Disney hopes 'Avatar: Fire and Ash' reignites China's passion for Hollywood films

When director James Cameron landed in China earlier this month for the Hainan Island International Film Festival in Sanya, it was a homecoming of sorts.

When director James Cameron landed in China earlier this month for the Hainan Island International Film Festival in Sanya, it was a homecoming of sorts.

“Avatar,” the first film in Cameron's science fiction fantasy series, and the Chinese box office essentially grew up together. In 2009, “Avatar” grossed more than $200 million of its $2.92 billion in China, at a time when the country had fewer than 5,000 movie screens and was just beginning to invest in modernizing its local film industry.

Now, China has more than 80,000 movie screens, twice as many as there are in the U.S., and Chinese movie theaters are a lot less likely to be showing Hollywood films than they used to be.

“When the first ‘Avatar’ movie came out, Hollywood was the only game in town,” said Chris Fenton, a media executive and producer who authored a book on Hollywood and China called “Feeding the Dragon.” “But since then, China has gotten as good as us at telling world-class stories for their own people. And now they’ve largely shut us out of that market.”

But Disney, which enjoyed a rare recent success there with the rollout of “Zootopia 2” last month, is hoping for another box-office win in China with “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” which opened Friday. And competing Hollywood studios will be watching to see if Disney manages to entice Chinese “Avatar” fans back to theaters.