China Box Office: ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ Tops Quiet Weekend With $27.1M

Disney’s big-budget Alice Through the Looking Glass cruised to an easy first-place win at the Chinese box office, debuting to $27.1 million during a quiet late-May release window in the Middle Kingdom.

Alice 2 landed the No. 2 opening for a Disney live-action title behind this year’s The Jungle Book (this doesn’t include Marvel titles).

Stateside, Alice 2 bombed with a four-day debut of $34.2 million over the long Memorial Day weekend. Instead, Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse, which doesn’t open in China until Friday, won the North American holiday race with $80 million.

Johnny Depp returns for the sequel as the Mad Hatter, while Mia Wasikowska is back as Alice. In 2010, director Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland soared at the worldwide box office, grossing $1.025 billion. This time out, James Bobin was in the director’s chair, with Burton remaining a producer.

Burton’s Alice grossed a strong $33 million in China to rank No. 8 for the year. But China’s box office was less than 25 percent of its current size at that time, meaning Alice 2 isn’t likely to place among top 10 grossing films of 2016, given forthcoming competition.

After Apocalypse‘s debut Friday, Legendary Entertainment’s Warcraft will open just five days later on June 3. The two action pictures are expected to command huge screen counts.

Coming in at No. 2, The Angry Birds Movie earned $13.5 million in its second weekend for a $52 million total after 10 days, according to Beijing-based box office monitor Ent Group. 

Captain America: Civil War added $4.3 million for third place, bringing its China cume to a stellar $186.4 million. It is now the seventh-biggest imported movie ever in China, behind only Furious 7, Transformers: Age of Extinction, Zootopia, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Jurassic World and Avatar.

In fourth, The Divergent Series: Allegiant earned a soft $2.7 million, bumping its ten-day total to $16.3 million.

Rounding out the top five was local art-house picture Song of the Phoenix, directed by the late Wu Tianming, a profoundly influential figure in the Chinese film world who died in March 2014. Completed in 2013 and released posthumously on May 6, the movie earned another $1 million from Friday to Sunday.

Phoenix has been buoyed by a publicity stunt orchestrated by Fang Li, one of Wu’s producers. Shortly after the movie’s debut, Fang recorded a video of himself kneeling, weeping and begging Chinese theater owners to give art-house films more screen time — the clip went viral and Fang got his wish. Local observers say initial estimates for the movie were in the $1 million to $2 million range. After 24 days in cinemas, it has grossed $11.9 million. On Friday, Chinese regulators granted the film permission to screen for an extra month.