Box office drops for first time in 5 years

A man passes by a poster of the film Warcraft on the wall in Luoyang, Central China's Henan province, June 14, 2016. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Stanley Rosen, professor and director of the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California, said industry watchers should "expect to see these blips more frequently as the box office grows even more".

Films like The Mermaid or Furious 7 can "inflate the box office in a given quarter", he said.

Rosen said that Chinese movie consumers eventually will be more discriminating about what they watch. As with China's economy at large, "the box office can't grow at an equivalently high rate for every quarter, or even every year, particularly when the overall box office is getting so high", he said.

Marc Ganis, president of Jiaflix, which helps US studios distribute films in China, said another factor is that the government may be stepping in to make sure ticket sales are not inflated, as it did after distributor Beijing Max Screen was punished three months ago for fabricating $8.7 million in ticket sales for Ip Man 3.

"What you're seeing is one of the primary reasons for what some are seeing as a remarkable shift downward, is actually more accurate reporting. The government has taken a very positive role in trying to get the reported box office numbers to be more reliable," he said.

The Chinese box office is so enormous that "the exaggerations that may have occurred years ago to establish a perception of the size of the Chinese market are no longer necessary and may be counterproductive", he said.

Ganis predicted that the rate of increase in box office for the year will be closer to 20-25 percent as compared with the 48.7 percent reported last year, which is "still great" given the size of the Chinese market, and particularly because the numbers will be more accurate now.

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