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The summer box office has exceeded 10 billion yuan.

According to the real-time data of Lighthouse Professional Edition, as of 23:25 on August 17, the total box office (including pre-sales) of the 2024 summer season (June-August) exceeded 10 billion yuan. The top five films in the current box office list are "Catch the Doll", "Silent Kill", "A Small Shop at the Edge of the Cloud", "Deadpool and Wolverine", and "Despicable Me 4".

As of now, 138 films have been released or scheduled for the summer season, which is basically the same as the 140 films that were finally released last summer. The genres are rich, covering comedies, action films, crime films, romance films, etc.

Chen Jin, a data analyst at Lighthouse Professional Edition, analyzed that of the 10 billion yuan box office of the summer season, comedy films had a box office of nearly 5 billion yuan, which performed the best, far higher than the 2.7 billion yuan of comedy films in the 2023 summer season. It was also the highest box office for comedy films since the 2018 summer season. It also continued the outstanding performance of popular comedy films such as "Hot", "Speeding Life 2", and "Article 20".

In terms of cities, the box office share of first-tier and fourth-tier cities increased year-on-year. According to the data of Lighthouse Professional Edition, as of August 17, the box office share of first-tier and fourth-tier cities in the 2024 summer season was 17.68% and 19.30%, respectively, which was a slight increase compared with 17.44% and 19.25% in the same period last year. Among the domestic films, "Under the Alien", "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" and "Retrograde Life" performed better in first-tier cities, and the box office share of first-tier cities exceeded 20%. "There is a Small Store on the Edge of the Cloud", "Silent Killing", "White Snake: Floating Life" and "Catching Dolls" performed better in fourth-tier cities, and the box office share of fourth-tier cities exceeded 20%. Overall, North China and Northeast China performed better in this summer season. The box office rankings of northern cities such as Tianjin, Hefei, Qingdao, Shenyang, and Jinan have increased compared with the same period last year, while the box office share of Southwest and South China has decreased slightly compared with the same period last year.

However, there are only 13 days left until the end of the summer season, and it seems that the current overall performance is far inferior to that of 2023. The box office of the 2023 summer season exceeded 20.6 billion yuan, jumping to the first place in film history, even surpassing the highest pre-epidemic year of 2019. The total number of moviegoers exceeded 504 million, breaking both the highest box office and the highest number of moviegoers in the summer season in Chinese film history.

Apart from 2023, the "strongest" summer season in history was 2019, with a box office of 17.778 billion yuan. In 2020, due to the impact of the epidemic, the box office was only 3.62 billion yuan, but it rebounded to 7.381 billion yuan in 2021 and 9.136 billion yuan in 2022.

What’s different about this summer season is that the live broadcast of the Olympics also contributed to the box office.

As early as during the 2022 Qatar World Cup, some cinemas tried to do live broadcasts, but were stopped because they did not obtain authorization. This time, the Paris Olympics live broadcast was a cooperation between China Film Group and China Central Radio and Television and was carried out in compliance with the regulations in the cinema.

According to data from Lighthouse Professional Edition, as of August 12, the total box office of CCTV's live broadcast of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games in theaters reached 2.442 million yuan, including 1.121 million yuan on July 30 (table tennis mixed doubles final), 460,000 yuan on August 3 (table tennis women's singles final, tennis women's singles final), and 275,000 yuan on August 4 (table tennis men's singles final), ranking the top three in the event box office.

From an industry perspective, Sun Jiashan believes that incorporating cinemas into the scene of watching the Olympic Games is a vivid example of media convergence represented by the film and television industry. The concept of media convergence has been proposed for 10 years. Under this major development trend, audiences can watch content that was previously only available on TV, tablets and mobile phones on large cinema screens, which actually means further exploring a standardized copyright market order in the film and television industry.

Sun Jiashan further pointed out: "In fact, the capacity of cinema chains is already in excess to a certain extent. Offline cinema chains are responsible for their own profits and losses, so how to recover costs is a very realistic issue. Watching games in cinemas means that we are exploring new paths for diversified operation of cinema scenes, which is beneficial to the overall development of cinemas and can reduce the huge operating pressure on cinema chains."