Why did 'The Wandering Earth 2' not perform as well at the box office as 'Man Jiang Hong'

During the 2023 Chinese New Year box office period, seven films including “Man Jiang Hong” and “The Wandering Earth 2” received a total box office revenue of 6.758 billion yuan and had 129 million viewers, a significant increase compared to 2022. However, the 2023 box office results only ranked second in history to the 2021 box office, which totaled 7.822 billion yuan and 160 million viewers, making it the top box office and viewership for the Chinese New Year period.

With the COVID-19 pandemic peaking and subsiding, why didn’t the 2023 Chinese New Year box office catch up to 2021? What is the state of our economic recovery? Using real-time data from over 10,000 cinemas nationwide (thanks to UC San Diego’s Yang Yang for providing the data), we conducted some research.

On the supply side, the number of cinemas and screenings has decreased. The chart shows the number of cinemas in operation each day from January 1, 2019 to January 28, 2023.

During the 2019 Chinese New Year period, there were 10,300 cinemas in China, and this number continued to increase until early 2020 when the number of cinemas in operation reached 10,900.

During the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, cinemas gradually resumed operation across the country, and the number of cinemas in China did not significantly decrease. Around October 2020, the number of cinemas in operation had basically returned to pre-pandemic levels, with approximately 10,700 cinemas in operation, only 200 fewer than the pre-pandemic peak.

After 2021, the number of cinemas in operation continued to increase, with 11,200 cinemas in operation on the first day of the Chinese New Year in 2021. This number remained stable until the end of May 2021, with May 1st being the peak of cinema operations, with 11,353 cinemas in operation nationwide.

From the second half of 2021 to early 2022, outbreaks occurred one after another across the country, starting with the Zhangjiajie outbreak, followed by outbreaks in Jiangsu, Xi’an, Tianjin, Anyang, and other places, and the number of cinemas nationwide was constantly affected by the pandemic but did not show a significant decrease. On the first day of the Chinese New Year in 2022, there were still 11,305 cinemas in operation nationwide, which was basically the same as in 2021.

Then, Omicron arrived. From March to June 2022, the number of cinemas in operation in China decreased significantly, with a minimum of only 6,000 cinemas in operation, with 40% of cinemas closed. In July 2022, when the pandemic temporarily subsided, there were only 10,000 cinemas in operation.

Over 1,000 cinemas survived the six-month closure in the first half of 2020 but disappeared in 2022.

In the second half of 2022, the pandemic resurfaced, and the number of cinemas in operation once again decreased. On November 30, 2022, only 5,188 cinemas were in operation nationwide, approximately half the number during the peak.

Most of us have personally experienced what happened next. After the pandemic control measures were fully lifted, China’s cinemas returned to the peak of the second half of 2022 in about a month. However, on the first day of the Chinese New Year in 2023, there were only 10,463 cinemas in operation in China.

The chart shows the number of cinemas in operation from the first day of the Chinese New Year to the sixth day from