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dolores ibarruri's avatar

Thanks for this interesting post! I was wondering if you could answer a question about Chinese blockbusters that I have been curious about.

The question is the opposite of the topic of this post: why aren't Chinese blockbusters widely watched outside of China?

I'm quite curious about this because I follow box office results as a hobby, and from that can tell you that many Indian blockbusters (like Pushpa 2) have been making good money in the American and international marketplace. Since this shows us that movies originating in emerging markets can be relatively successful in the US, it is strange that Chinese films that make so much money domestically barely make any impact in other marketplaces. You could say that the answer is that Indian blockbusters are just so much better than Chinese blockbusters, but I don't think that is the answer (in fact I think the opposite is true).

Chinese blockbusters have been steadily upgrading their quality and competitiveness, so why does that not translate into international competitiveness?

This question is all the more interesting to me because there is a huge market of diaspora chinese and overseas chinese students in places like the US, but cinemas do not seem interested in meeting that demand. In my country there might be one cinema in a major city playing one screening of a Chinese blockbuster, and that screening is usually 100% full. By contrast, I think the reason that Indian films do well in places like the US is mainly because of the diaspora Indian comminity.

Could you help answer this question? One good answer that has been suggested to me is that Chinese films struggle to secure overseas distributors, but then that just raises the question of why that happens, when Indian films can manage this easily.

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