Last year, the total box-office sales in the country reached 40.05 billion yuan ($6.18 billion). (Photo : www.techinasia.com)
It's been a great year for Chinese movie enthusiasts as the country's cinemagoers were treated to an array of local and foreign offerings, according to a report by China Daily.
This year has also seen Hollywood productions play China in a more positive and flattering light.
Some of the foreign crowd favorites include sci-fi thriller "The Martian" starring Matt Damon, who played a botanist stuck in Mars for a couple of months. The Chinese space agency played an integral part in the movie as it helped NASA rescue its man from the hostile planet.
This may have played a part in the total number of sales Hollywood managed to gather in the world's second-largest film market for 2015: 40 billion yuan or roughly $6.3 billion.
Despite the popularity of foreign films in the country, homegrown movies are still a dominant force in Chinese cinemas.
Nearly 60 percent of 2015's ticket sales were accounted by Chinese films. In September alone, a China-made live-action animation movie called "Monster Hunt" sold over 2.429 billion yuan worth of tickets, successfully beating "Furious 7" as the highest-grossing film in Chinese movie history.
Other top performers from China's local film production industry include 3D animated movie "Monkey King: Hero Is Back," and 3D action-thriller, "Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe." These two particular movies even received acclaim for their visual effects, an encouraging sign for the Chinese film industry.
Experts also credit the new crop of young Chinese directors.
"Films by iconic Chinese figures Chen Kaige and John Woo are still of high quality, but they might not fit the taste of the younger generation," said Rao Shuguang, secretary of the China Film Association, in an interview with China Daily.
