FACT: Kung Fu Panda 4’s Chinese box office earnings are down 65% from the Kung Fu Panda 3 record.

THE NUMBERS: Kung Fu Panda series box office –

	World	U.S.	China
KFP1:	$632 million	$215 million	$26 million
KFP2:	$665 million	$165 million	$92 million
KFP3:	$520 million	$143 million	$154 million
KFP4:	$544 million	$193 million	$50 million*

* As of end-June 2024. 

WHAT THEY MEAN:

Here’s the Smithsonian’s National Zoo happily joining First Lady Dr. Jill Biden last May to announce the coming arrival of a new pair of giant pandas — Bao Li and Qing Bao — this fall.  As the bears prepared for the flight east from their suburban Sichuan home to Connecticut Avenue NW, their cartoon cousin Po from the Kung Fu Panda series’ fourth installment was crossing the Pacific in the other direction. His reception in China was a bit lukewarm though, with box office down nearly two-thirds from the third KFP film. Why the drop? Some possibilities …but some background [minor spoiler alert] first:

Set in an animated version of ancient China, DreamWorks Animation’s 4-film Kung Fu Panda series centers on martial arts enthusiast panda Po. Something of a bumbler as KFP1 opens, Po to everyone’s surprise turns out to be an incarnation of the legendary “Dragon Warrior.” Trained by elderly Master Shifu, Po leads other martial arts adepts to defeat evil, foil villains, and emerge as hero of the Valley of Peace and leader of the Panda Village. KFP’s first installment drew its largest audience in the United States. Chinese interest, with the incorporation of traditional wuxia storylines and qi themes, escalated over the first three films to the point at which KFP3’s $154 million Chinese box office was nearly a third of global revenue and outdid U.S. sales by $11 million. But eight years later, interest seems off.  What happened?

1. Reviews not so good: One very simple explanation: Chinese viewers liked the earlier movies more.  The major fan-sites rated each of the first three KPF’s above 70% (“enjoyable and well-made”), while KFP4 dropped to about 60% (“average and passable”).  Among more formal reviewers, China Youth groans — “how surprised the audience was 16 years ago, how disappointed they are now” — and Xinhua concurs: “[T]he movie’s absorption and application of Chinese elements seems to have reached the end of its rope. … Po’s adventures have become less exciting.”

2. Growing preference for local films: There’s also a bigger picture, with Chinese-made films in general gaining relative to foreign productions. Chinese box-office revenue is up from $6.6 billion in 2016 to $7.3 billion in 2023, and from 17% to 23% of global box office. As the audience has grown, viewers’ tastes have changed noticeably though not drastically. While foreign films continue to draw, local productions have caught up over the past decade. Among the 423 films China screened in 2016, the 31 U.S. productions averaged $79 million, five times the $15.6 million average for Chinese-made films. By 2023, the Chinese-film average had jumped to $28 million, and the U.S. average dropped to an equal $28 million. From this perspective, KFP4’s lower earnings might illustrate local films’ rising entertainment value, and consequently diminishing passion for foreign movies. A table has the figures:

Year	# of movies shown in China	Total box office	Average box office per movie	# of U.S. movies*	Average box office per U.S. movie
2016	423	$6.6 billion	$15.6 million	31	$79 million
2023	510	$7.3 billion	$14.3 million	35	$25 million
2024 YTD	104	$3.0 billion	$28.0 million	10	$28 million

3.  Co-production and Cultural Match: A third explanation looks to some unique advantages for KFP3 as a U.S.-China co-production by DreamWorks and its joint venture with the China Film Group Corporation. (Oddly named Oriental DreamWorks; since updated to Pearl Studio after a buyout by the Chinese partner.) This appears to have given KFP3 special technical and cultural cachet, through work by the Chinese partner’s staff on costumes, hairstyles, etiquette, and lip-movement. One example is the female panda and ribbon dancer Mei Mei, for whom the Shanghai animation team corrected dynastic inconsistencies in clothing articles.  Another is the production of a Mandarin version with new lip animation synchronized with Chinese words, to avoid ‘uncanny valley’ and dubbing issues and improve viewing. This anecdote got picked up by the U.S.-China Economics and Security Review Commission, as a relatively unobjectionable case of “Directed by Hollywood, Edited by China (as opposed to a more political “Made in Hollywood, Censored by Beijing”).

4. Co-production and Policy Advantage: Maybe a bit less subtly, official co-production status gave KFP3 a boost KFP4 lacked, with a prized launch-date and avoidance of revenue-sharing systems imposed on foreign content. The Chinese government now allows 34 foreign films in per year — up under WTO rules from quotas of 10 in 1994 and 20 in 2002 — and also regulates release dates.  KFP3 got a great opening night during the blackout period before Chinese New Year and the subsequent Golden Week.  (Lunar New Year often falls in February, and the vacation week afterwards means February often gets China’s largest box office.)  Foreign films rarely if ever get this window; KFP4’s March 22, for example, wasn’t nearly so good.

So: Some mixed reviews, some changing tastes, some particularly good animation quality in KFP3, and some policy favoritism. All this noted, KFP4 still drew double the box office for this year’s Chinese films and topped all others during its opening weekend. So, not a rapturous but still a polite Chinese reception for animated Po, and by no means a bomb. Bao Li and Qing Bao will probably do better this fall at the Zoo, though.

Special Note: Research and drafting for this week’s Trade Fact by Ruowei Yu, a Google Public Policy Fellow with PPI this summer. Ms. Yu is a junior at Georgetown University, concentrating in Government and Economics.

FURTHER READING

Intros & credits:

The National Zoo announces an arrival this November: Bao Li and Qing Bao

WSJ (subscription required) on Hollywood, the animated pandas, and the Chinese media empire.

Georgetown expert Amb. Barbara Bodine on “panda diplomacy.”

And Chinese journalists, unhappy with American portrayals of the previous two pandas’ departure as ‘ankling’, call out “false narratives.”

Dolly back: Hollywood, China, & “Sino-American relations”:

The 2012 agreement to increase market access for U.S. movies.

The U.S.-China Security and Economic Commission’s Directed by Hollywood, Edited by China looks from Hollywood to Beijing and back, & asks who is changing whom?

From PEN International, an essay on artistic freedom, political censorship, and the choices they entail: “Made in Hollywood, Censored by Beijing.”

Fade to black?

Looking at 2023 global box office, trade journal Deadline feels pessimistic about future foreign-film growth in China.

And some prequels: 

Three book recommendations on Chinese & American high and pop culture, film and TV, and their past collisions:

Jianying Zha’s China Pop (2000); a bit dated but lots of insight and human detail on high-end Chinese cinema, popular culture, and politics in the 1990s.

A little later, Rachel DeWoskin’s Foreign Babes in Beijing (2006) on expatriate life in the boom era, a well-deserved plug for the 1st-century BCE classic Biographies of Famous Women, and DeWoskin’s own experience starring in a “blonde home wrecker” role in a mass-market Chinese TV soap-opera.

And Yunte Huang’s Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective (2011) looks back at the Chan character’s long career, from the original real-world model (1890s Honolulu policeman Chang Apana) to the 1920s novels, the 1930s films and their reception in Nationalist China, Asian roles in old Hollywood, and more recent Asian-American community intellectual debate.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

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FACT: Panama Canal worker mortality down 99.9% from the 1906-1914 project to the 2006-2016 expansion.

THE NUMBERS: Panama Canal shipping –

	Ship Transits	Cargo
2023	14,080	511 million tons
2015	13,874	331 million tons
1965	11,834	71 million tons
1915	969	5 million tons

 

WHAT THEY MEAN:

To build the Panama Canal, 56,000 workers dug a trench 41 feet deep across 48 miles of peninsula, including a rock ridge 275 feet high and 8 miles across. Over eight years, they moved 177 million cubic meters of earth and rock weighing half a billion tons. When it opened at the end of June 1914, the Gatun Locks — the largest concrete structures ever built until the 1930s — could lift and float ships up to 965 feet long and 106 feet wide.  This meant nearly all world shipping, and transit time from New York to San Francisco fell by half.  As a quick table shows, the Canal opening by itself equaled the logistical effect of replacing sailing ships with steam a generation earlier, and maritime technology has needed a century to halve passage time again:

Clipper ship record, 1854	89 days
Pre-Canal steamship record, 1900	59 days
Panama Canal average, 1920s	30 days
Current	15 days

A century later, with the Canal grew too narrow and shallow to accommodate for the world’s largest ships, the Panamanian government’s $5.2 billion expansion project moved another 52 million cubic meters of earth and stone.  Its conclusion at the end of June in 2016 deepened the navigation channels and opened new locks on the Pacific and Atlantic (180 feet wide and 60 feet deep, as compared to Gatun’s 110 and 42). The result hasn’t had quite the epochal shipping impact of the original, but has raised cargo volume by about 60%, from about 300 million tons of cargo a year in the early 2010s to 510 million tons a year since 2016. Before the re-digging, the largest ship the Canal could handle was a “Panamax” vessel of 52,500 deadweight tons; now it’s able to handle LNG tankers en route to Asia, and 14,000-TEU container ships coming east.

Another aspect of the two excavations, and the century separating them, illustrates not only logistical progress and engineering achievement but human progress.

Visionary 19th and early 20th-century projects took a large toll. The initial French attempt to build the Canal in the 1880s, before the discovery of the mosquito vector for yellow fever, proved beyond the reach of 19th-century technology and failed at the cost of 22,000 lives. The successful early 20th-century American effort wasn’t much safer: 5,609 of the 56,000 workers — mostly recruited from Barbados, Jamaica, and other Caribbean islands — died over the eight years of construction. The Canal Commission’s 1910 report, as a typical example, records 548 employee deaths, including 376 from disease (especially yellow fever and malaria, despite energetic efforts to control mosquito breeding), and 164 from industrial accidents including dynamite explosions, railroad accidents, electrocutions, drownings, and “accidental traumatisms, various.”

The expansion program’s record, telescoping a century’s worth of public health and worker-safety policy development, is a remarkable change.  We haven’t found a detailed worker mortality report of this type for the last decade’s expansion program, but (a) an online source of uncertain reliability, quoting an official at the 2016 conclusion ceremony, says there were seven, and (b) an ILO workplace death and injury table suggests that the whole of Panama averages 4 to 6 workplace deaths a year among its 2 million workers. Sometimes things do get better.

* TEU: “twenty-foot equivalent unit,” the acronym used to describe the number of twenty-foot shipping containers a vessel can carry.

FURTHER READING

Today:

The Panama Canal Authority has current cargo statistics.

… and an explanation of the expansion project eight years later.

Perspective from the U.S. Embassy/Panama City.

And live camera at the five Locks.

Looking back, with a human perspective:

The Canal Commission’s massive labor recruitment on Barbados is said to have brought 40 percent of the island’s working-age men to Panama, and cut the population from 200,000 in 1900 to 172,000 in 1910. The total workforce added 12,000 from the United States, 16,000 from other Caribbean islands, and 8,000 from Europe and Latin America to the 20,000 Barbadians.  A tenth of them died during construction – 5,609 people, including 4,290 Caribbean workers – of yellow fever, malaria, landslides, explosions, railway accidents, and other illnesses and workplace injuries.  By country, the Canal Commission’s 1910 death toll included 167 workers from Barbados, 113 from Jamaica, 49 from Martinique and Guadeloupe, 60 from other Caribbean islands, 48 from Spain, 36 from Colombia and Panama, and 31 from the United States.

“We Were Giants” — Barbados remembers the 20,000 at the 2014 Canal centennial.

Perspective from Smithsonian Magazine on labor recruitment, segregation in the Canal project , and health policies.

NIH reflects on the achievements and flaws of the Canal builders’ yellow fever and malaria control program.

And as a primary source, the Isthmian Canal Commission’s 1910 report; see Appendix P for statistics on worker health, mortality, and disease control.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

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