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China, the World’s Second-Largest Film Market, Moves Beyond Hollywood
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https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/c...-hollywood          China, the World’s Second-Largest Film Market, Moves Beyond Hollywood
6:56 AM PDT 10/7/2020 by Patrick Brzeski        As the country's box office aims to overtake the U.S.’ this year amid the pandemic, industry observers say political tensions could lead to a permanent drag on major studios’ bottom line.
Battered by the pandemic and growing political headwinds, Hollywood’s business prospects in China are becoming bleak.

A state of tumult in Washington-Beijing diplomatic relations is putting greater scrutiny on Hollywood's film activities in the country, while the United States’ failure to contain COVID-19 is forcing the industry to take its pedal off the accelerator in China’s theatrical market at the worst possible time. The list of tensions, dustups and scandals grows longer by the day — and each incident has only served to undercut Hollywood's longterm foothold in the country.

“The trade and political environment has created a perfect storm of uncertainty,” says Stephen Saltzman, an attorney for law firm Paul Hastings who often represents Chinese studios in Hollywood negotiations. "And uncertainty breeds caution, which leads to a lack of progress and impediments to growth," he says.

The feverish dealmaking and big-budget creative collaborations that characterized relations between the world’s two largest entertainment markets over the past decade are not only gone for now, but unlikely to return soon, Saltzman adds.

The studios’ weakening position in Beijing also is hitting the industry just as China is becoming an even more central pillar of the sagging global box office. With the COVID-19 crisis subsiding in China, the country’s tens of thousands of theaters are operating at 75 percent seating capacity, and filmgoers are demonstrating little hesitation about returning to the multiplex. During China’s National Day holiday weekend running Oct. 1-4, cinemas brought in $325 million in ticket revenue, with two Chinese tentpoles earning more than $135 million each. In North America, where many cinemas are shuttered and the public remains legitimately concerned about the safety of moviegoing, theaters generated just $11 million in sales during the same period. (In 2019, domestic grosses totaled $150.5 million for Oct. 4-6.)

As China’s box office roars back toward full capacity, analysts in Beijing have begun predicting that the territory will easily usurp North America as the world’s top-grossing theatrical market in 2020. In the U.S., meanwhile, industry debate is focused on whether much of the damage done to the domestic theatrical film model might become permanent. On Oct. 4, Cineworld, the owner of Regal, the second-largest cinema chain in the U.S., said that it was again shutting down all its theaters indefinitely.
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