Box office fraud shadows China's film market

Meanwhile, the number of theaters surged from 872 in 2002 to 4,545 in April. The number of screens in counties also surged rapidly, now accounting for 30.2 percent of the total.

"The explosive expansion caught the film watchdog off guard," Shi said, adding that it was just too many too soon for SAPPRFT to manage.

Lack of supervision, in turn, made room for theater chains to conspire with cinemas to cheat filmmakers and other parties out of ticket sales, Shi said.

However, the fraud has mainly been confined to second-tier and third-tier cities, where supervision from both the government and filmmakers is relatively weak. Most of the 26 cinemas that were found to be cheating on box office figures this year were located in small cities in provinces including Shandong, Shanxi and Henan.

Their methods for cheating on ticket sales included issuing handwritten tickets or using a "dual software system" to sell film tickets without registering the real box office gains to a uniform system, according to Huang Qunfei, general manager of the New Film Association.

Industry experts hold that real box office sales are at least 10 percent more. Though fraud seems inevitable, many experts believe it is stoppable.

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