Nearly six months after its closure, moviegoers are wearing face masks in a movie theater showroom due to the coronavirus pandemic on July 24, 2020 in Beijing, China.
China News Service | China News Service | Getty Images
In a year plagued by a deadly global pandemic, the Japanese box office set a new record.
An animated film based on a popular manga called ‘Demon Slayer’ became the biggest earnings in the country’s history and surpasses the record held in 2001 by Hayao Miyazaki’s ‘Spirited Away’. It sold more than $ 322 million in ticket sales.
Japan, an island nation in East Asia with a population of more than 126 million, had less than 300,000 cases of coronavirus and only saw cash receipts drop by 46% to $ 1.27 billion by 2020.
By comparison, the domestic box office has shrunk 80% to $ 2.28 billion, as U.S. coronavirus cases have been 21.6 million higher since the start of the pandemic. According to Johns Hopkins University data, Canada, a contributor to the domestic box office, has seen fewer than 645,000 cases.
Japan is only one of the countries in the Asia-Pacific region that has managed to navigate the coronavirus pandemic in such a way that the number of numbers has remained low and consumer confidence has remained high.
In places like China, Australia and South Korea, where Covid business has dropped significantly, analysts and operators are seeing boxes recover and thrive.
In Asia-Pacific, its market share increased in 2020. While the global box office was significantly lower last year – about 70% of what it was in 2019, or about $ 12.4 billion – Asia-Pacific accounts for 51% of ticket sales. In 2019, the countries accounted for 41%, according to data from Comscore and Gower Street analytics.
In comparison, the US and Canadian box office accounted for 30% of global ticket sales in 2019. In 2020, the market share dropped to just 18%.
Asia-Pacific has made strong efforts to combat the coronavirus, including suspending travel, setting up large-scale testing and contact detection, enforcing masks and enforcing strict social distance rules. Regardless of the approach of each country, their ability to reduce coronavirus cases and reopen their economies shows that if the United States can do the same, it can see similar results.
So far, the response to the coronavirus in America has been slow and cases continue to rise to historic levels, while hospitalizations and deaths are also on the rise.
Since August, when most theaters worldwide reopened, Asia-Pacific has accounted for nearly 78% of the total box office worldwide.
Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore, returned the double reason why these countries were able to bounce back after widespread theater closures.
First, these countries were able to get their outbreaks under control by locking up, instituting contact detection and enforcing mask mandates. The reduction in the number of cases and strictly preventive measures have instilled a greater sense of confidence in potential moviegoers.
Second, these countries have released new, non-Hollywood movies. Domestically, the box office got stuck because there was no new product for the audience to go see. Even when cinemas reopened at limited capacity, most of the films shown were legacy titles such as ‘Star Wars’, ‘Jaws’ and ‘Goonies’.
In Asia-Pacific, studios had a steady stream of new content to lure people off their benches. And moviegoers turned out in masses.
China has grossed more than $ 400 million at the local box office: ‘The Eight Hundred’, a war drama set in the 1930s, and ‘My People, My Homeland’, a five-story comedy film. Both of these films were released in the second half of the year.
By comparison, the movie with the biggest revenue in 2020 in the US and Canada was Sony’s “Bad Boys for Life”. The action film starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence is the third film in ‘Bad Boys’ franchise and was released in January before the virus began to spread in the US. It raised $ 204 million during its theatrical release.
No film released locally in the second half of the year earned nearly $ 100 million.
Universal’s animated family film “The Croods: A New Age” and Warner Bros. ‘superhero sequel’ Wonder Woman 1984 ‘both grossed less than $ 30 million domestically. ‘Tenet’, another Warner Bros. title, was released from Labor Day weekend that did not exceed $ 60 million during its theatrical performance.
“The road back to a normal big screen market will undoubtedly take a lot of time and a lot of patience,” Dergarabedian said. “But the lessons learned from the example of countries that have hit back strongly over the past few months show that a well-managed Covid response and a call for new movies can spark the box office’s prosperity now and in to inspire the future. “
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC. “The Croods: A New Age” is an NBCUniversal movie.