Chinese film industry looks for new horizons in North America

China's booming homegrown film industry is looking for new horizons as more Chinese films hit North America's theaters in 2019, and work to draw more US and Canadian moviegoers.

More Chinese films released in North America

The year of 2019 is another milestone for China's film industry as eight of the year's top 10 highest-grossing films in the Chinese mainland's box office charts are Chinese films.

The Chinese mainland's box office hit an all-time high with a total of 63.7 billion yuan ($9.1 billion) as of Sunday. It remains a difficult task, however, for Chinese films to appeal to North American moviegoers and achieve similar success beyond national borders.

Nonetheless, there is reason to be hopeful. Two major Chinese-language film distributors in North America have fared much better in 2019 than last year.

CMC Pictures has successfully released 11 Chinese films this year with a North American cume of 10.66 million dollars as of Saturday, including China's first homemade sci-fi blockbuster The Wandering Earth, which is the highest-grossing Chinese film in North America in the last five years with a total of 5.87 million dollars. It's a great leap for CMC Pictures, which released only five Chinese films in North America in 2018, which grossed a total of 727,000 dollars.

Another distributor, Well Go USA Entertainment, has released 14 Chinese-language films in 2019, doubling its North American box office from 2018's 4.01 million dollars to 9.84 million dollars as of Saturday. The company released only nine Chinese-language films last year.

The Chinese animated megahit, Ne Zha, was released by Well Go USA in North America with a cume of 3.67 million dollars. It's the top-grossing animated film ever made by China and No. 2 on the box office chart for all films ever screened on the Chinese mainland. The box office hit has grossed more than 700 million dollars worldwide.

Over the last two decades, as China's film industry grows to its current prodigious size, Chinese filmmakers have been flooding top U.S. film schools like USC, UCLA, NYU and AFI to learn Hollywood's "secret sauce" that has enabled Tinseltown to dominate the motion picture industry for the past 100 years.