Hollywood is notorious to have overtaken most of the local film industries, the very few that are standing strong are the Indian film industry and to some extent, the Chinese. The recently released Chinese summer blockbuster, Monster Hunt has recently become the highest grossing film at the Middle Kingdom box office. It snatched the throne from Universal’s Furious 7 and did it in a very short span of 28 days.
The state news agency Xinhua reported that previously, Furious achieved the milestone in its 30 days run at the box office while the Monster Hunt took 28 days to cross that milestone. It is now officially confirmed that the sales for the Monster Hunt crossed the mark of 2.428B Yuan while Furious 7 managed to rake in 2.426B Yuan. If compared with the US currency, the numbers are 380.99 Millions for Monster Hunt against the very close 380.67 million US dollars for the Furious. But that being said, when Furious 7 ended its Chinese run in mid-may, it recorded a total sales of around 391.2 Million USD.
The Chinese film industry (based mostly out of Hong Kong) has been trying very hard to enter the international filmmaking scene but in reality, it is struggling to even compete against the Hollywood in its own Chinese box office where American films are extremely popular. Owing to the interesting work being done by the likes of Wong Kar Wai, Stephen Chow and others, the scenario is expected to change quite a lot in the near future.
The seventh instalment in the blockbuster franchise, Furious 7 started its run in the Asian country on April 12 and within 2 weeks of its arrival, it shattered the box office records previously held by another American blockbuster, Transformers: Age of Extinction. Now transformers took the throne from Avatar and kept it for around a whole year until the Vin Diesel and Paul Walker starrer showed up in the Chinese theatres and the action packed, high on testosterone film thrashed all the previous records to be the top grosser of all times and with Monster Hunt being at the top now, it is for the very first time that a Chinese film has become the top grosser since the market re-opened for foreign films in 21 years.
However, one reason given for its success is the fact that this is the time of the year when it had to face zero competition from Hollywood and that worked highly in its favour, but there is no denying to the fact that the movie is at par with any other Hollywood film on so many levels.
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