This is a list of the highest-grossing films in Mainland China. Most of the data below is provided by EntGroup's China Box Office (CBO) website, with the gross in yuan.[1]
Up until the 1980s, the Chinese box office was typically reported in terms of box office admissions (ticket sales), rather than gross revenue. The film with the highest ticket sales in China is [zh], released in 1981, followed by Mysterious Buddha (1980) and then Gunshots in the CIB (1979), each with more than 300 million ticket sales.[3] The Chinese–Hong Kong filmShaolin Temple (1982) set the record for the highest-grossing film in China, with a gross revenue of CN¥161,578,014.[4] The foreign film with the highest ticket sales in China is the Indian Bollywood film Caravan (1971), which had its Chinese release in 1979 and sold nearly 300 million tickets in China.[5][6]Hollywood film releases were relatively rare in China up until First Blood (1982), which had its Chinese release in 1985,[7] and went on to sell 76 million tickets, the highest for a Hollywood film in China up until 2018.[5][6]
China began releasing box office gross revenue results for foreign non-Chinese films in November 1994, upon the release of The Fugitive (1993).[8][9] In 1995, the Hong Kong action filmRumble in the Bronx, directed by Stanley Tong and starring Jackie Chan, became the all-time highest-grossing foreign film in China, where it grossed ¥95 million; it is not considered a domestic film as it was produced in Hong Kong (then a British Dependent Territory). Later the same year, the American film True Lies overtook it as the all-time highest-grossing foreign film in China, with ¥103 million earned at the box office, while Jiang Wen's In the Heat of the Sun became the year's highest-grossing domestic film in the country with ¥50 million.[8] In 1997, Xie Jin's The Opium War was the year's top-grossing domestic film with ¥72 million, though it was narrowly beaten that year by The Lost World: Jurassic Park, an American film which earned ¥72.1 million.[8] In 1998, Titanic (directed by James Cameron) became the all-time highest grossing film to be released in China, with a then-unprecedented ¥360 million. In 2002, Hero became the highest-grossing domestic film, with CN¥250 million. China's first domestic film to breach ¥360 million was released in 2009, The Founding of a Republic.[8] In 2015, Monster Hunt became the first domestic film in 17 years to become the overall highest-grossing film in China, earning ¥2.44 billion.[8]
Highest-grossing films by year[]
Michael Bay, an American film director, is the most represented filmmaker in the chart with four films to his credit, occupying the top spot in 2001, 2007, 2011, and 2014. Among domestic filmmakers, Feng Xiaogang (1999, 2003, 2008) and Stephen Chow (2004, 2013, 2016) are the most represented with three films each.
^ abcdefghijklmno内地总票房排名 [All-Time Domestic Box Office Rankings]. 中国票房 (China Box Office) (in Chinese). 艺恩 ENDATA Inc. Archived from the original on 16 February 2020. Retrieved 2 March 2020.
^ abPengfei, Liang (2018-12-19). "梁鹏飞：当年《少林寺》电影票房到底有没有1个亿？". Guancha (Observer) (in Chinese). Archived from the original on 2019-02-16. Retrieved 15 February 2019. 《喜盈门》在一年多时间内，三种型号放映机的观众达到了四亿六千九百二十九万多人次; 《神秘的大佛》三种型号放映机，一年四个月，观众达到四亿零三百二十一万多人次
