China Box Office: ‘Barbie’ Opens in Sixth Place on Friday as ‘Oppenheimer’ Awaits Release Date

The Barbenheimer’s box office dominion does not extend to China, it seems.

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie released in China Friday to considerable fanfare, but its pink appeal is proving no match for a slew of local Chinese blockbusters. The Warner Bros. comedy-fantasy is on track to finish its opening day in China in sixth place, having earned only $960,000 (RMB 6.9 million) as of 6:30 p.m. local time.

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Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, meanwhile, has been approved by China’s censors for release, but regulators have yet to assign it a release date. Any China launch for the Universal Pictures historical thriller is now likely at least a month away.

The soft start for Barbie continues a trend of Hollywood films earning much less in China than they once did. Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One badly lost its opening weekend in the country last weekend, debuting in third place behind a pair of holdover Chinese hits.

Hollywood films have resumed flowing into Chinese cinemas at a healthy rate, but total ticket sales for U.S. movies in the first half of 2023 clocked in at just $592 million — a 69 percent slide from the $1.9 billion earned during the same stretch in 2019, before the pandemic. Local Chinese movies are performing better than ever though. In the first half of the year, ticket revenue for Chinese titles surged to $2.8 billion, up 27 percent from the equivalent period in 2019.

As Barbie was faltering Friday, Chinese tentpoles were again doing big business. Action comedy Wonder Family, from hitmaking comedy producer FunAge Pictures, was riding high with $8.9 million in sales for the day by 6:30 p.m. The first installment of Chinese director Wuershan’s historical fantasy Fengshen Trilogy, dubbed “China’s answer to Lord of the Rings,” was on track for second place with about $5.3 million. Fengshen opened Thursday with $7.5 million and strong word of mouth. Holdover animated hit Chang An was in third place Friday with $5 million (the film has earned $128 million to date), followed by MMA drama Never Say Never with about $2.9 million (its total is $239 million) and animated fantasy Oh My School! with $1 million as of the evening.

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