‘PK’ breaks records in China

Aamir Khan’s film ‘PK’ has set a new record being the first Bollywood film to make it into “100 Crore Club” in China which is normally a market dominated by Hollywood blockbusters.

The film has made around 100 million Yuan or a little over $16 million and is expected to run for two more weeks.
“Indian science fiction comedy PK has scored 8.3 points on one of China’s biggest film reviewing websites Douban since its release in China on May 22. After emerging as the highest-grossing Indian movie ever with a box office of $101 million globally, it is standing high in the favour of the Chinese public,” Wang Xiaonan recently wrote for the state-run Global Times newspaper.

Reaction to the movie, dubbed in Chinese for the local audience, has been positive with many saying that they appreciated the protagonist’s sense of bewilderment in a complex society. According to the movie’s promoters in China, it is rare for a non-Hollywood movie or non-Chinese movie to cross the 100 million Yuan-mark in China.

Even Korean and Japanese movies struggle to make it though the box office here is being currently ruled by the Japanese animation movie “Stand by me Doraemon”.

Besides word-of-mouth publicity for the movie among the Chinese, a strong “Hollywood-style” marketing strategy helped PK’s popularity – Aamir himself came here to promote it in May.

The movie was featured at prime time news slots on national broadcaster, CCTV and Chinese actor Wang Baoqiang, who dubbed for Aamir, promoted it among his 11 million followers on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. Khan appeared on the popular television chat program, called ‘Tonight 80’s Talk Show’, to speask about PK.