Proving that its appeal extends beyond popular actresses with lucrative yogurt contracts, the Warcraft movie is apparently already setting box-office records in China. According to Chinese box office analyst Jonathan Papist, a writer for China Film Insider, the new movie’s midnight opening earned 55.4 million Chinese yuan (or $8.4 million) in a single night. That surpasses the record previously set by last year’s Furious 7, which ultimately went on to bring in $390 million in the country over its entire run. (For the record, that’s more than the movie managed to pull in domestically, by quite a bit.)
The lucrative nature of China’s market for big blockbuster spectacles has become a well-heeded reality in the film business, with studios sometimes filming special, China-centric scenes for flicks expected to do well overseas and stars like Bruce Willis signing on for films in the country’s growing movie industry. Foreign movie companies do occasionally have to contend with the country’s limits on what kinds of films are allowed to be shown—following, for instance, a 2011 ban on time-travel movies that might make people nostalgic for the past—but the potential rewards for a crowd-pleasing CGI smash-em-up like Warcraft are usually too tasty to resist.
