The Disney tentpole has faced an uphill marketing battle in China, the world’s second-largest movie market, where the saga is surprisingly unknown.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is already the highest-grossing film of all time in North America. But in order to take Avatar’s crown as the biggest movie ever worldwide, the J.J. Abrams juggernaut will need a huge performance in China when it opens Saturday.
“All bets are on China,” says Vivek Couto, executive director of research and analysis firm Media Partners Asia. “China is what will propel them past the $2 billion mark and beyond.”
Force Awakens’ global tally had reached $1.58 billion as of Thursday. So there’s still a ways to go before it’s able to surpass the $2.78 billion that Avatar earned after it was released in December 2009.
China is expected to surpass North America as the world’s largest movie market sometime next year, and Hollywood studios increasingly count on the territory to deliver big returns for their most expensive pictures. Universal, for example, just had a banner year in China, with Furious 7 grossing a record-breaking $390.9 million and Jurassic World taking in $228.7 million there.
But due to unique cultural and historical factors, Disney can’t simply assume that Force Awakens will be embraced by Chinese moviegoers with the same audiencewide fanboy enthusiasm it garnered elsewhere.
Click below to read the full article.
