Stills from some of China's biggest box-office phenomena in 2024

The year 2025 holds a special place in the history of Chinese cinema. One hundred and twenty years ago, Dingjun Mountain, a cinematic adaptation of a classic Peking Opera, came out and was later remembered as the first Chinese film ever made.

For Chinese filmmakers, however, the year arrived not with exciting promise, but rather hefty uncertainty.

According to data released by the China Film Administration on January 1, the country's total box office revenue in 2024 plummeted by 23 percent to just 42.5 billion yuan ($6 billion)—the lowest since 2015 and 34 percent down on the numbers of 2019, a record year for the Chinese box office before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

In the eyes of Wang Hongwei, Vice President of the China Film Directors' Guild and a renowned professor at the Beijing Film Academy, the root of the crisis lies in the industry's inability to keep up with changing market demand and rising competition from other forms of entertainment, such as micro-series and short-form videos.

"The speedy rebound of the film market in 2023 led to the false belief that sticking to our old ways would naturally lead to a full recovery," he said in a film podcast named Sis Freeway.

Losers as winners 

For a long time, comedies had reigned supreme during the Spring Festival, summer and other traditional high seasons for film releases in the country. In recent years, however, this dominance has been challenged by the rise of historical dramas, science fiction films and crime thrillers.

A closer look at the numbers reveals a major comeback by Chinese comedies in 2024. The genre generated a colossal 20 billion yuan ($3 billion) in ticket sales, accounting for half of the year's total, and secured five of the top 10 spots on the list of the year's highest-grossing films, data published by Chinese ticketing platform Beacon showed.

The five comedies that topped the year's box office chart signal a shift of focus away from their predecessors' strong-willed heroes and fantastical elements such as time travel to the everyday existence of ordinary people, particularly that of the so-called wonangfei (a Chinese term for "losers").

The highest grossing film of the year was YOLO, a film directed by and starring comedian Jia Ling that follows an unemployed, overweight woman who rediscovers her sense of purpose in life through boxing. While most critiques about the film centered on whether the protagonist's weight loss busted or perpetuated body shaming, the film covers a much wider scope of social issues, including self-actualization, women's empowerment and the phenomenon of NEET (an acronym for "Not in Education, Employment or Training") in China.

Pegasus 2, the second highest-grossing film of the year, tells the tale of how a former champion driver, now down on his luck, assembles a new team to compete in a famed rally race. While many have compared it to The Fast and the Furious franchise, the film starred no hard-boiled street racers and was ultimately a story about how have-nots cope with mid-life crisis.

Successor, ranking third on the chart, presents a dark satire on the constraints of traditional Chinese parenting by tracing a boy's growth within an artificially impoverished environment orchestrated by his incredibly wealthy parents. Although the narrative primarily focuses on the second son, many netizens found themselves sympathizing instead with the first son, who is labeled a complete loser for not living up to his parents' standards.

The most renowned members of this wonangfei trend are perhaps the protagonists in Article 20, a courtroom drama directed by veteran filmmaker Zhang Yimou and the fourth top earner of the year, and Johnny Keep Walking!, a tale of corporate dysfunction that took the eighth spot on the 2024 chart. The former follows a conflicted prosecutor who finds himself entangled in a web of perpetually escalating developments in both his home and professional life, while the latter features a miserable human resources manager trapped in a system of Byzantine bureaucracy, "voluntary" overtime and random layoffs.

"People are done with good-looking, fantastically rich and hyper-competent protagonists," Chen Lufan, a 29-year-old film script writer, told Beijing Review.

"By identifying with the losers and the anti-heroes who reflect their own struggles amid grueling workplace culture and toxic family relations, Chinese viewers are finding solace and strength in the mundane and using the comedic genre as a means to redefine what it means to be a hero," she said.

Surprise! 

Besides the traditional comic hero, another trend that seems to have fallen out of favor with the Chinese audience is homemade blockbusters that are typically heavy on special effects and sometimes overly reliant on star power.

In 2024, only one domestic blockbuster, The Volunteers: The Battle of Life and Death, a war epic directed by Chen Kaige, made its way to the country's top 20 highest-grossing films.

Meanwhile, a plethora of documentaries and low-budget films released last year have carved out a unique niche within the Chinese film market, earning both considerable ticket sales and critical acclaim. Though they belong to different genres, these films all sought to explore the multifaceted realities of the human experience by venturing into uncharted territories.

A surprise hit of the year was The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru, a documentary directed by Fang Li that narrates a little-known episode in World War II (1939-45), where a Japanese freighter transporting some 1,800 British prisoners of war from Hong Kong to Japan was torpedoed by an American submarine.

Another highly praised release last year was Chinatown Cha-Cha, a road trip documentary directed by Yang Yuanyuan that follows a troupe of senior Chinese American dancers on their tours across China, the United States and Cuba.

"The two documentaries bear many similarities, as they each attempt to salvage an almost forgotten chapter of history and use it as a springboard for a more nuanced exploration of China's historical relations with the wider world," Zhuang Jun, an associate professor specializing in film history at Liaoning Normal University, wrote in an article featured in newspaper Wenhui Daily.

For Wang, the decline in blockbuster hits is not necessarily a bad thing. "In fact, 2024 was the year in which we realized that simply crafting a film around hot social media topics no longer guarantees success," he said.

The real challenge at hand for every director is to push the envelope by focusing on the story itself and by building their films around their own individual perspectives and insights, rather than blindly catering to existing trends, he concluded.

A new spring 

However, it is still too early to declare the end of the rule of Chinese blockbusters. Hopes are high that the coming Spring Festival season at the end of January may give the industry the much-needed kick.

One of the season's most highly anticipated films is The Legend of the Condor Heroes: The Great Hero, the film adaptation of a classic martial arts novel directed by legendary director Tsui Hark. For many Chinese moviegoers, the film is a nostalgic nod to their childhood and teenage memories of Hong Kong martial arts films from the 80s and 90s, an era fondly remembered as the Golden Age of Hong Kong cinema.

The period also features a stellar lineup of sequels to some of China's most commercially successful blockbusters. The league includes the second film in director Wuershan's Creation of the Gods trilogy, a high fantasy epic that smashed the Chinese box office in 2023; the sequel to the 2019 film Nezha, which still remains China's highest-grossing animated film; and the latest installment in the Detective Chinatown series, the country's largest thriller-comedy franchise that debuted in 2015.

"The Chinese New Year box office season is all about reviving past glories, whether they hail from a distant era or more recent times," Chen said. "However, the many changes that took place in 2024 suggests we are entering a new era of filmmaking, and it remains to be seen whether these old-time hits will once again prove their magic."