Chinese Theaters Rereleasing Avengers, Avatar, and Inception to Boost Cinema Reopenings

China is slowly starting to return to normalcy after a period of issues with the coronavirus and the COVID-19 disease, and that includes the reopening of theaters and other businesses. To help kickstart the reopening of those theaters, China is re-releasing some of the biggest films of the decade, including all four of Marvel's Avengers movies. That means Marvel's Avengers, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame will be hitting theaters again, but that's not all, as they are also rereleasing other big hits like Avatar and Christopher Nolan's Inception and Interstellar to help bolster audience attendance (via THR).

At the moment there are around 600 to 700 movie theaters open for business in China, and though many of those are locally operated and not major chains. At the moment no major chain theaters have reopened, but they could be soon.

Rereleasing such big films is part of China's answer to one of the issues many countries will face once businesses start to reopen after the coronavirus pandemic is handled, which is convincing audiences that it's safe once more to go out in large groups. Distributors won't start marketing and releasing their biggest films until they know audiences are heading to theaters, but audiences won't really come to theaters once it's safe to without the bigger releases, so China hopes to get them coming out with big films like Avengers and Inception.

A new deal achieved over the past week will see China Film Group rereleasing local blockbusters as well, including Earth Warrior 2 and Wolf Totem, and those cinemas will have to the right o keep 100% of ticket revenue instead of giving up the standard 43% cut to distributors and producers in an effort to help them get back up and running.

As for the Hollywood studios, they are not giving up their usual 25% of sales, though the 25% cut is already much lower than the usual 40% or 50% studios receive from other markets. With what these movies brought in previously, China is hoping to get film business up in a big way. Avatar brought in $202 million during its initial run in China, and Interstellar brought in $122 million. As for Avengers, the four films brought in a collected total of $1.3 billion, so those will likely generate a nice sum during their rerelease.