Lunar New Year Stacked With Follow-Ups And Franchises Aims To Kickstart China Box Office After A 2024 Downturn

A 'Detective Chinatown' prequel and a 'Ne Zha' sequel are just two tentpoles amid a holiday line-up packed with sequels and prequels for some of China's biggest hits and most popular recent successes.

With just under six months to go, it still looks like Disney’s Elio will open on the same day as Universal’s live-action How to Train Your Dragon remake. While we’ve had theoretical showdowns of this nature—big-budget, demographically similar would-be tentpoles set to debut concurrently—there’s usually a participant that flinches. Recall that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Captain America: Civil War did not both kick off the summer season in May 2016.

Nor did How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World open, as initially planned, on the same day as Finding Dory in the summer of 2016. Amid COVID-specific complications and delays, neither John Wick: Chapter 4 nor Matrix: Resurrections debuted in the key pre-Memorial Day weekend frame of 2021. Okay, so Ghostbusters opened with $15.5 million, and Gremlins debuted at $13.5 million on the same weekend in June 1984. That was 41 years ago.

I bring this up because we’re just under two weeks away from China's Lunar New Year frame. The marquee will be packed with what is presumed to be the biggest of the big for the year. That is business as usual in the Middle Kingdom. Most of the year’s top in-country earners often debut amid essentially the same holiday-specific week. And 2025 is no different. Well, it is a little different, as this time it’s the Chinese theatrical industry that – after 2024 fell 23% from 2023 to just $5.8 billion – is playing the #SurviveTill25 game.

This year’s holiday frame will feature a direct sequel to a $740 million-grossing animated fantasy and a prequel to a $1.35 billion-grossing action-comedy trilogy. There’s also a third chapter in Dante Lam’s blockbuster Operation actioner series. And we’ve got the second installment of Creation of the Gods, a mega-budget, three-part saga detailing the last king of the Shang dynasty, alongside the thirteenth film in the $1.1 billion-grossing animated Boonie Bears series.

Forgive me if I missed another one, but you get the idea. After not a single film topped even $480 million in-country, the theatrical industry is loading up its biggest weekend with the Chinese film industry's version of “Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue.” Think Hollywood scheduling Avengers: Doomsday on the same week as Avatar: Fire and Ash, The Super Mario Bros. Movie 2 and Wicked: For Good.