‘Ne Zha 2’ Spurs Debate on Future of Chinese Cinema as 2025 Blue Book Launches at Tokyo Market

At the Tokyo International Film Festival’s TIFFCOM market, the launch of the Blue Book of China Film 2025 – jointly edited by Peking University’s Chen Xuguang and Zhejiang University’s Fan Zhizhong – framed Chinese cinema at a crossroads between crisis and renewal.

According to the report, annual box office revenue in 2024 fell 22.6% year-on-year to RMB42.5 billion ($5.75 billion), with admissions down 28.6% despite 91,000 active screens. Audiences have fragmented across short-form video, gaming and streaming, while the average viewer age continues to rise. Yet mid- to low-budget realist dramas, family-themed films and comedies have helped sustain theatrical momentum.

The 2025 edition identifies several dominant trends. Female-directed and family-ethics dramas have reshaped mainstream storytelling through films such as “YOLO,” “Something Wonderful” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” Comedy accounted for 36% of box-office revenue in 2024, driven by titles like “Successor” and “Johnny Keep Walking.” Documentaries such as “Caught by the Tides,” “The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru” and “Ms. Hu’s Garden” signaled a revival of cultural and social nonfiction. AI-driven production and film-game convergence have emerged as new growth engines, exemplified by “Black Myth: Wukong” and “Ne Zha 2,” which blend cinematic storytelling with interactive structures.

The Blue Book concludes that while record-breaking grosses like “Ne Zha 2” demonstrate commercial potential, the future depends on diversified financing, balanced scale and greater integration of AI and animation into industrialized production. Chen closed by asking whether China can maintain its box-office peaks, globalize its myths, and ultimately build its own large-scale creative ecosystem – its own Disney.

During the post-presentation Q&A, Chen addressed the industry’s financial volatility, noting that rising budgets have sharply increased risk and spoke about the imbalance between investment and returns. He urged studios to move toward sustainable “serial operation,” diversifying revenue through licensing, merchandising and cultural-tourism tie-ins, while supporting a stable ecosystem of medium- and low-budget films.