'Kung Fu Panda 3' China Box Office: A Huge $16.3M Debut Boffo $23.1M Total

Kung Fu Panda 3 started its theatrical run in China with a bang, earning a strong estimated $16.3 million on its first day of play. 

Taken on its own, that’s one of the bigger single day grosses for a movie in history, just ahead of Sony ’s Spectre ($15m) and just behind Universal/Comcast Corp.’s Jurassic World ($17.7m) and Paramount’s Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation ($18m). It sits behind Terminator Genisys ($26m), Paramount/Viacom Inc’s Transformers: Age of Extinction ($30m), Walt Disney Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($33m), Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron ($33.9m), and Universal’s Furious 7 ($63m). Including the Saturday previews from last week which brought in $6.4m during three hours of show times, the film’s “opening day” total is $23.1m which would be the sixth biggest opening day in China history if you counted the previews into the Friday total, which to be fair is standard practice in America.

Everyone is watching this one both in America and in China, and I’ll try to update when the American preview figures roll in later this morning courtesy of 20^th Century Fox. But $140 million DreamWorks Animation and China Film Group Corporation have taken several potentially groundbreaking steps to make sure the movie plays as much to China as it does to America, if not exponentially more so in what is the second biggest movie going marketplace. 

To wit, they created two versions of the film in China, both a “standard” international version with dubbed vocals and a second version with altered animation so that the mouth movements and body language would better match up to the Chinese audio. Oh, and even in America we’re seeing seven theaters playing the film in both English and Mandarin.

The original Kung Fu Panda earned a then-shocking $26 million in China back in 2008 while Kung Fu Panda 2 earned $92m back in 2011. This time around, the expectations are much higher, with the hopes of displacing The Monkey King: Hero is Back ($152m) as China’s biggest-grossing animated feature of all time. At the risk of stating the obvious, the Kung Fu Panda franchise is huge in China, and there have been countless product/merchandising tie-ins to coincide with the release of this third entry. Oh, and the worldwide release date was specifically tailored to the Chinese New Year, which is a week from Monday. Because, as I always say, the best weekend is the one before the holiday weekend. Kung Fu Panda 3 will do its thing in America and China this weekend, and then the holiday will buffer the would-be second weekend drop.

And, again stating the obvious, China Film Insider reported that Oriental DreamWorks cast a who’s-who of Chinese movie stars for the Mandarin language version of said screenplay, including Jackie Chan (who of course has a small role in the domestic version as well), Yang Mi 杨幂 (The Great Wall), Bai Baihe (Monster Hunt, which earned $32,766 in its first week of U.S. play in 41 theaters), Huang Lei 黄磊 (Where Are We Going, Dad?), and Wang Zhiwen 王志文 (Together). That’s somewhat standard practice for overseas animated releases (it’s one reason why Fox’s Ice Age films have done so well outside of America), but it still bears mentioning. 

How this film plays over the next couple weeks in America and China is without question the biggest box office story of the moment, as this kind of “make the same movie twice” approach could very well be standard practice, especially for animated features, if this works.

Directed by Jennifer Yuh and Alessandro Carloni, and starring (in America anyway) Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan, Bryan Cranston, Kate Hudson, and J.K. Simmons, Kung Fu Panda 3 has thus far earned $23.1 million at the end of its first day of Chinese release. 

We’ll know soon enough if we’re looking at legs similar to Jurassic World or Terminator Genisys. But the multipliers, especially if we count that $23.1m total as “one day,” look exceptionally promising.