(Peoples Daily Online)14:52, July 12, 2019
A cinema in Beijing (Photo/Xinhua)
The box office revenue in China has slumped by 2.8 percent, and the number of movie-goers has fallen by 10.5 percent, Beijing Youth Daily reported.
In the first half of the year, 806 million moviegoers were registered at theaters, while the figure in the same period last year was 901 million. The box office revenue in this period was 31 billion yuan, compared with 32 billion in the same period last year.
The Broadway Cinema on Wangfujing Street, Beijing, sold only six tickets for a screening of the Marvel blockbuster Spider-Man: Homecoming, starting 6 p.m. on Tuesday. The ticket was priced at 50 yuan ($7.28), data provided by a third-party movie-ticketing platform showed. No tickets were sold for the screening of the movie starting 9:20 p.m. that same day.
The cinema downturn is partly related to rising movie ticket prices. The average movie ticket price in the first half of the year was 37.8 yuan (service charge included), up 7.6 percent year on year, according to data from Dengta, a film analytics platform backed by Alibaba Pictures.
The lack of high-quality films is another reason. This year, the number of movies that recurred box office revenue of more than one billion yuan was much smaller compared with that of the same period last year. As a result, many people have resorted to other entertainment channels.