Hacker News Reader

Comment by voisin | Hacker News Reader

> They are too large of a market not to cater to

Why? Seems the market was plenty big enough prior to their ascendancy.

China's middle class was about 3% of its population in 2000. It's now around 50% of its population. The number of people there able to afford going to the movies is substantially higher now.

Why is this being downvoted?

How can you tell when something is being downvoted?

You can't, but you can tell when the number of downvotes exceeds the number of upvotes.

Appreciate it.

it goes grey.

It was probably upvoted again (as happens a lot when people comment on downvotes) by the time you found the comment.

Thanks for the info!

A movie can make back its budget just by being a hit in China.

This is how we get movies like Skyscraper(2018)[0]. $120M budget. $70M from US/Canada. $300 from "worldwide" and most of that was from China. Just the Chinese opening weekend alone was $48M.

Transformers: Age of Extinction. $210M budget. China alone provided $300M of profit.

All you need to do is hire Chinese actors for side characters, set a bit of your movie in China and not talk about Taiwan. Easy money =)

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5758778/

I think its interesting that two of the most bankable stars of their respective times are/were enormous guys: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Dwayne the Rock Johnson.

It's hard to compare box office draw due to inflation, but here's four of the top 6 overall and their height. Doesn't seem like a correlation to me...

Robert Downey Jr. $2.4B 5'9"

Tom Cruise $8B 5'1"

Tom Hanks $9B 6'

Dustin Hoffman $2.5B 5'6"

Was this a joke or a misprint? Tom Cruise is 5'7. I knew he was short, but 5'1 is SHORT :-)

No one really knows... ;)

What his publicist says should be taken with a grain of salt.

Obviously films can be produced without aiming to enter the Chinese market, but the highest budgets will go to the films which can, and they'll have higher marketing budgets and so on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com