| 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.
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.
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.
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.
