Tom Cruise's MI 4 rules Chinese box office

Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise seems to have outdone himself at the Chinese box office over the past week, with his latest film Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol taking over at the top of the box office charts.
American studio Paramount has announced the film collected an estimated 157 million yuan (19 million euros) on its first weekend of release, outstripping by five times the opening efforts of the last film in the franchise, 2006's Mission: Impossible III.
China has just come out of the Lunar New Year holiday period -- traditionally a boom time for cinemas -- and the latest MI film has been going head-to-head with Robert Downey, Jr.'s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, which has now picked up and estimated 145 million yuan (17.4 million euros) since its release on January 15.
It's yet another indication of the current power of the Chinese box office, reaffirmed this week by the Shanghai-based industry watcher Artisan Gateway, which has confirmed reports that around 13 billion yuan (1.6 billion euros) in tickets were sold across the nation in 2011, a rise of 29 percent year on year.