Photo: VCG

December looks to be a very busy time for Chinese theaters and moviegoers as a total of 57 movies are scheduled for the month. Many Chinese film experts are now predicting that the 2020 box office for the Chinese mainland might break 20 billion yuan ($3.05 billion) as the current total for the first 11 months has already reached 16.5 billion yuan. 

However, several experts told the Global Times that December's box office will likely not surpass the box office of October, which got a tremendous boost from the National Day holiday. 

"Unlike December, people had a whole week-long holiday in October to go to the theater," Xiao Fuqiu, a film critic based in Shanghai, told the Global Times.

According to Chinese ticketing platform Maoyan, the box office in October in the Chinese mainland reached 6.36 billion yuan.

Xiao added that February 2021 is expected to become the top box-office month of 2021 since several blockbuster films will be released during the Chinese New Year holiday. The box office in February 2019 reached 11.16 billion yuan, according to Maoyan. 

Shi Wenxue, a film critic and a teacher at the Beijing Film Academy, told the Global Times that the film with the biggest box-office potential in December is Dante Lam's The Rescue, which was postponed from 2020's Chinese New Year to December 18, and action film Shock Wave 2 starring veteran Hong Kong actor Andy Lau.

The Rescue was originally a strong competitor for the 2020 Chinese New Year film season. It was another highly anticipated work after his blockbuster films Operation Mekong and Operation Red Sea. On ticketing platforms Taopiaopiao and Maoyan, the number of users who want to watch the film has exceeded 1.5 million. 

Anticipation is also high for Shock Wave 2, which sold 660,000 tickets during a livestream hosted by Lau on Sunday night. Nearly 900,000 users on Taopiaopiao and Maoyan want to see the film, so its potential opening box office is roughly 13 million yuan, according to Shi.

According to Maoyan's list of the most highly anticipated upcoming films, the highest ranking is A Little Red Flower starring Jackson Yee, the protagonist of Chinese romantic crime film Better Days, and Liu Haocun, a new rising star who appeared in Zhang Yimou's recently released One Second, followed by comedy film Detective Chinatown 3 and romance film I Remember. Hollywood superhero film Wonder Woman 1984 ranks at No.10. 

Wonder Woman 1984 isn't the only imported film that Chinese moviegoers will be seeing in December.

Media has reported that a total of seven other films from the US, Russia, Japan and France are also scheduled for release in the mainland .

While some of these films, such as Wonder Woman 1984 and Pixar's Soul, will also be released on streaming services in the US, they will only debut in theaters in China, most likely in the hopes that China can help less the loss in profit in the US market.  

However, both Xiao and Shi pointed out that it is unrealistic for Hollywood to expect to "recover its capital" by entirely relying on the Chinese mainland's film market. 

According to Xiao, the "box-office Waterloo" encountered by Tenet and Mulan and the increase in popularity of Chinese homegrown films all show that the domestic film market has moved beyond Hollywood films, which rely heavily on special effects and star power to bring in audiences in China. 

"An emphasis on emotional resonance and storytelling is the reason why domestic blockbusters have generally been performing better at the box office than Hollywood blockbusters in recent years," Xiao added.