Nezha 2 doing fairly well in SEA so far.
There's a thread that I'm reading on XHS regards the Philippines box office results. Initially, pre-sales for the movie were quite low and most Chinese chalked it up to the current territorial disputes poisoning the mood for Chinese entertainment. However, the movie still debuted at #1 at the Philippine box office for the weekend, what changed? Well, apparently Warner Bros. handled the distribution of the movie in the Philippines and simply put, they actually ran a marketing campaign to promote the movie. Leading many Chinese on that XHS thread to lament the incompetence of Chinese movie studios in promoting Chinese movies overseas.
Its still the case for our world that even as the quality of Hollywood productions decline, their marketing prowess is still unparalleled by any nation. Quality alone isn't enough to promote a movie, what sadly promotes a movie is surprise surprise
actual promotion. Indeed, I look at Godzilla Minus One. Special effects that exceed any recent Hollywood film, strong reviews, and above all an internationally known IP. Yet how much did it make globally? A mere $110 million, including Japan.
This will be a tough nut to crack and funny enough, what's one example Chinese can look to? Well, I would point to that gacha game company that every serious Mainland gamer loves to look down on nowadays, even if they still have much more international players than Black Myth Wukong ever managed to garner. Yes, MiHoYo. Genshin Impact didn't just go viral because of social media. After all most social media fandoms, no matter how big they are, are ultimately echo chambers. MiHoYo actually invested the money they had made from Honkai Impact 3rd and other IPs to market the game globally, so that most gamers on all corners of the globe were aware of it. I'm sure that's simplifying it, but it wouldn't hurt for Chinese movie studios to look at how they did things.
