Online marketing has propelled the most lucrative month ever for China's surging box office. Xu Fan reports.

July has been the highest-grossing month in China's box-office history.

And that's on the heels on several recently set records in the world's second-largest movie market.

A growing number of insiders hail the country's growing embrace of the Internet as the mine producing the industry's "golden time".

The box office brought in more than 5 billion yuan ($806 million) between July 1 and 28 - the most in any single month in China's film history. The figure is just shy of the box office for all of 2009 (5.9 billion yuan).

Nearly 144 million tickets were sold in the country's 5,400 theaters in July.

This month has pushed the total for 2015 so far to 25.2 billion yuan. That's not far behind the total for all of last year - 29.6 billion yuan, according to entertainment-industry research organization, Entgroup.

Homegrown titles are leading the charge - namely, Monster Hunt (1.5 billion yuan), Jian Bing Man (924 million yuan) and Monkey King: Hero Is Back (705 million yuan).

One of this year's best-picture Oscar nominees, The Imitation Game, has only brought in 22 million yuan since its July 21 release.

And the British Claymation Shaun the Sheep Movie has brought in 46 million yuan on the Chinese mainland - less than half of what its makers expected. That's despite aggressive promotion in the country by directors Mark Burton and Richard Goleszowski.

Many Chinese had watched the films online months before they hit the country's theaters. Imitation debuted elsewhere last November and Shaun did so in February.

"Chinese fans of European titles are increasingly mature and discreet. They won't buy tickets just to seeing idols on giant screens," says Zheng Ye, production department head of the Shanghai-based Fundamental Films, which has close connections with foreign markets.

"But the Internet is changing the entire ecosystem of China's movie industry," he says.

Domestic marketing firms tell China Daily their promotion strategies in recent years typically make giant portals and social media top priorities.

"Few people read print nowadays," Zheng says.

Stars giving exclusive interviews will first consider such giant portals as Tencent, Sohu and Sina.

Cooperative video-streaming websites are allowed to release trailers 12 hours earlier than other platforms, explains Zhang Wenbo, CEO of the Beijing-based Brave Entertainment, the company marketing Monster Hunt.

A 16-minute program featuring interviews with stars who appear in Monster and the film's trailers has been watched 15 million times and given 9,000 reviews on iQiyi.com, a Chinese video-streaming giant.

Online anticipation for the film peaked mid-June - a month before its premiere, Zhang recalls.

Baidu searches for the film increased sixfold after its stars - Wallace Chung, Jing Boran and the monster king, Huba - appeared on the hit reality show Running Man, one of the country's most talked-about shows on the Internet.

The promotion strategy echoes that of Jian Bing Man, which was inspired by a popular series only streamed online. The movie's director and lead actor, Dong Chengpeng, was seen making and selling jianbing - a breakfast pancake - in Beijing's Zhongguancun on April 30. The video went viral online. Millions of netizens posted and reviewed the clip on the Sina Weibo micro-blog platform and the WeChat messaging system.

While such sensations are often conjured by marketers, some Internet stunners go viral "by chance".

Take Monkey King. It wasn't expected to be a blockbuster - as seen by its first-day box office revenues and small number of screens - but online praise from young fans put it above Kung Fu Panda II as the most popular animated flick among Chinese.

On Tuesday night, its makers hosted a celebration party to which it invited a dozen representatives of zilaishui, or "tap water", which refers to spontaneous flows of online adoration.

One of the representatives, Hebei Academy of Fine Arts animation student Zhao Qiang, tells China Daily the film gives heart to Chinese animators with its "quality and popularity".

He has uploaded clips, images and news about the film to a fan forum every day, he says.

"We really hope more viewers hear about it and see it in theaters," he says.

Big-budget films without such marketing hooks and Internet fan bases are increasingly stranded in the market. Some are even pushed into low-profile territory.

John Woo's upcoming romance epic, The Crossing Part 2, had to reschedule its media event to morning last Wednesday to avoid overlapping with that of Fan Bingbing's Lady of the Dynasty in the afternoon. Both the historically themed movies staged news conferences on the same day and will premiere on July 30.

Even with its pan-Asian, A-list cast of Zhang Ziyi and Takeshi Kaneshiro, a source close to the producers of The Crossing Part 2 says there's concern the 200 million yuan production hasn't created much online hype, especially among youth - an increasingly crucial demographic among theatergoers.

Fan's horseback sex scene with the protagonist emperor in Lady, on the other hand, went viral online last week. She has 36 million Weibo followers.

China's average moviegoer is 21 years old and is among the country's 650 million Web users, media report.

Audience members born in the 1990s have grown up with the Internet, Loongs United Investment Co Ltd's new-media department head Zhang Zhiyuan says.

"All their communications and interests come from and are spread via the Internet," Zhang says.

"Win them, and win the market."

Contact the writer at xufan@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily USA 07/30/2015 page7)