Director Duncan Jones’ Warcraft adaptation opens stateside on Friday, and while poor reviews have analysts hedging their bets on the film’s domestic box-office potential, it may not matter all that much. Foreign markets are expected to be the film’s bread and butter, and it is already breaking records in a country with more than quadruple the population of the good ol’ USofA.
According to Collider, the film is already a sensation in China, hauling in a record $8.4 million during its midnight screenings Tuesday night and besting the mark set by Furious 7. On top of that, it has already netted a cool $20.4 million in advanced ticket sales. To put that in perspective, estimates suggest that the film will take in just $22 million to $24 million for its entire opening weekend here in the U.S.
Related: New ‘Creating Warcraft’ featurette looks at adapting the game to film
The news shouldn’t come as a total shock, since the movie’s video game namesake has a massive and dedicated player base in The Middle Kingdom, but the broader story here is that it’s becoming more common to see films tailored to succeed in foreign markets at the expense of the domestic market.
In recent years, overseas ticket sales have begun to represent a larger and larger share of Hollywood’s overall gross, and China — with more than one billion potential customers — has helped drive this market shift.
That said, China isn’t the only overseas market in which Warcraft is thriving. As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, it has already raked in a total of $75 million in other foreign locales, including Russia and Germany, where it earned $17.3 million and $10 million, respectively, in its first 11 days. It also netted $7.8 million in France during the same span.
Like it or not, the film industry, while centered in Hollywood, is a global one, and the tastes of the rest of the world are having more of an effect on the types of films that do and don’t see the light of day.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?