Film industry eyes more success after record holiday box office

Virtual reality becoming reality

A record 44 billion yuan's worth of tickets were sold by cinemas in China in 2015.

The flourishing of the Chinese film market can be at least partly credited to market liberalization in 2003, when annual box office in China reached a mere 1 billion yuan.

In that year, authorities doubled the number of foreign films cinemas could show to 20 and allowed foreign enterprises to invest in Chinese cinema chains. China's film market has since posted an average annual growth of 30 percent.

Last year, taking in 27.1 billion yuan in ticket sales, or 61.58 percent of the country's total, domestic films maintained clear dominance in China despite fierce competition from Hollywood.

The industry looks likely to continue its boom.

Growing customer demand and investments have served as the "twin engines" for the industry's success. Next, it will harness new technology like virtual reality, as well as making more use of the Internet, said Liu.

With China aiming to increase the value of its creative industry to 100 billion yuan by 2020, insiders agree it is only a matter of time before the country overtakes the United States to become the world's largest film market.