Asura flops, but shines a light on China’s increasingly sophisticated film audience

Vivienne Chow says that the devastating failure of the Chinese film industry’s most expensive production ever, despite rising box office numbers overall, shows that filmmakers now need original storytelling to woo a domestic audience of growing discernment – and that’s good news for the Chinese film industry

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Published: 5:02am, 23 Jul 2018Updated: 1:25pm, 23 Jul 2018

In Indian mythology, an Asura is a demigod with three heads, who is obsessed with power, ego and violence. This week in China, the film Asura represents not only an epic failure, but also an important lesson for the country’s fast-growing film industry’s ambition for box office success that outshines Hollywood. In other words, the Chinese film industry itself is an Asura.

To be fair, the future of China’s film industry has never looked so promising. The country overtook North America as the world’s largest film market in the first quarter of this year, and though it lost the title halfway through 2018, as North America went up to nearly US$6 million through June, China’s film industry is still on the rise.

The half-year industry report from Ent Group revealed that the Chinese box office has achieved the best-ever first six months in 2018, totalling 31.6 billion yuan (US$4.8 billion) with 889 million viewers, a 16 per cent increase from the 27.2 billion yuan recorded during the same period of 2017.

Of the half-year box office receipts, 18.8 billion yuan, or 59.6 per cent, came from domestic productions, with local blockbusters Operation Red Sea and Detective Chinatown 2 driving movie-goers to the cinema.

The figures have given a great deal of confidence to the film industry, with many industry players believing that this could be the year that China will eventually become the world’s No 1.