660 Research Paper_final_Hui Song

RUNNING HEAD: MASTER GRADUATION PAPER 1
Box Office and Audience’s Film Taste Study in Mainland China
Research Paper
Hui Song
IICS 660 Research Paper
Instructor: Dr. Zhengyi Li
April 30, 2016
Email: annabelle_song@hotmail.com

BOX OFFICE AND AUDIENCE’S FILM TASTE STUDY IN MAINLAND CHINA 2
Abstract
This paper aims to investigate the Chinese audience’s film taste in the Chinese and
American movies through the Chinese theatrical market in 2015. In this paper, data consists
of the box office data, including 24 movies in 2015, and 480 movie comments. Statistics and
comparative analysis are adopted to study the box office data. While sentiment analysis is
adopted to study movie comments. Through the box office statistics, I find that the Chinese
movies are more popular than the American movies. Whereas according to the rating data,
Chinese audience prefer the American movies to Chinese ones. Through the sentiment
analysis on the movie comments data, I find out that the Chinese audience’s sentiment
towards American movies is negative whereas towards Chinese movies is positive.
Discussions are made to answer the contradictory results from the two parts of the data. I
discuss the limitations and future suggestions after the findings.

List of Tables
Table 1. Top 25 Movies in Mainland China 2015
Table 2. The Key Aspects for Sentiment Analysis on Movie Comments
Table 3. Descriptive Statistics of Box Office in Mainland China in 2015
Table 4. Statistics Comparison between China and U.S. in 2015
Table 5. Rating Statistics Comparison between China and U.S. in 2015
Table 6. Genre Comparison between China and U.S. in 2015
Table 7. Polarity Comparison between Chinese and American movies
Table 8. Sentiment Analysis on the Movie Comments

Introduction
Box office study has been popular among global scholars for decades. The Hollywood
films play as an international transportation for American culture (Fu, 2012). Since 1960s,
when the United States triggered globalization, American culture has become the most
popular culture in the world. Hollywood movies play as a significant medium in
disseminating American popular culture and framing people’s perceptions of other cultures
around the world. However, because the Chinese government has been strictly controlled the
import and export of all merchandises, especially the cultural products such as films,
Hollywood movies hadn’t had a chance to influence the Chinese audience until 1994, when
the Chinese government permitted to import maximum of 10 foreign movies per year (Su,
2014). From 2001, when China became a member of WTO, 20 foreign movies were
permitted to import to mainland China per year (Su, 2014). Since 2012, the number of the
foreign movies has increased to 34 per year (Su, 2014). According to the State
Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television of the People’s Republic of
China, the total revenue of box office in mainland China during 2015 is around 6.8 billion
U.S. dollars, with the increase of 48.7% compared to the counterpart in 2014 (He, 2016). The
total revenue of Chinese domestic movies is 4.17 billion dollars, taking 61.58% of total
Chinese box-office revenue in 2015 (He, 2016). That is to say, the revenue of the foreign
movies is around 2.63 billion U.S. dollars in mainland China in 2015 (He, 2016). In Chinese
theatrical market, there are 81 movies, including 47 Chinese domestic movies and all of the
34 foreign movies exceeding the revenue of 100 million Chinese Yuan, which is around
15.38 million dollars in 2015 (He, 2016). In 2015, within the top 20 movies in the box office,
the average total revenue of Chinese movies has exceeded the average revenue of Hollywood
movies for the first time, with the revenue of 100 million Chinese Yuan (He, 2016).
However, the situation was totally the opposite in 2014. Till now, China has become the

second largest film market in the world. Meanwhile, Chinese domestic movies are improving
and winning more Chinese audience over.
There are some factors that have significantly influenced the Chinese audience’s film
choice and taste in the last two decades. First, with the increasing importance of English
learning in Chinese education system, Chinese young generations are eager to improve their
English. Watching English movies and TV dramas are the most efficient ways to learn
English. Second, with the development of Chinese video websites since 2004, large amount
of Hollywood movies and TV dramas are available and easily accessible to Chinese
audience. Meanwhile, American popular culture via Hollywood movies has significantly
influenced Chinese audience’s film taste, especially the young generation’s. After being
exposed to the Hollywood movies for two decades, Chinese audience’s film tastes keep
changing.
With the development of Internet technology, public opinions are easier accessible and
getting useful for other internet users and the third parties. Meanwhile, the challenge of
information mining is growing. In order to extract the the most useful information out of the
large amount of reviews, data mining is important and necessary. Kim and Hovy (2004)
claimed that public opinions always companied with sentiment, such as like or dislike.
sentiment analysis is adopted in large amount of researches to analyze the audience’s
acceptance and emotional preference towards movies.
In the paper, my research question is what the Chinese audience’s film taste in the
Chinese and American movies through the Chinese theatrical market in 2015. Audience’s
sentiment towards the movies is essential to predict the box office performances (Lee, 2006).
Chinese theatrical market is the second largest one in the globe and is going to be the first
soon. Chinese audience’s film taste study is necessary to effectively predict the Chinese box
office performance. Though there are some researches regarding global and reginal box

office (Fu & Govindaraju, 2010; Fu, 2012; Lee, 2008) and the global audience’s film taste
(Fu, 2006; Fu & Govindaraju, 2010; Fu, 2012), the current researches regarding Chinese box
office and Chinese audience’ s film taste are insufficient. Moreover, Chinese audience’s
sentiments towards Chinese and American movies have not been well studied and compared
yet.
The existing researches on the box office mainly adopt two research methods. One is
quantifying the international movie flow by empirically checking the box office revenue data,
the other is conducting sentiment analysis on the movie comments. However, Chinese market
and audience have not been well studied yet. In this paper, I will adopt statistics to analyze
the overall Chinese box office revenue in 2015 and sentiment analysis to analyze the Chinese
audience’s movie preference and sentiments towards the Chinese domestic movies and
Hollywood movies. In the following parts of this paper, firstly, I go through the literature
review; secondly, I explain the data collection and analysis method. Thirdly, based on the
analysis results, I present the findings. Finally, I suggest the limitations and implications of
this paper for future studies.
Literature Review
There are several perspectives to analyze the global box office. The first important
research perspective is the global film transactions (Choi, Lee & Chon, 2012; Chung, 2011;
Chu-Shore, 2010; Fu, 2006). Globalization and cultural imperialism are theoretical
foundations to explain the imbalanced information flow and media flow from the West to the
developing countries (Boyd-Barrett, 1977; Petras & Veltmeyer, 2000; Schiller, 1976).
According to Cox, there are “economic, social, cultural levels of globalization, and on the
cultural level, globalization refers to international communications, cultural standardization”
(1992, p. 30). Globalization is the direct reason causing the phenomenon of cultural products
dumping to the developing countries and the global imbalanced information flow (Schiller,

1976). The globalization of the U.S. American cultural industry has significantly penetrated
into other cultures (Pattie, 2014; Yin, 2011). Cultural imperialism does not only refer to
dominating a culture, or importing cultural merchandise to other nations, but also refers to
largely using mass media (Tomlinson, 1991). With the advent of streaming media, new mass
media online platforms have been well established and have largely influenced the cinemas.
However, because of the copyright and the transmission control from the movie producers,
cinemas remain as the most important movie transmission channel nowadays. The cultural
convergence theory claimed that the globalization of media has accelerated the global
cultural convergence and homogenization (Barnett & Kincaid, 1983; Rogers & Kincaid,
1981). Cultural homogenization refers to “sharing beliefs, values, consumer preferences and
social structures” (Berry, 2008, p. 328). Cultural homogenization is a phrase of acculturation,
which leads to “cultural and psychological changes” in different interacting parties, who are
from different cultural backgrounds (Berry, 2008, p. 328).
The second most important perspective to analyze the global box office is the audience’
taste in Hollywood movies and movie selections (Fu & Govindaraju, 2010; Lee, 2006; Lee,
2008). The economic theory of international media flow illustrates that culture plays a key
role in attracting global audience to foreign media products (Fu & Govindaraju, 2010). Some
scholars believe that the attraction of the foreign media products is mainly influenced by the
cultural differences (Hoskins & Mirus, 1988; Owen & Wildman, 1992; Wildman, 1995).
Cultural distance is one of the most important reasons contributing to the popularity of the
American media products in others cultures (Hoskins & Mirus, 1988; Keh et al, 2015).
Cultural distance refers to the differences in values and cultural aspects (Fu & Govindaraju,
2010; Fu, 2012). Culture plays a significant role in influencing “individuals’ decision
making, attitude formation, judgment, and other cognitive processes” (Keh et al, 2015, p.
371). Psychologists argue that the east Asians (including Chinese) have higher tendencies to

conform (Kim & Markus, 1999; Liang & He, 2012). When significant number of individuals
accept and follow one or a similar culture, they can change the host culture (Kim & Markus,
1999). In the view of Yin (2011), the popular American culture has tremendous power in “the
formation of our cultural identities and our perceptions of other cultures and groups” (p. 54).
The key American cultural values are about pursuing freedom and human rights (Bellah
et al, 2007; Kim & Markus, 1999; Spindler & Spindler, 1990). Popular American films are
always about individualism and heroism. To make the global audience accept the movies
better, similar contents and cultural paradigms are repeated in different Hollywood movies
(Lee, 2006). Hollywood moviemakers have adopted a universal strategy to broaden the
number of global audiences as large as possible (Dancyger, 2013; Lee, 2006; Miller et al,
2005). In 1999, Olson established the theory of “narrative transparency”, proposing that the
universalization of the stories and the ways of telling them are the direct reasons of making
American culture popular (Lee, 2006). However, “media products moving across cultural
boundaries are often subject to local reception processes” (Lee, 2010, p. 945). Local
reception refers to “the ways in which meanings and values associated with media products
are created within each local context” (Lee, 2006, p. 261). Because of the differences in
“aesthetic tastes, social and cultural values, language, and other factors may lead to different
judgments of whether certain media products are better than others” (Lee, 2006, p. 260), the
performance of a movie in different national markets can be largely different. Hoskins and
Mirus defined cultural discount as cultural lost of a media product in other cultures because
of the difficulties in identifying “the style, values, beliefs, institutions, and behavioral
patterns of the material” (Lee, 2006, p. 500). Audience studies in last 30 years have found out
that audience tend to interpret the meanings of the cultural products by putting them in their
own contexts and mixing with their own experiences (Lee, 2006).

Because movies are typical experiential merchandise, the consumers’ opinions and
experiences of the products are essential. Movie comments are important sources for
producers to evaluate and foresee the performances of the movies and are useful sources for
researchers to study the audience’s movie preference and emotional tendency. Using market-
level data is an effective way to solve the “standard aggregation problem” (Chintagunta,
Gopinath & Venkataraman, 2010, p. 945). Some scholars (Barranco, Rader & Smith, 2015;
Chintagunta, Gopinath & Venkataraman, 2010; Keh et al, 2015; Lee, 2008) examined the
aspects of valence and volume of internet film reviews in a specific geographical area or a
nation. More scholars adopted sentiment analysis to analyze the online movie comments
(Thet et al., 2010; Yang & Chao, 2015; Zhang et al, 2009).
According to Na et al (2010), sentiment analysis is one type of text analysis, “under the
broad area of natural language processing, computational linguistics and text mining, that
analyses sentiment in a given textual unit with the objective of understanding the polarities of
the opinions expressed and the types of emotions toward various aspects of a subject” (p.
823). Some scholars have developed some lexicons or machine learning method to find
whether the polarity of the given text is positive, negative or neutral (Ding, Liu & Yu, 2008;
Kang, Yoo & Han, 2012; Parkhe & Biswas, 2015; Zhang et al, 2009). However, most
sentiment analysis focus on English documents, only a few researches pay attention to
Chinese texts (Lee, 2006; Liu et al, 2015; Yang & Chao, 2015; Yang & Yecies, 2016; Zhang
et al, 2009).
Other perspectives to analyze the global box office include the policies analysis (Su,
2009; Su, 2014), genre study (Fu, 2012; Na, Thura Thet & Khoo, 2010), rating study
(Barranco, Rader & Smith, 2015; Peleja et al., 2013), and so on.
The existing researches are not sufficient to answer my research question because of
several reasons. First, only a few researchers have focused on Chinese market though

Chinese market is rocketing in recent years. Second, because of linguistic problems, foreign
researchers have difficulties in conducting researches using market-level data such as movie
comments from Chinese websites. Last, sentiment analysis on Chinese audience is
insufficient till now but it is important to explain and predict the Chinese box office.
Method and Analytical Framework
This study consists two parts of data, the box office statistics data and movie
comments, and adopts mixed method, including statistics and sentiment analysis. Statistics is
adopted to analyze the box office data. Sentiment analysis is adopted to analyze the movie
comments drawn from the Chinese social media.
Data Collection
Box office data is drawn from CBO (cbooo.cn), a reliable movie database in mainland
China. Top 25 movies in 2015 are drawn upon CBO ranking as shown in table 1. Because
there is one Japanese movie ranked at 24th
in 2015 China box office, this movie is not
included in this study. Therefore 24 movies are analyzed in this paper. I draw box office data
during 2015 calendar year because Chinese theatrical market is growing rapidly every year.
The 2015 box office has reached a new summit comparing to the previous years. The data
during 2015 is more reliable to analyze the current Chinese audience’s film taste and
emotional tenancy.
Table 1

Box office data includes two parts. The first part which is drawn from the CBO website
includes the categories of genre, gross revenue, per ticket price and nation. The second part
includes the rating information which is drawn from Douban.com. Genre is a very important
category because some scholars have conducted several researches regarding the relationship
between genres and box office performance (Parkhe & Biswas, 2015; Fu, 2012; Lee, 2006)
and have concluded that genre is closely related to cultural differences (Lee, 2006; Pamler,
2003). Fu (2012) found out that “genre taste dissimilarities are related positively to cultural
distance between countries, and negatively to the English proficiency of the importing
country” (p. 789). There is a strong connection among genre, linguistics and the acceptation
of the films by the local audience. For example, comedies largely reply on linguistics and is
significantly cultural specific (Lee, 2006; Palmer, 2003; Walsh & Bode, 2004). Some studies

(Lee, 2006; Walsh & Bode, 2004) have found out that fiction movies are more universally
accepted without suffering from the cultural discount. Due to most Chinese audience are
nonproficient in English language and all American movies are translated to Chinese with
Chinese subtitles, linguistic problem and cultural discount can be significant. Therefore,
genre is an important aspect to explain the performance of both Chinese and American
movies in Chinese theatrical market. Gross revenue is the most important aspect to evaluate
the performance of the movies because it directly illustrates the popularity of the movies. Per
ticket price illustrates the market acceptable value of movies.
The other important box office data, audience rating information, is drawn from
Douban (movie.douban.com), which is a leading social media website in China. Some
scholars (Yang & Yecies, 2016) have adopted the data from Douban to analyze Chinese film
market. The rating information including 5-star scale, starting from one star (worst) to five
stars (best) and the overall rating data with 0-10 scale. I draw the rating statistics score of the
24 movies and the amount of audience who participated in rating the movies from Douban.
Adopting statistics method to analyze the box office data is an efficient way to explain the
macroscopical picture of Chinese audience’s film taste.
The second part of the data, which is more important and more time consuming
compared to the first statistics part, is the movie comments. The movie comments are drawn
from the Douban website, the same source as the audience’s rating data. For each movie, 20
movie comments are drawn randomly. All the original movie comment data is in Chinese.
But considering large amount of the movie comments are irrelevant to this study, I randomly
choose 20 relevant comments out of thousands for each movie. The total amount of movie
comments analyzed in this paper is 480.
Analytical Framework

There are two parts of data in this research, therefore, 2 different analytical methods are
adopted. To analyze the first part of the data, which is the box office data, statistics is adopted
to explain the overall performance of both the Chinese and American movies in Chinese
theatrical market in 2015. I Compare the total amount, genre, gross avenue, per ticket price
and rating scores of the movies ranked within top 25 in 2015 between Chinese and American
movies. Sentiment analysis is adopted to analyze the second part of the data, which is the
movie comments on the 24 movies.
The core of sentiment analysis is to define the polarity of a given document. In this
paper, polarity of positive and negative is analyzed. Positive polarity refers to the audience’s
emotion towards the key word is positive. Take “I like this movie” for example. The key
word in this sentence is “movie”. The sentiment towards the key word is “like”. According to
the lexicon from HowNet, “like” is a positive emotion word. Therefore, the polarity of “like”
is positive. The words such as hate, dislike, boring are negative.
There are three main steps to conduct the sentiment analysis to analyze the movie
reviews. The first step is to identify the key aspects from the movie reviews. A large amount
of the researchers adopting sentiment analysis (Thet et al, 2010) on movie reviews identify
the key aspects regarding to the movie technical features. In this paper, I identify the key
aspects including overall, linguistics, actor/ actress, story, effect, U.S. and China, as are
shown in the table 2. Overall aspect includes two key words, movie and production. Overall
illustrates the audience’s general opinion and emotions towards the movies. Linguistics is one
of the key reasons causing the cultural distance (Jeon & Jiao, 2013; Lee, 2006). Linguistic
closeness influences audience reception of a movie (Na, Thura Thet & Khoo, 2010). Aspect
of actor/ actress, is adopted to examine the influence of the actors or actresses in the movies
on Chinese audience’s preference and acceptation to the movies. Aspect of story, as the
content of a movie, contains cultural values and other cultural aspects in it. The universal

themes of Hollywood movies are romance story, friendship and family relations (Lee, 2006).
By identifying the key words under the story aspect, audience’s film taste in movie content
can be identified. Aspect of effect is a main aspect to examine the advanced film production
technologies adopted in Hollywood and Chinese movies. Finally, aspects of U.S. and China
are identified to check if these key words are the main reasons drawing Chinese audience’s
attention to the movies and to check if the features rooted in Hollywood movies can be found
in Chinese movies, vice versa.
Table 2
The second step of sentiment analysis in this paper is using a proper lexicon and
locating the key words in the movie comments data. Zhang et al (2009) summarized some
Chinese linguistic characteristics. First, there is no space in Chinese sentence. Second,
adopting different verbs leads to strong or subtle of emotions. Third, the word dependency is
more obvious in Chinese sentences than English ones. However, because this study focus on
finding out the sentiments towards the identified key words within each aspect. Instead of
giving the sentiment score to the words or sentences, statistics will be adopted to summarize
the sentiments towards all the identified aspects. In this paper, the lexicon of Chinese words,
which is collected from HowNet, is adopted to analyze the polarity of the words. Polarities in
this paper include 4 scales, which are positive emotion and comment, negative emotion and
comment. HowNet is an online open source for scholars and people who are interested in
getting the polarity of the subjective words. The resources are in English and Chinese.

HowNet supplies a useful lexicon for Chinese documents. With in the Chinese lexicon, there
are 836 positive emotional words, 3730 positive comment words, 1254 negative emotional
words and 3116 negative comment words. Some scholars (Zhang et al., 2009) have adopted
the lexicon from HowNet in their sentiment analysis studies. However, with the development
of Internet, Internet language has appeared. Because large amount of Internet words is not
included in HowNet, I adopt dict.baidu.com as a complementary source of HowNet to
identify the polarity of the subjective words. I find out the synonyms from dict.baidu.com
first and then check those synonyms words in HowNet again until I find the polarity of the
synonyms.
The last step of sentiment analysis in this paper is data mining. Because all the key
words in Table 2 are nouns. The sentiment words describing the key words are adjective or
verb words, such as 我喜欢这个电影（I like this movie）. “电影”（movie）is the key
word that I have identified, the sentiment toward “电影”(movie) is “喜欢”（like）.
According to HowNet, “喜欢” is a positive emotional word. All the key words listed in Table
2 are located in the four lists of comments and the sentiment words are marked. Afterwards,
polarities of the sentiment words are identified according to HowNet lexicon. The key
aspects, which are overall, linguistics, Actor/Actress, story, U.S. and China are given positive
or negative polarities.
Results
Box Office Data Statistics
This part presents the statistics results of the box office data and sentiment analysis on
the movie comments data. The table 3 illustrates the descriptive statistics of the box office in
mainland China in 2015. In table 3, I include the gross revenue, per ticket average price,
average number of people for per show, 5 star scales of rating, rating scores and total amount
of people participating in rating the movies. Ranking is based on the gross revenue in 2015 in

mainland China. The Japanese movie ranked at 24 is not included in this research. In the
following part, specific aspects regarding the statistics will be presented.
Table 3
Table 4 illustrates the statistic result based on Table 3 and the comparison between
China and the United States. In table 3, there are 13 Chinese movies and 11 American movies
ranked within top 25 in 2015 Chinese box office. Chinese and American movies dominance
the most popular theatrical market in mainland China. The total gross revenue of Chinese
movies is higher than that of American movies, with the amount of $480,675,799. The
average gross revenue of Chinese movies is also higher than that of American movies, with
the amount of $14,348,203. That is to say, for each Chinese movie, Chinese audience pay
$14,348,203 more than on American movies. From the total gross revenue of each movie, we
learn that more Chinese audience went to cinemas to watch Chinese movies in 2015.
However, the average ticket price of Chinese movies is $0.25 lower than that of American
movies. There are 7 people more to watch each Chinese movie than each American movie.

From these figures, we can conclude that there were more audience going to theaters to watch
Chinese movies than American movies in 2015. That is to say, Chinese movies are more
popular than American movies in Mainland China in 2015.
Table 4
Table 5 illustrates the statistics and the comparison of movie rating data, which is
drawn from Douban. Because the data keeps updating, the data in this paper shows the status
till April 2nd
, 2016. Adopting five-star grading system is “easy to observe the number of
evaluations made as well as the favorability of the evaluations” (Keh et al, 2015, p. 369).
Overall rating is more influential than content in impacting customers’ interest (Keh et al,
2015). I statistically analyze the 13 Chinese movies and the 11 American movies regarding
the rating information drawn from Douban. I adopt three dimensions, minimum, maximum
and average percentage to analyze the rating data. The minimums number illustrates the
lowest percentage of audience who have rated the Chinese or American movies under the
given stars.
Table 5
The overall rating part, including the overall score of the movies and the amount of
audience who have participated in rating. From the overall rating data, we can see that the

minimum overall rating of Chinese movies is significantly lower than that of American
movies, and the maximum overall rating of Chinese movies is slightly lower than the
counterpart of American movies. The total amount of audience who have participated in
rating the Chinese movies is higher than the counterpart rating American movies, which
means the rating score is more reliable and can stand for the majority of Chinese audience’s
opinion. The overall rating data illustrates Chinese audience think American movies are
better than Chinese ones and they prefer American movies to Chinese ones.
In 5-star scale, 5-star means the best and 1-star means the worst. From table 5, we can
see much more Chinese audience rate American movies as five or four-star than Chinese
movies. The number of Chinese audience rate American movies as five and four stars is
twice as high as the number rate Chinese movies. The maximum number of five-star and
four-star of American movies is also slightly higher than Chinese counterpart. However, the
number of 1-star and 2-star rating on Chinese movies is extremely higher than the counterpart
of American movies. The average number of 2-star rating on Chinese movies is around three
times higher than that on American movies. Meanwhile the average number of 1-star rating,
which means the worst movies on Chinese movies is more than ten times higher than the
counterpart rating on American movies. While the number of three-star rating on both
American and Chinese movies seems equal.
From the rating statistic numbers, we can find out that Chinese audience think the
American movies are much better than Chinese ones. Compared to Chinese movies, Chinese
audience prefer American movies. This result support the results concluded from table 4.
The following table 6 explains the connections between genre and the Chinese box
office, as well as the rating scores that Chinese audience have given to the movies under the
genres. Lee (2006) has proved that comedies are with cultural dependency. Lee (2006) also
concluded that action, thriller and science fiction movies are more cultural impendent

because all of them have more or less adopted some universal elements. In action movies
there are always kung fu stars or some kung fu elements, while in thriller movies, there is
always a universal theme such as good beats bad (Lee, 2006). The Hollywood science fiction
movies are based on the universal knowledge of technology and imagination (Lee, 2006). Lee
(2006) also confirmed that the science fiction movies did not suffer from the cultural
discount.
Table 6
In table 6, I compare the amount of both the American and Chinese movies within top
25 box office in 2015. The left part of the chart illustrates the amount comparison and the
right part illustrates the audience’s ratings towards the different genres. Because there are
some movies including one Chinese movie, Wolf Totem (Cao & Annaud, 2015) and two
American movies, Avengers: Age of Ultron (Alonso & Whedon, 2015) and Ant- Man (Feige
& Reed, 2015) are under two different genres. The three movies are calculated under each
genre repeatedly. For example, Wolf Totem (Cao & Annaud, 2015) is under both drama and
adventure genres, I put Wolf Totem (Cao & Annaud, 2015) under both of the genres
separately. The genres of the top 25 movies include action, adventure, animation, comedy,
drama, fantasy, scientific fiction and thriller. From table 6, we can find some significant
points. First, action movies took the first place, with 13 movies in total in 2015 Chinese box

office. American action movies are slightly more than Chinese action movies. The amount of
movies in the rest genres is not large. Second, there was no American movies under comedy,
drama and thriller genres. Meanwhile, the comedy genre is significant because there are 4
comedy movies within top 25 movies, however, all of them are Chinese movies. Therefore,
this study also confirms the conclusion that comedy is dependent on linguistic proficiency
and cultural understanding. Most humor is funny when using its original language.
Translation is not a good way to translate the humor. Third, there is no Chinese movie under
the genre of scientific fiction, whereas there are two American movies under the genre.
Scientific fiction movies are largely based on the technical production in visual and audio
effects. Hollywood is leading the technical production of movies, while the counterpart in
Chinese movies is very weak.
From the rating data in table 6, I extracted the following conclusions. First, the rating
scores of Chinese movies under the same genre vary significantly while the counterpart of
American movies vary slightly. The minimum score of Chinese action movies is 4.3, whereas
the maximum score is 7.4, with 3.1 higher than the minimum score. However, the minimum
of American score is 6.2 and the maximum score is 8.4, with 2.2 higher than the minimum
score. This finding illustrates the Chinese audience’s acceptance of the Hollywood movies
under the genre of action is higher than the Chinese domestic ones. Moreover, both the
maximum and minimum scores of American movies are higher than the counterparts of the
Chinese movies. The larger gap between maximum and minimum scores of Chinese movies
indicates the audience’s preference towards these movies are significantly different. The
score of American fantasy movie is much higher than Chinese ones, with the difference of
1.3. Second, though there are 4 Chinese comedy movies, the difference between the
maximum and minimum scores is 3.5, which is the most significant gap among all the genres.
And the average score is 5.9, which is also the lowest score among all the genres. It implies

that the Chinese audience are not satisfied with the Chinese comedy movies. By contrast,
there is no American movie under the genre of comedy. It implies the Chinese audience’s
acceptance of American comedy is rather low. Less of language proficiency and the
American ways of making humors are different from Chinese ways. Cultural distance is
significant in the genre of comedy. Third, there is no significant gap between Chinese and
American movies in adventure, animation genres. The comparison among genres indicate
genres play an important role in attracting Chinese audience, and genre action is the most
popular one in mainland China in 2015. Last but not the least, among all the genres of the
Chinese movies, Chinese audience prefer the genre of action and comedy to other genres.
While among all the genres of the American movies, Chinese audience’s most interests are in
the action, adventure and sci-fi movies. Action, adventure and sci-fi movies are less
contextual. With the science common sense, audience’s acceptance of the three genres are
directly related to the advanced movie production and computer science. Cultural discount is
less significant in these three genres, whereas is significant in comedy movies. Comedy
movies are largely based on the use of spoken language, local idioms and the dominance
culture. Because of being lack of the language proficiency and the knowledge of American
life style, Chinese audience’s acceptance of American comedy movies is quite low. The
cultural distance is significant between Chinese and American comedy movies.
In conclusion, within top 25 box office of China in 2015, Chinese movies are more
popular than American movies because More Chinese spent more money on Chinese movies.
Moreover, according to the rating data, Chinese audience preferred American movies to
Chinese ones. Third, genre played an important role in Chinese theatrical market, and genre
action was the most favorite one among all the genres in 2015.
Sentiment Analysis Results

This part displays the results of sentiment analysis on the movie comments drawn from
Douban.com. I calculate the amount of negative and positive subjective words according to
the lexicon lists drawn from HowNet. Negative and positive comment and emotion words are
calculated separately, as shown in table 7. Generally, the amount of comment words are
much more than emotion words in both comments on American movies and Chinese ones. In
2015, among all the 480 comments which were randomly collected from Douban.com, total
negative words towards American movies are 91, including 78 negative comment words and
13 negative emotion words. While the total negative words towards Chinese movies are 80,
including 77 negative comment words and 3 negative emotion words. The amount of
negative comment words towards American movies and Chinese movies is almost equal,
while the amount of negative emotion words towards American movies is significantly
higher (around 4 times) than the counterpart towards Chinese movies. The total amount of
negative words towards American movies is more than towards Chinese movies. That is to
say, Chinese audience’s negative emotion and comments towards American movies are
higher than that towards Chinese movies.
Table 7
From the table 7, we can see the total positive words towards American movies are less
than the counterpart towards Chinese movies. The total positive words towards American
movies are 73, including 63 positive comment words and 10 positive emotional words. The
total positive words towards Chinese movies are 99, including 90 positive comment words
and 9 positive emotion words. The positive comment words towards American movies are
around 30% less than that towards Chinese movies. However, the positive emotion words
towards American movies are equal to the counterpart towards Chinese movies.

For the American movies, there are more negative sentiment words compared to the
positive ones, therefore the sentiment polarity of Chinese audience towards American movies
is negative. Whereas there are more positive sentiment words compared to the negative ones
towards Chinese movies, thereby the sentiment polarity of Chinese audience towards Chinese
movies is positive. Further more, polarity towards each key aspect should be carefully
checked and compared.
Table 8
Table 8 illustrates the polarities towards each key aspect, which I have explained in
table 2. In table 8, polarity of negative includes negative comment and emotion, and the
polarity of positive includes positive comment and emotion. From table 8, we can see that the
content aspect account for the largest proportion of the polarity words, which means the
Chinese audience pay the most attention on story, including 主题(theme), 主线(storyline), 剧
情(drama), 情节(plot), 故事(story), compared to other aspects. Whereas aspect of China
including 中国(China), 功夫(Kung Fu), has drawn the least attention. In terms of aspects of
Linguistic, actor/ actress and effect, the negative polarity of American movies is lower than
that of Chinese movies. However, the positive polarity of American movies is only higher in
the aspect of U.S., which include the key words of 美国(U.S.), 好莱坞(Hollywood), 英雄

(hero) and 自由(freedom), than that of Chinese movies. While the positive polarity of
American movies in all other 5 aspects is lower than that of Chinese movies.
In terms of overall aspect, the negative polarity of American is almost equal to that of
Chinese movies, while the positive polarity towards the overall of American movies is
around half of that of Chinese movies. The negative polarity of linguistic aspect of American
movies is as much as 2.5 times higher than that of Chinese movies, while the positive polarity
of linguistic aspect of American movies is as same as the counterpart of Chinese movies.
This finding implicates the significant cultural distance in language. Chinese audience reply
on the Chinese subtitles to understand the English language, whereas the translation is always
not perfect. An interesting sentence in English can be translated to boring Chinese. Moreover,
according to the rating data and findings, there is large cultural distance in language aspect
and significant cultural discount in comedy. Language as the most important part in comedy,
suffers great cultural discount. For the actor/actress aspect, both the positive and negative
polarities of the American movies are significantly lower than the counterparts of Chinese
movies. That means the Chinese audience pay more attentions on the actors and actresses in
Chinese movies compared to the Hollywood movies. In other words, the aspect of actor/
actress significantly influences the Chinese audience’s choice on Chinese movies.
In terms of story, the negative polarity of American movies is around one third times
higher than that of Chinese movies, while the positive polarity of American movies is almost
equal to that of Chinese movies. Therefore, in terms of story, Chinese audience’s sentiment
towards American movies is more negative than towards Chinese movies. Story contains the
core cultural elements. The acceptance of stories illustrates the acceptance of the culture and
the core values. Chinese audience’s positive sentiments towards American movies illustrates
Chinese audience have hybridized the Chinese and American cultures, therefore the cultural
distance is less significant in story aspect. Chinese audience can understand and accept the

core values berried in the Hollywood stories. For the aspect of effect, the negative polarity of
American movies is similar to that of Chinese movies, while the positive polarity of
American movies is much lower than that of Chinese ones. The amount of sentiment words
(total of negative and positive words) on the aspect of U.S. is around 4 times higher in
American movies more than in Chinese movies. In terms of American movies, the score of
negative polarity is equal to that of positive polarity in the aspect of U.S. However, aspect of
U.S. can be found in the comments of Chinese movies. That is to say, from the Chinese
audience’s perspective, some Chinese movies have adopted some American elements, which
are listed under aspect of U.S. in table 2. However, no aspect of China discussed in the
comments of American movies in either negative or positive way. There are only 7 positive
words related to aspect of China in Chinese movies.
In conclusion, the Chinese audience’s sentiment towards American movies is negative
whereas towards Chinese movies is positive. This result is significantly influenced by several
aspects. First, the negative polarity of American movies in aspect of story is significantly
higher than that of Chinese movies. Second, both of the negative and positive sentiment on
American movies towards the aspect of linguistics is much lower than that of Chinese
movies. Last, both negative and positive sentiment towards the aspect of U.S. of American
movies is much higher than the counterpart towards Chinese movies. Because some of the
results of sentiment analysis are significantly different from the statistic results, further
explanations have to be provided.
Comparative Analysis between Box Office Statistics and Sentiment Analysis Results
In this part, I compare the results of statistics and sentiment analysis. According to
statistic results of box office data within top 25 box office of China in 2015, Chinese movies
are more popular than American ones. This finding is reinforced by the results of sentiment

analysis, that the Chinese audience’s sentiment towards American movies is negative
whereas is positive towards Chinese movies.
According to the rating data, Chinese audience prefer American movies to Chinese
ones. However, according to the sentiment analysis, Chinese audience’s sentiment towards
American movies is negative whereas towards Chinese movies is positive. Meanwhile, the
negative polarity of American movies in aspect of story is significantly higher than that of
Chinese movies. This can be viewed as the side effect of adopting universal strategies in
Hollywood movies. Since 2001, 15 years have passed. With the development of streaming
media and video websites, both of the amount of Hollywood movies and the number of
people who can access to Hollywood movies keep growing. According to Leeds-Hurwitz
(2006), social constructionists believe that an individual’s identity is constructed, that is not
developed independently whereas associated with other people. According to Fong and
Chuang (2004), cultural identity refers to “the identification of communications of a shared
system of symbolic verbal and nonverbal behavior that are meaningful to group members
who have a sense of belonging and who share traditions, heritage, language, and similar
norms of appropriate behavior” (p. 6). Chinese audience have watched too many Hollywood
movies in last 15 years and have started to get tired of the Hollywood universal stories.
Though American movies are much more diverse in genres and stories, the ones been
selected for Chinese audience are all Hollywood movies. Through the repeated themes and
stories, Chinese audience’s have been social constructed by American popular cultures that
berried in the Hollywood movies. Therefore, Chinese audience’s cultural identities are social
constructed by the Hollywood movies. In the comments, many people used 套路 (old
patterns) or 没新意(without a new idea) to express their disappointed feelings. The aesthetic
fatigue of American movies has largely influenced the audience’s sentiment towards
American movies. However, because of the large gap between Chinese and Hollywood

movies, Chinese audience are more positive to see the improvement and development of
Chinese film industry. Thereby they are with more encouraged sentiment towards the
improvement and efforts in Chinese movies though plenty aspects of Chinese movies are not
as good as Hollywood ones.
Limitations and Recommendations for Future Research
There are some main limitations in this paper. First, it has exposed that the movie
ranked at the first of the box office had faked the gross revenue. But the CBO and other
Chinese official statistics remained the problematic gross revenue. This paper adopted the
CBO data and remained the total gross revenue because there is no other reliable resource
available. Second, the comment data are randomly drawn from the Chinese social media, but
some users may cancel the registration on Douban.com. In that case, the comments data I
have drawn may be not available for future reference. Third, the sentiment analysis in this
paper is simply calculated the numbers of the negative and positive subjective words instead
of giving each subjective word the certain score according to the SentiWordNet
(http://sentiwordnet.isti.cnr.it/), which has been adopted in a lot of sentiment analysis
researches on English documents. Because the score of each subjective word is different, the
total sentiment polarity may be slightly different from the polarity in this paper. Therefore,
future researches should study the sentiment score of each sentences to get more accurate
sentiment.
Meanwhile, there are some other limitations in this research and suggestions for
future studies. The two most significant limitations are as follows. First, this study focuses on
2015 financial year. The limited time span may be insufficient to illustrate the whole picture
of Chinese audience’s movie taste, but the taste in 2015. For future studies, longer time span
should be analyzed to study the progressively change of the Chinese audience’s movie taste.
Second, because this paper only studies 24 movies, which is not large enough to illustrate the

whole picture of Chinese audience’s film taste because the total amount of movies in the
theatres is much larger than 24 movies. The larger scale of data should be drawn and studied
in future studies.
Conclusions
This paper discusses the topic of Chinese audience’s film taste during 2015. This paper
statistically analyzes the China box office data during 2015 and adopts sentiment analysis to
analyze the Chinese audience’s movie comments data. After carefully comparing the box
office data of the Chinese and American movies, some conclusions can be made. First, within
the top 25 box office of China in 2015, Chinese movies are more popular than American
movies because more Chinese have spent more money on Chinese movies. Second,
according to the rating data, Chinese audience prefer American movies to Chinese ones.
Third, genre played an important role in Chinese theatrical market, and genre action was the
most favorite one among all the genres in mainland China in 2015.
After conducting the sentiment analysis on the movie comments data, some
conclusions can be made. Firstly, the Chinese audience’s sentiment towards American
movies is negative whereas towards Chinese movies is positive. Though the Chinese
audience rate the American movies higher than Chinese movies, the sentiment towards
American movies is not as high as the rating score. On the contrary, Chinese audience rate
the Chinese movies much lower scores, whereas the sentiment towards them is generally
positive. That means, Chinese audience on one hand still recognize Hollywood movies are
leading the theatrical market and much better than Chinese movies in many aspects, on the
other hand, Chinese audience are getting tired of the super hero and universal stories in
Hollywood movies and happy to see that Chinese filmmakers are making efforts to narrow
the gap between Chinese movies and Hollywood ones. Secondly, the negative polarity of
American movie in aspect of story is significantly higher than that of Chinese movies.

Thirdly, both the negative and positive sentiment on American movies towards the aspect of
linguistics is much lower than that of Chinese movies. Finally, in terms of aspect of U.S.,
both negative and positive sentiment of American movies is much higher than the counterpart
of Chinese movies.
Based on all of the findings in this paper, more related researches are suggested to
conduct to thoroughly study the Chinese audience’s film taste.

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