How Did Warcraft Beat Star Wars And Batman V Superman At The Chinese Box Office?
Hollywood is on the brink of change.
2016 has been a year of defying conventions. Sure-things have flat-out bombed, billion dollar hopefuls haemorrhaged money and overall there's been a whiff of failure outside of Disney's one-two-three of Zootopia, The Jungle Book and Captain America: Civil War. Most unexpected of all, however, has been the slew of poorly reviewed films that inexplicably manage to both make an impressive amount money, but also prove a hit with audiences.
Just look at Warcraft - despite having a savaging from critics, the reaction from fans of the game has been pretty positive (remember a time when geek movies were hated by the fanboys put passed by critics?) and it's proven a solid box office presence - as it opens in US cinemas it's already made back its budget. In fact, its opening in China bested Star Wars: The Force Awakens' take in the same time period and has seen it storm past Batman V Superman's entire run.
How did that happen? How did Warcraft prove a bigger opener than the third highest grossing movie of all time and totally dominate a film that, while being a disappointment (it's into profitability, but Dawn Of Justice fell well below predictions), was still a strong performer?
For starters, you have to consider that there's a lot of World Of Warcraft fans in China; they have 3.2 million active player, more than anywhere else in the world. And as the movie has such an impenetrable mythology and unexplained plot, it's clear Duncan Jones has aimed his film squarely at those gamers. But while that makes some success unsurprising, that doesn't account for taking down cinematic icons. To do that we need to take a sobering look at how Hollywood is changing everything it's taught itself in the past twenty-or-so years.
China's rise at the box office shows an alteration about how we view the globalisation of American culture. Star Wars is the biggest thing ever, if you live in the English-speaking world. The same with Batman and Superman; they're part of the fabric of our culture, emphasis on the "our". When you get to China - which hasn't always been the most open about inviting in other cultures and still only allows 34 non-Chinese films into cinemas year - it's a different story. Star Wars isn't something the past two generations have grown up with and Batman doesn't have the same ubiquity. The Force Awakens failed to come close to Avatar worldwide exactly because of this; China was its relative weakest territory because that assumed audience just isn't there.
In recent years we've seen movies start to include explicit Chinese content to woo this exploding audience - Iron Man 3 had a shoe-horned sub-plot set in China and Transformers: Age Of Extinction relocates halfway through to Hong Kong - but Warcraft shows a shift into the next stage of this courting, where China becomes the goal, not the bonus. And, over there, the conventional wisdom of the 21st Century Hollywood - that the franchise is king - just doesn't hold true; existing IP is a different beast, so instead big, effects-driven films with an epic sheen and "essential 3D" are the key. Most of the successful films are still tied into big franchises to keep up appeal in the rest of the world, but there's a noticeably adjusted style and tone.
Warcraft beat Star Wars and Batman in China because it played into the desires of that audience better than those other US franchises did. No matter how it does in America (expect a more muted opening weekend domestically), I'd say it's a fair bet the taste of this Chinese success is going to further change what sort of movies are commissioned and how they're made, with domestic concerns decreased somewhat in its stead. Warcraft may just be The Beginning of something after all.
What do you think of Warcraft's box office success? Let us know your take down in the comments