Box office success

‘The box office success of your last film depended entirely on “assembled viewing”. Can you tell us whether the sequel you are releasing today will resort to the same trick?’ shouted a young journalist at the press conference.

Treated by a thunderous look from the star director sitting on the stage, this impetuous question was a breath of fresh air to her senior colleagues and was followed by resounding applause. The next day, her question was widely used as the title of the press release in the many newspapers that carried it.

The practice of handing out free cinema tickets to students and public sector workers and making them watch certain films during office hours has a long history in China. Called ‘assembled viewing’, its cost is usually covered by the unions, and those who are allocated a ticket are warned that they must have an exceptionally good excuse for not showing up at the film. In the early nineteen-nineties, a new series of films which were generously subsidised by the government and which aimed to promote patriotism by depicting the ‘great achievements’ of the Communist Party, became huge box office successes thanks to the practice of assembled viewing. It is no secret that this is the only way to get people in the street to endure long hours of propaganda.

While it is well-known that box office figures in China are unreliable, I heard something that even an experienced and cynical journalist found incredible: in order to attract their paid audiences to the latest propaganda movie, some cinemas gave it the title of the latest film in the Harry Potter series. By this means the box office revenue of the propaganda movie would ‘steal’ that of Harry Potter.

‘Is this really true?’ a recently retired colleague asked in slack-jawed amazement.

‘Yes, it is’, my senior journalist friend confirmed. This blatant swindle was another trick to boost the box office revenue of propaganda films.

In order to continue to do her job, my friend always tries to look on the bright side of life, and her great consolation was that the fresh-faced journalist who dared to upset the star director by putting a question that was on everybody’s mind was her intern. She is not sure if such courage was a symptom of the intern’s relative lack of experience or derived from her elite family background: she was none other than the granddaughter of the former chief regulator of films. But she gave hope to my friend in the apparently endless drive to get at the truth.