Chinese film market slows pace, focuses on quality

The 25th China Golden Rooster & Hundred Flowers Film Festival closed on Saturday in Tangshan, Hebei province.[Photo/IC]

Chinese film market has experienced leapfrog development in the past decade and entered more stable phase for restructuring, experts said during a national film festival.

The 25th China Golden Rooster & Hundred Flowers Film Festival closed on Saturday in Tangshan, Hebei province.

China's film market reached its prime time in 2015, when box office reached 44 billion yuan ($6.6 billion), up 48.7 percent from 2014, according to the film bureau of the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SARFT).

"The market cooled down from the heat this year. Pace is slower and quality becomes important," said Liu Hanwen, a film researcher with SARFT.

Chinese film industry has been growing at an annual rate of more than 30 percent in the last six years. In February, with 6.87 billion yuan, or one billion US dollars in ticket sales, it overtook North America for the first time.

However, box office figures started to disappoint market watchers in April, with a 24.2 percent drop from last year. Summer total ticket sales, from June to August, was 12.4 billion yuan, about the same with the figure last year, according to official statistics, but the revenue of 4.5 billion yuan in July was down 18 percent year on year, the first decrease in five years.

During the summer, ticket sales of domestic films totaled 4.7 billion yuan, more than 40 percent down from 7.9 billion yuan in the summer of last year.

Not a single domestic film scored over one billion yuan in sales since April this year, said Li Chun, an assistant professor of the Communication University of China.

"Everybody thinks foreign films would stimulate the market, but judging from the figures so far, the foreign films also lack luster in the market," he said.