0.8M, Feng Xiaogang’s Personal Tailor upped its total to a personal best $115.5M. It’s also the fifth-highest grossing Chinese film of all time.

Capping the top ten is The Apostles with $0.7M. After two weeks, the thriller has taken in an unremarkable $1M.

In a couple of days, The Monkey King, a $65M fantasy film starring Donnie Yen, Chow Yun Fat and Aaron Kwok, will open in Hong Kong and China. The trailer is super busy, shiny, and just plain nuts. With such a huge budget, records will need to fall.

(China box office figures courtesy of EntGroup.cn. Worldwide figures from BoxOfficeMojo.com)

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