Film industry report shows global post-pandemic recovery, upward domestic trend

Despite a steady recovery in the global film industry, a return to pre-pandemic levels remains a distant goal, experts said during the launch of two publications on the global movie market in Qingdao, East China's Shandong province earlier this month.

The Blue Book of Film: Annual Report on the Development of Global Film Industry (2022), in Chinese, and English monograph The Global Film Market Transformation in the Post-Pandemic Era: Production, Distribution and Consumption were unveiled on April 7 at the 2023 Qingdao Film and TV Week.

The global film industry has been significantly affected by the pandemic, resulting in theater closures worldwide, delays or cancellations of film releases, suspended film production, and film festivals postponed or pushed online, according to the annual report.

"After the pandemic started to spread across the world, the box office receipts for 2020 were merely $11.8 billion, less than one-third of the overall revenue in 2019," says Niu Xingzhen, co-editor of the report.

Describing signs of recovery that appeared in 2021, Niu says global ticket revenues in that year rose to $21.3 billion, up 80.5 percent compared to 2020. The number grew to $25.9 billion in 2022, an increase of 22 percent compared to the previous year.

Although 2022 has been the highest-grossing year since the outbreak of COVID-19, its box office haul is still 35 percent lower than the average annual revenue from 2017 to 2019, indicating that there is still a long way to go to return to pre-pandemic levels, Niu explains.

According to the report, North America reclaimed the title as the world's leading movie market in 2022, with box office revenues reaching $7.5 billion, a 65 percent increase from the previous year. However, the Asia-Pacific region experienced a 14 percent decline, resulting in a decrease in its global market share last year from 51.2 percent to 37 percent.

With the world's highest-grossing movies in 2022 and 2021 respectively being Avatar: The Way of Water and Spider-Man: No Way Home, Hollywood has shown its enduring influence, still dominating the box office in most countries around the world, says Niu.

However, the report demonstrates that China still possesses enormous potential as a movie market.

In 2020 and 2021, China accounted for more ticket sales than any other country due to high-grossing domestic titles like The Eight Hundred, The Battle at Lake Changjin, Hi, Mom and Detective Chinatown 3, though North America regained the lead in 2022.

Yu Dong, vice-chairman of the China Film Association and chairman of Bona Film Group, says that the global film industry has undergone unprecedented restructuring due to the pandemic, adding that he believes China is accruing more developmental advantages in the landscape of world cinema with its achievements in the past few years.

Niu, also a professor at the Qingdao Film Academy, says China's box office earnings in the first quarter of this year have reached approximately 85 percent of the total in the same period of 2019, indicating that the country has been recovering faster than most other movie markets.

"Based on the current recovery rate of the Chinese movie market, along with an annual box office growth rate of more than 10 percent prior to the pandemic, China is likely to reclaim its position as the world's largest box office in 2024," says Niu.