Stephen Chow takes the lead, 90 films fight a desperate battle in the summer movie season
The 2026 summer film season kicks off with a massive lineup of nearly 90 titles. However, with one-third of the season already passed, as of July 9, the total cumulative box office for the summer season stands at only about 2.3 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of nearly 20%. Market enthusiasm is far below the sweltering summer temperatures.
Where lies the problem? The positive cycle of the film and television industry, which was shattered by the earlier market chill, has failed to recover for a long time. Without quality works in the market, audiences lack the passion to go to cinemas, and flooding the screen with more films only results in more sacrificial flops.
In a few days, Stephen Chow's new movie Kung Fu Women's Football is set to tap into the World Cup buzz and compete in the summer season. Will it fire the first shot to revive the summer box office?
Diverse Range of Genres
During the 2026 summer season, nearly 90 Chinese and foreign films compete side by side, covering more than ten genres including history, comedy, action, animation, and science fiction, forming a remarkably comprehensive content landscape.
Main melody-themed works are making a concentrated push — Catch the Spy, Four Crossings, and The Penghu Naval Battle respectively honor public security heroes, depict revolutionary campaigns, and narrate epic naval battles. Additional titles like When the Stars Shine, Our Names, and Classified Files further enrich this thematic lineup.
The animation segment is the most bustling battlefield of this summer season. During the window before large-scale releases of domestic animated blockbusters, Hollywood animations have propped up the market momentum. Minions and the Big Monster and Toy Story 5 are both projected to exceed 300 million yuan in total mainland box office, while Spider-Man: Fresh New Day has over 500,000 users marking it as "want to see" on Maoyan.
Later, a series of original domestic animations will be released to audiences one after another. Among them, works such as Three Kingdoms Part 1: Fighting for Luoyang, The Eight Immortals!, and Demon Detective of Tang Dynasty take revised historical tales, reconstructed myths, and ancient-style suspense detective stories as their core themes, delivering differentiated content expressions.
Realistic-themed productions are also flourishing: Miss Cube tells stories of the silver-haired generation, Missing You portrays the lasting companionship between girls; Dad and Count to Three dissect the complex family relationships beneath daily life; The Mountain, the Water, the People narrates the path of green development from a vivid perspective; The Persuader and Angry Tiger directly confront sharp social issues.
The comedy segment also has plenty of highlights. Xing Wenxiong's absurd comedy Maverick and the street-rooted Stingy Guy have already premiered; Stephen Chow's nonsensical new work Kung Fu Women's Football and the sequel to the classic workplace comedy IP Year-end Party Never Stops 2! have also officially announced their summer release dates.
If Jia Ling's Turn to Bloom and Wen Muye's Welcome to Dragon Restaurant can join the lineup smoothly, the summer comedy camp will become even more lively, and the genre competition will be more engaging.
Despite the rich thematic matrix, market enthusiasm has not materialized in tandem.
As of July 9, in the top 10 summer box office rankings: the champion Love Letter to Grandma and the 9th-place The Vanished are both non-new releases for the summer season; imported titles including Toy Story 5, Burning Blinkers, Minions and the Big Monster, and The Backrooms occupy the 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 6th positions respectively.
The Market Is Waiting for a Breakout Hit
To boost performance in the summer season, the film industry has rolled out unprecedented preferential offers unseen for years, yet these measures still failed to revive the market.
Data from Beacon Professional Edition shows that the average ticket price in June this year was 36.5 yuan, 2.6 yuan lower than the same period last year. Many films have voluntarily cut their settlement prices, and cinemas have launched discount packages, trying to leverage cost-performance to spur moviegoing demand.
For example, Miss Cube, produced under the supervision of Wen Muye, cut its settlement price from 25 yuan to 10 yuan, and some channels even offered free 0-yuan screenings, but its box office barely exceeded 10 million yuan three days after release, with a projected total box office of only 23 million yuan.
The problem does not lie in the ticket price, but in the content itself.
Audience aesthetics have iterated through multiple rounds long ago; they have seen high-quality works, understand what makes a good film, and their choices are becoming increasingly rational. The aura of IP, star-studded casts, and thematic dividends — these tricks that once worked flawlessly are becoming less and less effective now.
Catch the Spy and Four Crossings are the most typical examples. One features Feng Xiaogang, Lei Jiayin, and Hu Ge in the cast, while the other is a big-budget revolutionary war blockbuster produced by Bona, yet the former has a projected box office of just over 100 million yuan, and the latter less than 300 million yuan — both suffered crushing defeats.
For audiences, what they need is not just a complete story, but narrative designs that bring surprises and emotional connections that reflect their own life situations. From this perspective, how have those highly anticipated "savior" films performed?
The previous installment of Year-end Party Never Stops 2 grossed 1.29 billion yuan; the sequel focuses on the pain points of AI-driven workplace involution, a theme closely aligned with current realities. Bai Ke continues as the lead, Zhang Ruoyun joins the cast as a new addition, and Da Peng's billing position has been adjusted, creating certain uncertainties over its prospects of breaking 1 billion yuan at the box office.
Stephen Chow's seven-years-in-the-making new film Kung Fu Women's Football comes with built-in nostalgia traffic, but The New King of Comedy previously flopped at both the box office and with critics. It remains an open question whether his classic nonsensical style can once again win over audiences.
Jia Ling is skilled at blending comedy with warmth, and her new film Turn to Bloom focuses on the serious theme of anti-pyramid schemes. Its box office success will depend on whether the production team can prove their ability to handle such subject matter.
Wen Muye's new film Welcome to Dragon Restaurant challenges the war genre with the novel premise of "a Chinese chef venturing into the Middle East". However, the mix of food, war, and comedy carries a high risk of emotional dissonance, which greatly tests the director's control and the lead actors' performance skills.
Of course, the fact that neither of these two films has been officially scheduled for release is itself the biggest negative factor.
The Penghu Naval Battle is a high-risk contender on a different track: historical themes easily spark public controversy; director Johnnie To excels in crime films, and his last ancient-costume work received only a 4.4 rating on Douban; the grand spectacle requires alternating court power intrigues and war rhythm, which is exactly his unproven weak point.
Performance Divergence Under Intense Industry Competition
Faced with market fatigue, capital anxiety has long been written into financial reports.
The box office in the first five months of this year has dropped by 42%, and film and television companies collectively posted poor financial results in the first quarter. The entire industry regards the summer season as a "lifeline", and leading companies have almost staked all their core resources on the table.
Even Bona Pictures (001330.SZ), which has lost nearly 3 billion yuan in four years and faces tighter cash flow, has released Four Crossings filmed in 2025, yet its box office is highly unlikely to recoup production costs.
China Film Co., Ltd. (600977.SH) saw its net profit decline by 19% in the first quarter of 2026. Its summer lineup includes self-produced new titles such as Three Kingdoms Part 1, Year-end Party Never Stops 2!, and Welcome to Dragon Restaurant, as well as exclusive distribution projects like Toy Story 5 and The Backrooms. However, a significant portion of these future revenues will be used to cover the financial gap left by Catch the Spy.
Light Chaser Animation's girlhood friendship-themed film Missing You has a controllable production cost, and its upper limit will be determined by word-of-mouth momentum. Go to Your Island, adapted from a top-ranked Jinjiang IP, is precisely targeted at book fans and couples for the Qixi Festival release, but its "tragedy beauty" style may easily turn away casual viewers; the high animation production cost brings risks of underperforming expectations.
Ruyi Pictures' revenue in the first quarter of 2026 decreased by 36% year-on-year, with net profit dropping by nearly 90% year-on-year. Against this backdrop, the timely release and box office performance of its self-produced title Turn to Bloom are particularly critical. In addition, Ruyi Pictures has also co-invested in works including Year-end Party Never Stops 2!, Welcome to Dragon Restaurant, and The Eight Immortals!.
Whether the summer season will become a turning point to rescue the performance of various companies, or a Waterloo where losses continue to expand, all will return to the big screen for the final test.
This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Zebra Consumption" (ID: banmaxiaofei), written by Chen Biting, and published with authorization from 36Kr.