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I have submitted my vote for 2017. I mentioned earlier that I this can be easily arrived at by a simple extrapolation of the rate of growth. I have spent some time considering other more complex models, but I have yet to see any concrete reason to discard the simple extrapolation over such a short time period. I have also been seeing evidence that even (presumably) more complicated models mostly match the expected date provided by the simple extrapolation. example The truth is of course that all these models are wrong. For example the extrapolation of growth is hilariously wrong thirty years out; it predicts something like $13 trillion. I simply think that over the course of two years reality won't likely stray far from the model. This is based mostly on a smoothness assumption which I think is perfectly reasonable here. I am much less confident in my other predictions of year of first billion dollar film, and which franchise the film is a part of. I basically guessed 2022 for the year, because I am very uncertain where the box office could be by then. For the franchise, I choose the Monkey King, which I took to mean any film predominantly about the monkey king. This was pretty easy to choose given the reliable track record of such films and the fact that Chinese officials think of it as a quintessential Chinese story. I think that to change my mind about the year of passing domestic box office (give or take one year) one would need to explain why the smoothness assumption is invalid here.

I think I found an interesting statistic to help give weight to arguments by pessimistic prognosticators. In the US there are 117 million households and the average household has an income of $51,939 per year. That means that each household needed to spend $88.54 on movie tickets last year. That amount is 0.17% of the households income. In china there are 772 million employed persons with an average wage of 52,388 CNY or $8,382 per year. 1 That means for china to surpass the domestic BO ($10.36B) each employed person would need to spend $13.42 on movie tickets. That amount is 0.16% of the employed persons wage. At the US proportion (0.17%) the Chinese BO would be $11B. If it is assumed that this is the maximum proportion that is reasonable to expect any citizen to pay. It sets an absolute limit to the growth of the Chinese BO. When there is a limit to an exponentially growing data source, a sigmoid function is a better model than an exponential function. This would suggest that the chinese BO will start slowing down when it hits the midpoint of its maximum i.e. $5.5B. Therefore according to this model, the Chinese BO will start slowing down after this year. (Last year was ~$4.7B.)

I love this topic so much and I don't even know why. I was considering becoming a member just to pose this very question. I think this is the sort of question that you can think about over and over again and never get right. Predicting the future is practically impossible without an accurate model of the system. Most predictions for the size of the chinese box office are logically nondeterministic. This means that the variables that are tracked do not have any causitive explaination for the growth. For example, the most common model that people use is just the extrapolation of a recent trend. e.g. BoxOffice(YearsLater) = ThisYearBO * (1 + RateIncrease) ^ YearsLater Applying this model to 2014 data gives a prediction of 102 million yuan by 2018 which translates to 16.3 billion dollars. If we assume no growth of the domestic market during this period than the chinese market will pass the domestic market by as soon as 2017. This is a completely irrational model, but I have got nothing else right now.