2025 has been a good year for the box office of China’s cinemas. By October they’ve already surpassed box office takings from the previous year. The record was broken on the afternoon of the 2nd October when numbers reached RMB 42.5 billion (about US $5.98 billion) in ticket sales. With Golden Week – a week-long national holiday, traditionally a good time for cinema ticket sales – just getting underway, it seems there’s a lot more money to be made before the year is out.
Chinese productions have dominated the market for 2025, making up about 90% of all ticket sales, but Chinese films have also been doing remarkably well on foreign screens too. Here are a few of the big hits:
Ne Zha 2 (哪吒之魔童闹海)
A children’s animation based on the life of the mythical Chinese being. This sequel to 2019’s Ne Zha has been massively successful, quickly becoming the highest-grossing animated film ever, surpassing even Pixar and Disney’s records.
Global box office takings: US $2.2 billion
Detective Chinatown 1900 (唐探1900)
This murder mystery is the fourth installment of the Detective Chinatown series. It follows protagonists Qin Fu and Ah Gui’s investigation of a murder in San Fransico’s Chinatown.
Global box office takings: USD $471.5 million
Dead to Rights (南京照相馆)
A historical drama about the 1937 Nanjing Massacre.
Global box office takings: US $372 million
Numbers like these are exciting for China, a country that’s traditionally struggled to garner wide-spread engagement with its cultural exports on the global stage. But the Chinese film industry still has a long way to go. The lion’s share of these grand numbers – over 99% in Ne Zha 2’s case – were made from ticket sales on Chinese screens.
Domestically these numbers are being boosted by active campaigns to develop a ‘ticket-stub economy.’ This is the type of high-grade consumerism that sees ticket stubs from cultural activities like sports events or cinema trips being used to grab deals and redeem discounts.
This year, the National Film Administration and China Media Group jointly launched the China Film Consumption Year. This is essentially a multi-institutional push to leverage the spending power of cinemas in boosting consumption. The ticket-stub economy was a stated part of this initiative. The goal is ultimately to pump a bit of momentum into the Chinese economy. For Chinese cinemas and cinemagoers, it means cheaper tickets, more promotional tie-ins, and a good reason to feast their eyes on the silver screen.
