Nitesh Tiwari’s wrestling drama Dangal continued its extraordinary theatrical run in China by scoring another $570,000 to move into 17th place on China’s all-time highest-grossing movie ranking.
Dangal has now extended its release to 44 days in the Middle Kingdom, an exceptional run for any film in the territory these days, let alone a non-Hollywood foreign picture. At $183 million in gross theatrical coin it has extended its box office multiple to 83x its opening day total, a huge leap over the previous record of 69x that had been established by Zootopia in March and April of 2016.
'Dangal' now ranks as the 8th highest-grossing imported film in China's history.Disney / UTV
The Hindi language hit entered the list of China’s top 20 all-time highest grossing films just over a week ago when it surpassed the 1.184 billion RMB ($175 million) that had been earned by Hong Kong-China crime thriller Operation Mekong last year. Then it continued its climb past The Monkey King 2’s 1.201 billion, and yesterday it left Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War and China’s Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons (another Monkey King-themed film) in its dust at 1.247 billion RMB ($182 million). No other non-Hollywood foreign film ranks even in the PRC’s historical top 50.
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The next hurdle for Dangal on China’s winners list is the Huang Bo-starring comedy Lost in Thailand, which rang up 1.272 billion RMB in 2012 ($187 million in 2017 dollars). It should be able to reach that total by next week, but will need to get there before June 23rd, when all bets are off. That’s the date when Transformers: The Last Knight will arrive in China and suck all the air out of the market. The Transformers sequel will release on more two-thirds of China’s movie screens, thus taking away most of the 5,000+ screens currently held by Dangal.
At this point the 15th film on the list, Avatar, is probably out of reach for Dangal at 1.34 billion RMB. The Indian import will only have another 11 more days in China release when Transformer 5 arrives, unless its distribution license is improbably renewed. So we can expect Dangal to finish with a final China tally of around $190 million. That would make it the country's 8th-highest grossing import ever, at least until Transformers knocks it down by a rung around the end of the month.
