China Floods Theaters with War Propaganda, Hits Summer Box Office Single-Day Record

The Chinese state newspaper Global Times celebrated this weekend that the country’s box office had hit a single-day record for the summer, earning $972 million on the back of multiple war propaganda films demonizing the Japanese.

The Chinese government has increasingly closed off its market to Hollywood films as the regime has expanded its ability to fund domestic productions. While three war propaganda films populated the weekend box office – and the China Film Administration begins advertising another “highly anticipated war-themed drama” for the fall – films like The Fantastic Four: First Steps and Superman have failed to entice enough Chinese moviegoers to claim success in one of the world’s largest movie markets.

“As a wave of domestic blockbusters are set to dominate August and September, Hollywood films face severely constrained market space in China,” the Times observed.

According to the Global Times, the Chinese box office earned $52.2 million on Sunday, “the highest single-day tally of this year’s summer season.” The revenue theaters are earning this summer, it noted, is returning to “peak levels” prior to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. The China Film Administration has so far logged a 22.9-percent increase in sales in the first six months of 2025 compared to 2024.

The Chinese Communist Party has invested heavily in the last decade in building up a domestic market for communist propaganda films, particularly those exalting the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and demonizing America and Japan. Beijing enjoyed a breakthrough in 2021, as the rest of the world’s box offices reeled from Wuhan coronavirus lockdowns, with the runaway success of The Battle at Lake Changjin, a film about the Chinese and North Korean communist fighters winning one battle in the Korean War against the Americans. While the film was internationally considered of low quality, lasting three hours and featuring poor acting and cheap special effects, the communist regime heavily pressured its citizens to buy tickets to the film. The government went as far as to encourage viewers to bring and eat raw potatoes in the theater to empathize with the struggle of the soldiers.

The successor to Lake Changjin at the box office this weekend is a film called Dead to Rights about the Nanjing Massacre, in which Imperial Japan invaded the city of Nanjing and killed thousands, including both soldiers and entire civilian families, in 1937. Estimates suggest the Japanese killed as many as 300,000 people in this one episode.

Dead to Rights tells the story of Chinese nationals trapped in a photography studio to escape the killing, where they help develop a trove of photos that later serve as proof of the atrocities.

The film has made about $210 million in ten days, according to China’s state news outlet Xinhua. The American magazine Variety observed that Dead to Rights was also the “No. 1 film globally over the weekend,” beyond its success in China.

Another four domestic films joined Dead to Rights at the top of the weekend box office, including an animated movie about ancient Chinese mythology called Nobody, and another historical film, The Stage. Nobody follows an increasingly common template in Chinese regime-promoted filmmaking of animated films using bright colors and attracted special effects to share communist-friendly interpretations of Chinese mythology. Another film of this template, the sequel Ne Zha 2, became the first non-American movie to pass $1 billion in box office sales in February, a month after its debut in Chinese theaters.

Ne Zha appeared to be a response to war propaganda fatigue at the box office following a parade of ill-received military dramas after the success of Lake Changjin. Among the most embarrassing was the 2022 movie Born to Fly, an obvious attempt to replicate the success of the American film Top Gun: Maverick after the creators behind that movie chose to reject funding from the Chinese entertainment corporation Tencent after being pressured to remove a Taiwanese flag from the eponymous main character’s jacket. Born to Fly was ultimately released in spring 2023 after being delayed due to poor special effects and flopped in the Chinese box office.

Chinese studios changed their strategy for several years after this failure, choosing to produce heartwarming family dramas, science fiction, and animated Chinese mythology films. On Sunday, however, the Global Times hinted that the era of blatant war propaganda films may soon be returning as studios prepared to debut at least three such features.

“Other patriotic titles set to hit screens in August include documentary Mountains and Rivers Bearing Witness and war film Dongji Rescue, which were inspired by real historical events and designed to showcase the resilience and spirit of the Chinese people during wartime,” the Times observed. In September, the China Film Administration will release 731 Biochemical Revelations, a movie about “the Japanese army’s horrible germ warfare experiments.”

The Chinese Communist Party began threatening to limit access to the movie market for Hollywood films in April, citing President Donald Trump’s policies to impose tariffs on Chinese goods. A small number of Hollywood productions have made it to theaters, but done poorly as Beijing browbeats locals to spend their money on domestic films, instead, particularly those focused on turning public sentiment against America and Japan. The Global Times noted this weekend that, “currently, only two imported titles, F1:The Movie and Jurassic World: Rebirth, have exceeded the 100 million yuan [$13.9 million] mark” this year.

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