The era of baokuan films: How Chinese social media creates box office successes

Abstract Exemplified by Wolf Warrior 2 (2017), Dying to Survive (2018), and The Wandering Earth (2019), a group of popular Mainland Chinese films labelled baokuan (爆款) has emerged since the mid-2010s. These baokuan movies are known in China for their extremely high domestic box office takings and overwhelmingly positive online word-of-mouth from audiences. Using a combination of Internet studies, film marketing studies, and audience studies, this article focuses on why these baokuan films enjoy great popularity assisted by the Internet and social media in China. It argues that social media has brought two major changes: new strategies for film marketing, which predominantly rely on online promotion, and the blurring of the roles of film audiences and marketers. These changes jointly enable a film’s prestige to be continuously escalated and circulated.