China’s soaring movie market tarnished by box office fraud
Print Edition
BOX office fraud has cast a shadow over China’s surging film market, which is now the world’s second largest.
Last week, seven Chinese cinemas were banned from screening new films due to cheating box office figures. The suspension is the second this year after nine venues were punished in February.
The fraud was committed to avoid sharing box office earnings with filmmakers and other parties, said Tu Biao, a market observer.
Box office fraud is a natural outcome of the ballooning film sector in the country, said Shi Chuan, vice president of the Shanghai Film Association and a professor at Shanghai University.
China’s box office sales in 2013 neared 21.8 billion yuan (US$3.6 billion), up from 860 million yuan in 2002 when the sector became more commercialized.
The film market expanded not only in box office figures, but also in the number of screens, which have extended into second- and third-tier cities, Shi said.
Lack of supervision
As of April this year, there were 20,285 screens in China, up from 1,581 in 2002, according to the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television.
In the same period, the number of theaters rose to 4,545 from 872.
“The expansion caught the film watchdog off guard,” Shi said.
Lack of supervision, in turn, made room for theater chains to conspire with cinemas to cheat filmmakers and other parties out of ticket sales, Shi said.
But the fraud has mainly been confined to second and third-tier cities, where supervision from both the government and filmmakers is weak. Most of the 26 cinemas that were found to be cheating on box office figures this year were located in small cities.
Their methods for cheating on ticket sales include issuing handwritten tickets or using a “dual software system” to sell tickets without registering the real box office gains, said Huang Qunfei, general manager of the New Film Association.
Noting that box office fraud was recurring, the state administration published a circular in January banning cinemas from manipulating figures. Violators are banned from screening new films.
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