Predictably, “Fast X” won a second weekend at the box office in mainland China, surpassing its total of $100 million. But the disappointing start to Disney’s live-action “The Little Mermaid” was the biggest talking point.
“Fast X” earned $17.6 million in China, according to data from consultancy Artisan Gateway. That was a 66% drop from its opening weekend, but still gave the film a cumulative of $110 million after 12 days and has seen estimates revised further to the rise
Box office Maoyan now predicts the film will end up with RMB 880 million ($126 million), after forecasting RMB 728 million ($104 million) and then RMB 840 million.
That would make the film the highest-grossing Hollywood title of the year (barring the 2022 release “Avatar: The Way of Water”). But the numbers are very low in previous outings of the franchise.
So far, “Fast X” only ranks as the 49th highest-grossing Hollywood film in terms of Chinese local currency. If Maoyan’s prediction is correct, “Fast X” could rise to 40th place. In contrast, “Fast 8” and “Fast 7” rank second and third on the list of imported films in China, with a total of RMB 2.67 billion and RMB 2.43 billion respectively.
“The Little Mermaid,” Disney’s live-action remake of its classic animated tale, was just the second-best-performing release of the weekend, coming in fifth on the weekend chart with a paltry $2.5 million. It was overtaken by Japanese animation “Sword Art Online The Movie,” with $3.8 million in fourth place.
(Second place went to China’s “Godspeed” with $6.8 million for a four-weekend cume of $148 million, while “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3” grabbed a 4.9 million for a three-weekend cume of $79.6 million.)
Discussion of “The Little Mermaid,” in which actor-singer Halle Bailey plays the title role, once again raised the question of Chinese audiences’ willingness to watch films with prominent black characters. This has previously been debated around the “Black Panther” titles and “Star Wars” promotional materials.
In midweek, The Global Times, a state-controlled tabloid newspaper, attacked Disney, accusing it of undermining the film’s potential in China by casting a black actor in the role.
“Many Chinese netizens said that, like ‘Snow White,’ the image of the mermaid princess from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales has long been rooted in their hearts, and it takes a leap of imagination to accept the new cast.” The same publisher accused Disney of “political correctness” – an argument similar to the “woke” accusations made by the political right in the US – and said the film would likely not perform well in East Asian markets .
He doubled down saying, “The controversy surrounding Disney’s forced inclusion of minorities in classic films isn’t about racism, it’s about their lazy and irresponsible storytelling strategy.”
A day later, after an online discussion about how Chinese posters for the film had apparently turned the mermaid’s skin color blue, an op-ed in the Global Times went further. He used the discussion of the film to launch a broad critique of Hollywood and Western colonialism. He also extended the debate to promote China’s anti-Covid policies and even the construction of power generation plants in Africa.
“A number of netizens from Western countries on Twitter have attacked the Chinese public, claiming that the poor box office numbers are due to ‘racial discrimination’. This is to impose their politically correct standards on the Chinese public and use to sow discord between China and African groups,” he said. “China has always maintained brotherly relations with Africa and has never needed a ‘atonement’ mentality prevalent in Hollywood.”
Disney has a particularly difficult line to tread in China. It operates theme parks in Shanghai and Hong Kong and has long been the biggest Hollywood studio investor in the Middle Kingdom. But as past controversies over “Mulan” and Chloe Zhao-directed “The Eternals” also demonstrate, finding a happy medium between China and the US is tricky for the multinational when national security concerns and political sensitivities take over. position so prominent in many debates.
Cold War attitudes caused the Mouse House to close its Disney English School operations in China and lose more than two years of Marvel film releases.
Interestingly, while audience ratings on a scale of 1 to 10 are a regular feature of popular film discussion in China, neither Maoyan nor rival firm Taopiaopiao currently offer an audience rating figure for “The Little Mermaid”. Readers at the film review site Douban give the film a score of 5.3, based on over 18,000 reviews.
Artisan Gateway reported that the weekend box office total in China fell to $42.2 million, the lowest figure in a month. It reckons the year-to-date total is 45% better than the equivalent figure in 2022, but 18% behind 2019.
