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Could you please give me a source? I use BoxOfficeMojo, but apparently you have a better source. I can use it for my listings then :-).
As a matter of fact, right now on the first line of its China page, boxoffice.com lists 5500 screens for Skyfall in China instead of the 8000+ screens listed by the Variety copy/pasting aggregator, it looks much, much more reliable.
I see hehe. Thanks anyway. But you haven't answered my question yet. What source do you use? I would like to update my lists accordingly...
He answered. Boxoffice.com
And if the summary has disappeared in the limbo, the core data of Boxoffice for China (given also in the first line of their China page, some here don't look very motivated :) !) is Entgroup, that I've seen already listed here (by GermanLady I think). For instance, to find TDKR did more than your figure you go to :
http://english.entgroup.cn/566673/
There are similar sites for many countries. The best site for France is also not a free one, but the webmaster shares "easily" the most expected data on the main box office French forum AlloCine. I guess it was a bit the same attitude with the old BoxOfficeMojo forums before Amazon basically destroyed it.
Ironically for a 007 thread, I found out that one of the countries with the less box office data available is the UK ! In particular historical data about UK are nowhere to find out, I'm interested in any info on finding it. OHMSS #1 of its year in the UK ? Try to prove it ! Only 007 sites says so, others say it is a Carry On movie...
The question off course is, who is more correct: BoxOfficeMojo.com or Entgroup.cn? How do you know, how...can you know?
Because it's written on the tin if you can read. I'll give you the definitive reason tomorrow, I'm quite flabbergasted, remember you called me a newcomer, and here it's elementary logic.... An hint : here with TDKR, both have common data it seems (BoxOfficeMojo probably uses Entgroup data, there are often monopolistic business with box office "real-time" "independent" (hmm...) tracking - even in France it's a US company that does it now... The official independant data from French administration exists, but is available one year later)
Also, Entgroup is doing business with their data, while I imagine at BoxOfficeMojo, only a few employees arrived too late to have benefited from the buying by Amazon are doing the minimal job while all their former colleagues are on the beach with their dollars :)
Sometimes, dear Frenchman, you're talking in rather vague descriptions. But that is you I think ;-). What 'tin' are you talking about. And you are a newcomer no? Just a very critical one ;-).
I remember sending photos of QoS posters in Paris in the old MI6 forum. And well, I didn't forgot I attended the CR premiere in Paris, but I forgot I reported it here. So thank you Google to give the opportunity to show that I'm quite an old "newcomer" :
Yep, look who they thank here 6 years ago at the bottom of this page :
http://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/articles/bond_21_french_premiere.php3?t=bond21&s=bond21&id=01372
! (I'm sure the first photo is mine, at that time I had a nice little photo camera not an Iphone who can't shoot anything in the night :) + many of the anecdotes in the text are from my report)
I had also quite a fair number of posts about Bond in France that disappeared totally when they switched to forum "for Iphone" we have now. Etc.
-- Old anecdote about being on the Bond forums almost 20 years ago removed by myself on secondthoughts because it contained the name of someone --
Now about BoxofficeMojo, Boxoffice and Entgroup :
I think the two formers use the latter actually. And the first is lazy, like any former start-up waiting to die. I think The BoxOfficeMojo data for many foreign movies simply miss last weeks or things like that. IMO, BOM has zero credibility (now) amongst French box office forums for instance, any surprising result would be double checked now. I think they stop some data when the movie they track disappear from top 10 or so. In some case, the "gross at the date of..." hints that, in some others, the date looks not correct, but "only" with a 1 or 2 weeks shift.
And in China they sometimes write their data is not reliable if I remember well, so they don't provide the week by week breakdown (no such data for TDKR for instance). I think I remember in some other movies it's blatant they stop exactly at some week. To be frank, for China, it looks as if they have no budget to subscribe to Entgroup and look only at the free data when they have the time to gather it ! (Remember they had to stop their forums even though they were extremely popular, and the true interest of the site).
Oh, and Taken 2 WAS released in China, even if BoxOfficeMojo has no data :) [I think EuropaCorp simply don't care about BOM and so won't send their data to them, etc. + BOM won't look at it at Entgroup because the Taken 2 page has not enough clicks to interest them into maintaining it - it may be the same reason why China data is so poor there, because not much people click on it several months after the release of the movies in the USA...]
One can also look at older data, now that the State Administration of China has released its figures for 2012 Top 10. For instance for Ghost Protocol :
BOM said 101M$ at that time
Entgroup said103M$ at that time
China official number recently announced : 104M$
For Life of PI :
BOM said No Data (!)
Entgroup said 89M$
China official number : 90M$
The Avengers :
BOM said 84M$
Entgroup said 90M$
China official number : 92M$
IceAge 4 :
BOM said 68M$
Entgroup said 73M$
China official number : 73M$
There's still MIB III and Titanic 3D to check if you want (for me the case is closed and the point is made), but I don't think BOM will magically become reliable on these last two ones.
I know you've spent lots of time gathering info from BOM for your mega lists, but sorry, Michel Vaillant's nonsensical figure is probably not the only problem :)
Another recent contradictory data : 8,800 screens ("another record for SF !") or 5,500 screens for China ? The irony is that 5,500 is a record too. Here the data is really contradictory, no "missing" possibility, but I trust Entgroup data 2 days after the fact more than some copy/paster at Variety writing within a few hours.
And well, 80% of the available screens looks a bit too much. 50% is already quite surprising ! (but did they all have exclusively SF on them ? I don't know...). And I can imagine someone making a confusion in the rush to write something as fast as possible and adding "screen" and "venues" to almost make the result twice what it is in truth. But here, to be honest, I'm less confident than when speaking about BOM's data, because for this screens figure, it means there's a true mistake somewhere by someone, and I have no real experience to sort this out for sure (80% may be "normal" for an isolated release after all, or maybe they count the trailers on the other screens, etc..).
'Skyfall' Crosses 100 Million Yuan Mark in China
As of Tuesday, Sam Mendes’ Bond film -- which premiered in Beijing and Shanghai two weeks ago and opened across China on on Jan. 21 -- has already brought in 112 million yuan (US$18 million), according to figures from Dianyingpiaofangba (“Movie Box Office Bulletin Board”), one of the most authoritative sources of ticket sales figures in the Chinese blogosphere.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/skyfall-crosses-100-million-yuan-415307
I don't think he's critical. More, objective.
Well BoxOfficeMojo seems very popular here, and their method of computation based on ticket prices would answer "No way" (as explained regularly by mepal here). But, for some reason, for that particular ranking, another method is prefered, that answers "Yes, it has already overtook it".
As far as I'm concerned, I can give you very strong facts for either way :)
I don't know if that one is more 'objective' though. An average of both perhaps?
Yeah baby :-D. This INDEED sounds different hehehe. Also, don't forget 'Skyfall' premiered on a frikkin' Monday :-).
Seems pretty good news to me.........considering that the film is available on bootleg DVD in the country.
Maybe Chinese BO market, is similar to Japanese, in as much as rather than a film earning big at beginning of its run, then dwindling down quicky.........the films grosses are more evenly earned over a period of time!
In a recent post of yours you mentioned the lack of BO data from the UK.
I agree in that for such a big film market, historical data is virtually non-existent on the web for the UK.
However, I did recently see some data for OHMSS, for its run in the UK.
Figures, are as follows:-
BO gross £750,000 (No.1 for 1970)
Admissions:- 2,450,000
Ok but it would me more reliable if one could obtain the top 10 of these years. This #1 comes with no real framework, really. As a matter of fact, OHMSS was released in the UK in 1969 (18 December), and referencing it into the 1970 year is a method never seen on any other ranking analysis (and god knows the ranking aficionados love to twist things !). Can I ask you where this #1 rank claim comes from ? As far as I could find, it's always claimed on 007 sites, from an unique 007 "bedside companion" book from quite some time.
If you look at other cinema buffs site that are not 007 oriented, you find claims that for the same years, the Carry On series crushed the UK box office, and that for 1969, the true year OHMSS should be "ranked" into, Carry On Camping was #1 in the UK (with no reliable details either...)
Also, note that 750.000/2.450.000 = 30.6 pences (in today's system), which is very spectularly close (ie : identical !) to the average UK ticket price for that period you can find online. So to me it's actually the same unique data, and if it's not you on your own that did the computation, to me it actually cast doubt on the reliability of the original source (ie : to give a likely estimation as a fact).
I think my handful of examples shows that BOM is consistently less reliable than Entgroup for China, for instance. In other words : when the clicks stop, the work stops. Everyone but BOM knows Life of Pi is a major success in China ! But in the USA it's so so, so they don't bother to track it... That's the doom for all the "free" sites bought by larger companies, once the first passionate employees left the building with the dollars.
That's why I even trust more the labour of love (I think) that is The-Numbers.com (but it take them far more time to give final figures - a good sign for me, though !). It also earns money with GoogleAds and some box office game sponsorship but to my eyes it doesn't feel it has yet degenerated into an Amazon customer grabbing tool. And even if their domestic result have probablt the same source as BOM and are very often identical, the WW result they give can be often very significantly different from those given by BOM.
Finally, let's examine the reports from "experts" that "Chinese don't like Skyfall"...
Ok, surely a 3D movie full of special effects will rate better
Oh ?
Well let's try an action movie with a local star, come on "everyone knows" the Chinese only like movies that come with a fistful of fists
What ?? Ok, I know, all the movies have the same kind of ratings, it's not relevant, everyone knows the Chinese always do the same thing, right ?
Gee..
(And actually I choose the first two examples because they had similar ratings, movies like Ghost Protocol 4 are a bit higher, and movie like Taken 2 lower, etc...)
More nonsense from "experts" then in the end... And when the final results will be in, the same will "predict" what to do for Bond 24 to perform better, I'm sure :)
Is it because they have an inbuilt resentment to anything from the West, due to the brainwashing `Everything Chinese is great' propoganda by their government?
I've been to China several times and know first-hand the level of censoring that goes on there. SF's cuts prove this even more. For all the talk of it being the next big superpower, the country is very, very insular, with an inward look and not a healthy look outward globally.
If they are to become the next global state police to replace the US, I just hope they start to appreciate more Western cultures in general, otherwise we could all be in for a big change, and maybe not for the better.
Well, in the top 10 of China box office 2012, there are 7 US Blockbusters (I include Life of Pi in it), like in France for instance. In the top 10 of South Korea box office 2012, there are only 3 (and there are the 3 superhero ones). And Japan is even harder for US blockbusters than South Korea (only 2 this year). I don't think South Korea and Japan are more "brainwashed" by their government than China, so the explanation is somewhere else IMO (like : a local culture that lives well).
Then there was the period were Chinese car manufacturers started 'copying' the design of western cars.
Right now, the Chinese simply adore brands like Volkswagen, Audi, Mercedes and BMW. For the very simple reason that they love them. Those cars are better then their own. And the Chinese import restrictions did not help a thing eventually :-).
That's something what will happen to the James Bond franchise as well. It'll take a while until it gets as big as in western countries. BUT, as we already had our 'Thunderball' times, the Chinese still need to experience their 'Thunderball' moments within the Bond franchise.
Source: http://www.jpbox-office.com/fichfilm.php?affich=france&id=12100
Today, I will launch a thread about where Bond movies stood compared to the genral box offices in specific countries (what was their rankings, which was the first movie, and the first movie from said countries that year). It could be interesting to have comparisons.
BTW, Skyfall still plays in Paris this week, in five theaters.
And as for all the analysis of Chinese behaviour, wow, nobody can pretend to understand a market that basically has a revolution every six months there. And I'm not talking about the country as a whole.
Try to copy/paste your analysis to Japan (you know the country of Sony who uses 007 in their ads even months after the movie release...), and you'll see it is not very meaningful (SF is near #20 of the year in Japan.. and yet, I never read here it would a predictable failure because Japanese only like Kung Fu movies... + Japan definitely "had" their TB moments, it is reported Connery's life was a hell while shooting YOLT)
Domestic: $301,252,887 28.0%
+ Foreign: $776,500,000 72.0%
= Worldwide: $1,077,752,887
Also it got 4th seat at RT
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/guides/golden-tomato-awards-2012/wide/