Box Office Mojo error: cinema screens in China

Before I start this post, I want to emphasize that this error does not pertain to any one title, but to many of them, and I don't have the correct data to replace the incorrect data. So I am going to skip the links to the affected titles on IMDb and BOM which the staff might otherwise be looking for.

Looking at the past weekend's box office results from China on boxofficemojo.com, I noticed that the number of theaters for the top movies was unusually high.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/2026W30/?area=CN

• All Wishes Come True! was listed as playing in 796,388 theaters.
• Kung Fu Soccer was listed as playing in 1,200,633 theaters.
• A Part of Me was listed as playing in 272,912 theaters.
• The Decisive Moment was listed as playing in 159,831 theaters.

Those numbers seemed very high to me. For comparison, the widest release film in the USA last weekend (Moana) was listed as playing at 4,015 theaters. The population of China is about four times that of the USA, so I would expect that movies would play in more theaters there, but not over 100,000 or even over 1,000,000 theaters.

In fact, according to CGTN.com (the website of a Chinese news network), the total number of cinema screens in China at the end of 2025 was 93,187. (See https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-01-01/China-s-2025-film-industry-closes-on-a-7-4b-high-note-1JzTmAJy9sk/p.html where this is mentioned.) 

That means that the theater numbers given on BOM are impossible.

(As an aside: I realize that a movie can play on multiple screens in the same theater, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that different countries have different standards as to whether they count the number of screens where a movie is playing vs. the number of theaters. That doesn't affect the point I'm making, since the number of theaters or screens where each film is playing in China must be no more than the number of screens in the entire country.)

I note that this problem doesn't seem to have started until the weekend of May 8-10, 2026 (see https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/2026W19/?area=CN ) when movies started being listed as playing at over 100,000 theaters in China. Earlier in the year (see https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/2026W16/?area=CN for an example), most films did not have their number of theaters in China listed, but when they did, it was a number in the 10,000 to 13,000 range, which is plausible. Apparently sometime in May, the number of theaters for each film started getting reported more often but in a wildly incorrect way.