Latest update October 19th, 2015 11:51 PM
Cheaper Online Film Ticketing Seek Bigger Roles
BEIJING July 22, 2025 - Recent data suggests a whopping 63 percent of Chinese moviegoers in the first half of 2015 bought film tickets online.
China’s box office hit 20.4 billion yuan ($3.3 billion) in the first six months of the year, a leap of nearly 50 percent over the first half of 2014. About 12.5 billion yuan ($2 billion) came from online transactions including group buying and online seat selection (in China, sometimes it generates extra fee).
In contrast, only about 13 percent of American moviegoers buy film tickets online per year, according to industry insiders. Digital ticketing was introduced to the US some 15 years ago. But none of the major online ticket players including Fandango and MovieTickets.com along with a few theaters themselves have ever witnessed a similar surge.
A price war
China’s three Internet titans, Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba (BAT), have been shaking up many industries including filmmaking. Now they are fighting in the field of online ticketing.
Apart from their own ticketing sites, namely Alibaba’s Taobao Movie, Baidu’s Nuomi, Tencent’s Wechat-based Weipiao, they have also taken stakes in other vendors, such as Alibaba’s investment in Meituan.com, a group buying site that owns the online ticket platform Maoyan, which accounts for a nearly 70 percent market share.
They started a price war last year by selling film tickets at 9.90 yuan ($1.6) or even less, which became the main push of the incredible percentage.
Nuomi offered tickets at only 3.7 yuan ($0.6) on March 7 this year to celebrate the Chinese Girls’ Day (a day before Women’s Day), covering more than 800 theaters nationwide. Taobao Movie, on the other hand, sold the films at 3.8 yuan ($0.61) on March 8, the International Women’s Day, and allowed users to buy two tickets at 19.9 yuan ($3.2) on November 11 last year.
For consumers in China, deep discount is definitely good news. In China, every Tuesday used to be “the happy film day” as film tickets were sold at half-price. But now every day can be a Tuesday, thanks to BAT.
But in the US, it is a different case. Consumers could hardly get a discount and need to pay a surcharge, which generally is $1 to $1.50 per ticket, to buy tickets online.
Grabbing market share
A film ticket’s minimum price set by the theaters and the film studios is usually about 40 yuan ($6.5). Online platforms and studios have to subsidize the users’ purchases in this price war. But at the moment, all they care about is more market share.
The soaring traffic also gives these Internet companies access to gather data on users’ preferences and patterns, which could serve as a tool to take control of the relationship with the moviegoers in the future, and offer data reference in film production – Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent all have their own film division.
Online ticket platforms and film studios have been ratcheting up the war. The China Film Distribution Association along with China Film Production Association, two state-run industry groups, has released a series of policies to regulate the market.
Chinese cinema circuits are also worrying that the price war will disrupt the orders and some of them, such as Wanda Cinema Line, have started to upgrade their ticketing sites.
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