Chinese Box Office Surpasses Domestic Totals for First Time Ever

The Chinese box office posted numbers larger than that of the United States for the first year in box office history. The global numbers were a fraction of what they would have been under normal circumstances as the global pandemic tremendously hindered audiences from gathering at the cinema, resulting in a 72% drop off in ticket sales worldwide when comparing the most recent year to its preceding year. The 2019 to 2020 tumble was greater in the United States, which resulted in the U.S. falling as the number one contributor to a box office report for the first time.

In 2019, the domestic box office drummed up $11.4 billion, bolstered in part by Avengers: Endgame assembling crowds to post the largest box office sales numbers for a single title of all time. The 2020 box office took in merely $2.28 billion as a whole, which is less than Avengers: Endgame did worldwide.

The largest film of 2020 internationally was the Chinese movie The Eight Hundred, a World War II epic which topped Bad Boys For Life's second place finish with $413 million. Behind the Bad Boys sequel is the Sam Mendes war epic 1917, which took in $385 million with a January 10 launch, followed by Christopher Nolan's Tenet with an estimated $362 milion. Tenet was the first Hollywood tentpole to test the waters by opening amidst the global pandemic. These numbers all come in via THR.

The box office is looking to bounce back in 2021, as the year was already filled with blockbuster titles and will soon be releasing movies originally scheduled for 2020, as well (should the current schedules hold up).

"The movie business will be forever changed no doubt, but movie theaters will be ready for their closeup and as things slowly return to some semblance of normal, they will star in an uplifting sequel of their own," says Comscore's Paul Dergarabedian. "2021 will be arguably the most important year in the history of the big screen, and one that will bridge the gap between a devastating 2020 that tragically affected so many people and impacted so profoundly many brick and mortar businesses."

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