Illumination and Universal’s “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” has passed $500 million at the worldwide box office in just over a week, becoming the biggest-grossing video game movie ever. It pulled off that massive take with just $13.3 million in China. After years of pandemic lockdowns and a shaky reopening, ticket sales for Hollywood movies in China have veered between a statistically irrelevant asterisk to just plain underwhelming.
With plenty of domestic films to watch, a growing sense of nationalism amid tensions with the West and audiences whose affections for Hollywood superhero movies seem to be fading. China has been downgraded from “most favored nation” to “just another marketplace.”