Are Young People in China Done With Going to the Movies?

China's once-booming theatrical box office has begun to crumble. Total movie ticketsales revenue in the country so far this year is down a whopping 22 percent compared to last year. The results represent a dramatic downturn from the strong postCOVID recovery China's film market achieved in 2023, when revenue surged 83 percent to finish the year at $7.73 billion. This year started strong for the Chinese industry, with box office during the Lunar New Year holiday week topping $1.1 billion, led by local blockbusters Yolo ($479.6 million) and Pegasus 2 ($468.9 million). But a prolonged fallow period extending through the summer has left the Beijing film industry wringing its hands, wondering whether a lasting shift in the marketplace may be underway. Filmmakers and analysts suggest an overlapping array of factors are behind the earnings plunge, but the truth is, no one fully knows what's gone wrong.

"I read a local research report recently that said the average age of the Chinese moviegoer has gone from 22 years old to 26," says leading Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke, whose latest feature Caught by the Tides premiered to critical acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival in May. "Our younger generations just aren't going to the cinema anymore. We have to ask ourselves, 'What happened and where have these people gone?'"

Throughout the West, the film business traditionally has been viewed as recession-proof. Even during economic downturns, people need entertainment, and the cost of a movie ticket is a small enough discretionary item that most consumers can always afford it. There are worrying signs that such logic does not apply in China, according to insiders. For at least the past year, the Chinese economy has been stuck in its most significant slump in over a decade, as a cratering property market and pessimistic consumer sentiment drag on growth. The downturn has been especially hard on young people. China's National Bureau of Statistics stopped reporting youth unemployment data in June 2023 after the rate reached a record high of 21.3 percent. The country began issuing a new, more favorable means of measuring joblessness early this year, but even by this metric, the unemployment rate among the young — ages 16 to 24 — climbed to over 17 percent in July.

"There's widespread sentiment on social media about job insecurity, particularly among new college graduates and the mid-career crowd," says James Li, co-founder of Beijing-based film market research firm Fanink. "As a result of all this, people are holding their wallets tight."

Li continues: "In our recent qualitative research among the Gen Z population in China, younger people have shown a clear tendency to aspire for stability in life, as seen in the record-breaking number of applicants for government jobs in 2024 [over 3 million]. They don't seem to be as ambitious or adventurous as the previous generations. Related to films, they report not liking taking the risk of spending time and money to see a movie that doesn't meet their expectations. In fact, many complain that online marketing of movies is becoming increasingly misleading."

Rance Pow, president of Asian box office consultancy Artisan Gateway, says his firm expects China's box office downturn to worsen before year-end. The company projects box office finishing the year at $5.69 billion, down from $7.81 billion — a 27 percent plunge for the year and a 38 percent decline from the pre-pandemic peak of $9.2 billion in 2019. Pow adds that the popularity of mobile video and gaming — "the continuing rise of shortform video platforms like Douyin, Bilibili, Xiaohongshu" — has helped chip away at the appeal of cinemagoing. The Paris Summer Olympic Games, wildly popular in China, also kept local audiences home to watch TV during what's usually a peak moviegoing window, according to Pow.

By and large, Hollywood appears to have fully abandoned its once-bullish stance on China. And not without reason: In the first 11 months of this year, earnings for U.S. films totaled $797.3 million — still a significant sum, but a 68 percent decline from the $2.5 billion in sales during the same stretch back in 2019. Throughout the pandemic, China's film regulators sharply curtailed the number of U.S. releases in the country (the number of American movie imports recovered in 2023, but so far this year just 29 U.S. titles have been released compared to 35 during the same stretch last year). The worsening geopolitical relations between Washington and Beijing have also weighed on popular perceptions of U.S. entertainment products.

The production values of Chinese movies, meanwhile, have soared to a level of near-parity with Hollywood, giving consumers the easy option of taking in cinematic spectacle in their own language and culture instead of a foreign one. The only U.S. blockbusters to perform powerfully in China this year, not incidentally, have been creature films — Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire ($132.2 million), Alien Romulus ($110.2 million) and Venom: The Last Dance ($72 million and counting) — one of the few genres the Beijing industry has yet to master, largely because of censorship constraints.

Overall, though, Beijing regulators' successful efforts to subtly suppress American film product have added to the overall market downturn, hurting Chinese exhibitors in the process.

"If China had opened up a bit more to imported productions, that would at least give more vitality and abundance to the supply side," explains Jia. "But that's unfortunately not happening. China is a country with 80,000 screens — we need more titles from around the world to fill them. Chinese films need to get better by way of more exchange with the outside world, and the viewers deserve more choices."