7. Hollywood Will Start Making Films Exclusively For The Chinese Market
In the last few years, the Chinese film industry has grown tremendously. At the minute, China has about twenty-eight thousand cinema screens by 2017, that number is expected to be almost doubled, to around fifty-three thousand screens. Though ticket sales across America have continued to decline year after year, ticket sales in China continue to grow. Not only that, but in 2015 the Chinese market for all films surpassed the US for the very first time. The growth of the Chinese market is having a real, tangible effect on the Western film industry. Terminator Genisys, for example, was considered upon its release to be a commercial failure. In about eight weeks, the film made around ninety million dollars in domestic box office revenue. With a budget of one-hundred and fifty-five million, that's obviously incredibly disappointing. The release of the film in China, however, changed everything. Eight days after release, the film had earned almost eighty-five million dollars in China almost the entire domestic total earned across eight whole weeks. By 2018, it's expected that the Chinese box office will be the largest in the world, overtaking North America. There's no doubt that Hollywood will begin to try and dip its toes in that market. In fact, Studios have already began setting up co-production deals on blockbusters in an attempt to try and bypass Beijing's thirty-four foreign movies-per-year quota. It's becoming more and more common for famous Chinese actors to be edited it into Hollywood movies in order to excite the Chinese market. Couple that with the fact that several film studios (including Dreamworks) have set up China-based studios and it's pretty clear where this is all headed. 2016 will be the year that Hollywood decides to go one step further and bypass America altogether, making a movie that specifically caters to the Chinese market. And if that goes well, expect to see it happen a whole lot more.
