by Benjamin Haines » Sun Apr 01, 2018 2:15 pm
Pacific Rim: Uprising dropped a harsh -67.3% at the North American box office with an estimated $9.2 million second weekend after its $28.1m opening. The first Pacific Rim dropped a mediocre -57.1% from a $37.2m debut back in 2013, whereas Uprising had an even steeper second-weekend drop than Legendary's Godzilla (-66.8%). With an estimated $45.6m domestic in 10 days, Pacific Rim: Uprising will be lucky to break $60m in North America at this point.
It's also sinking hard in China. After opening to $64.1m last weekend, it got terrible word-of-mouth from Chinese audiences and plummeted -85.6% for a $9.2m second weekend and a $90m ten-day total. The original Pacific Rim made $111m in , #5 for the year and second only to Iron Man 3 ($121m) among Hollywood imports in 2013. The Chinese moviegoing industry has expanded tremendously in the five years since then. There were five movies that grossed more than $100m in China in 2013, then that number jumped to 11 in 2014, then 20 in both 2015 and 2016, then 24 last year. Movies like Transformers: Age of Extinction ($320m in 2014), Furious 7 ($390m in 2015), and The Fate of the Furious ($392m in 2017) have broken records for Hollywood imports in the Middle Kingdom.
More significantly, since the record-breaking $381m Chinese haul of Raman Hui's Monster Hunt in 2015, Chinese-made blockbusters have proven capable of tapping into the cultural zeitgeist and selling more tickets than even the biggest Hollywood imports. Stephen Chow's The Mermaid grossed $526m in 2016 to become China's biggest movie ever, a record which Wu Jing's Wolf Warrior 2 obliterated last year with $854m, which is now the second-biggest single-territory gross for any movie anywhere in the world after Star Wars: The Force Awakens' $936m North American haul.
Point being, there are a lot more movie theaters selling a lot more admissions in China in 2018 than there were in 2013, but now Chinese moviegoers don't need to look to Hollywood imports as much as they used to for top-quality blockbuster entertainment. Already in 2018, the top six films in China are all Chinese-made, with Monster Hunt 2 at $354m, Detective Chinatown 2 at $539m, and Operation Red Sea at $568m so far. While a spectacular Hollywood work like Pacific Rim loomed large in China in 2013, a noticeably inferior sequel like Pacific Rim: Uprising can't capitalize on the expanded Chinese market of 2018. Chinese audiences don't need to settle for Hollywood's reheated leftovers when they're getting event-level blockbusters in their own country.