After undergoing strict inspection from China's film censors for its content and quality, Pixar's Coco officially enters the Chinese box office.
The story talks about a boy who is trapped in the afterlife with his ancestors, but tries his hardest to go back to the land of the living before it's too late.
The animated film, has garnered a hefty amount of compliments 11 days since its launch earning $80.5 million (including online ticketing fees) from a mere $1.9m opening on Friday.
The news is remarkable for a few reasons. First, mainly because Pixar movies have never been terribly a big business in China, especially when compared with the recent Illumination films. For example, Finding Dory earned $38 million in China despite a $1 billion+ global total, while Monsters University earned $33m in 2013 and last summer's Cars 3 earned just $20m.
However, Coco is going to give Pixar its first outright blockbuster in the world's largest movie market.
Second, Coco is a story set in Mexico that is explicitly about Mexican characters and steeped in Mexican culture.
It is also one of the rare few films allowed by the Chinese government to be shown in the country as it is often not allowed to show films with supernatural beings in them.
What attracted the crowd?
Probably, one of the few reasons why Coco become such a hit is because it was a Pixar movie that wasn't focused on the usual heroic stories in recent cartoon films.
To add to that, the amount of family values and remembering/honoring long-dead ancestors resonated as much with Chinese audiences despite or because of the ethnicity of its characters.
