Across Asia, but also across the entire world, 2024 saw a drop over the previous year in box office takings, which remain well below pre-pandemic levels.
Throughout its history, the cinema has repeatedly been declared dead as soon as it showed any signs of ill-health. The Asia-Pacific area accounts for more than a third of the world box office (39% in 2023, 34% in 2024), the Chinese box office is nearly as big as the American one, and the Japanese and Korean box offices are consistently among the top 6/7 in the world.
We are therefore talking about the most important global market for movie theatres, whose expansion – understood as number of theatres – continues to grow. But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask ourselves why
last year saw this decline (the forecasts for 2025 see figures settling on 2023 numbers), and that is what the essays in this catalogue attempt to do.
The pandemic, the Hollywood screenwriters and actors strike and the decline in TV series production are all elements that have led to a notable reduction in jobs in the cinema industry, especially – but not only – in Hollywood. The reduced investment in the production of large-scale blockbusters is evident in South Korea, which was the fastest growing cinema industry for the first twenty years of the century.
To this we must add an understanding of the impact Artificial Intelligence will have on film production. It is certainly very interesting to see that in China, Japan and also in Korea, the biggest box office successes are animated films (we can’t fail to highlight the takings of Chinese film Nezha 2, which exceeded 2 billion dollars, by far the largest box office of 2025 to date).