Superfast cars driven by Vin Diesel and his badass gang have earned their way in front of every single foreign movie ever released in China, box office records reveal.
According to Shanghaiist, Universal Pictures’ star-studded action romp, “The Fate of the Furious”, has raked in $377 million (2.60 billion yuan) at the Chinese box office.
For the month of April, it took more than half of all Chinese box office returns, earning $363 million. Incidentally, a massive year-on-year spike in the number of cinema-goers in April saw 140 million Chinese viewers flocking to the cinema, representing a 44.9% increase on 2016. The next closest film in the same month was “Kong: Skull Island” with $63 million.
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While it is, by all means, an incredible amount of money, the latest installment in the “Fast and Furious” franchise still falls over $100 million short behind Stephen Chow’s record-topping blockbuster “The Mermaid”, which earned over $490 million last year.
What the film “F8” did surpass was its predecessor, “Furious 7”, which got over $351 million in 2015 while the local production “Monster Hunt” became China’s top grossing movie in 2014.
Overall, “The Fate of the Furious” took in over $1.1 billion worldwide against a production budget of $250 million ($350 million in total including marketing costs). Comprising of over a third of the film’s revenue, the Chinese market has undoubtedly been the key to the movie’s global success.
