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posted by martyb on Sunday September 02 2018, @06:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the Ticket-to-make-money dept.

Movie madness: Why Chinese cinemas are empty but full

For a country which will soon assume the mantle of the world's largest cinema audience, China comes out with a surprising number of big budget B-grade flops. Some blame this on censorship, others on a lack of creativity but there are also those who see a more sinister force at work, which has nothing to do with film-making.

It also has nothing to do with selling tickets: at least not real ones. Some investors are apparently financially backing movies with the sole goal of boosting their stock price that can shift on the perception of a movie's performance, irrespective of its true popularity.

Chinese film critic and industry observer Raymond Zhou has been digging into the darker side of film financing in his country. "When you have a hit film, your stock price will go up several times in terms of market valuation compared with the grosses from the box office so some 'financial genius', came up with this idea: Why don't I have fake box office numbers so that I can make much more money from the stock market?" he said.

[...] How many hundreds of thousands of seats would a company need to buy to boost the figures enough to make a difference to its own stock price? Well what if the cinema chain is also an investor? It can just sell itself the phantom tickets for free.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 02 2018, @07:26PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 02 2018, @07:26PM (#729616)

    OMG I'm gay! And I'm a chubby chaser!