Universal Pictures
“Fast & Furious 10” (aka “Fast X”) dominated the mainland Chinese box office with a strong opening weekend and five opening days.
Data from consulting firm Artisan Gateway showed that Fast X scored $51.1 million between Friday and Sunday, comfortably topping the Chinese box office, with a market share of 58%.
Unusually, the movie opened on Wednesday. Over five days, it accumulated $77.4 million.
IMAX reported that the film had pulled in $8.4 million from China, accounting for 11th of the China market opening, from less than 1% of the screens in the market. The numbers reflect the five-day result, not the traditional weekend.
Driving Away was the biggest opening for a non-Chinese film this year, and the biggest opening outside of a holiday in China with a film of any nationality, this year, and was close to the opening weekend result of “Avatar 2” in December.
Those numbers will encourage Hollywood studios, which have seen mostly unspectacular results for their titles in China over the past couple of years. The remainder of the year holds the potential for a few more months of outings that are largely coordinated with international release schedules.
But the Fast franchise has performed much stronger in China in the past. In 2015, “Fast 7” earned 346 million yuan ($49.4 million in today’s currency exchange rates) on its opening day. In 2018, “Fast 8” grossed 417 million yuan ($59.6 million) on its opening day.
Chinese ticket agency Maoyan has revised upward its forecast for the total lifetime of “Fast X” in the Middle Kingdom. After its opening on Wednesday, Maoyan expects 728 million yuan ($104 million). It now says the film could gross 840 million yuan ($120 million) in China.
As more Hollywood movies are imported into China, the risk of them being cannibalized also increases. Over recent weekend, the biggest drop among the top five titles was “Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 3.” It dropped from $19.1 million in its second weekend to $9.1 million in its third weekend. And third place.
The Chinese title, “Godspeed” retained the second spot. It earned $10.3 million for a total of $134 million in its four weekend.
Daddy Media’s “Too Beautiful To Lie” opened Saturday. In just two days, he earned $6.2 million, which was enough to take fourth place.
China’s aviation work title “Born to Fly” lost more altitude. It dropped two levels from The Trip from third to fifth with its $4.0 million opening weekend score. Since its launch on April 28, Bombings has had an estimated $112 million in operations.
Artisan Gateway reported that the weekend as a whole was $88 million. This brings the country-to-date backlog after $3 billion to $3.08 billion. This is now 43% ahead of a painful 2022 and 18% in arrears compared to 2019.
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