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More than 1,000 days and a dozen productions later, the powerful regulators of the Film Administration of China,

in the home box office, have decided that it is time to lift the ban on Marvel films, blocked in the Asian giant since mid-2019.

It has been the official Marvel account on Weibo, the Chinese brother of Twitter, who has given the good news to Chinese moviegoers: the titles

and

will be released in early February in movie theaters all over the world. the country, just after the long Chinese New Year holiday.

Officially, there has been no explanation for Marvel's return.

Nor was there one when it was decided that the premiere of

, in April 2019, would be the last.

A veto that coincided with the height of the trade war between China and the United States and the beginning of a new Cold War between the two superpowers that splashed, as some analysts pointed out at the time, directly into Hollywood.

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Disney, above all, lost strength -and many hundreds of millions-

in the second largest film market in the world, with an audience that also always welcomed the adventures of superheroes with great enthusiasm in the merchandising of the Asian country.

As an example, the sum of the collection of the prequels of the next two films that will be screened in February, amounted in 2018 to around 116 million euros in China.

"Marvel movies have continued to be popular here, even if they weren't in theaters because

out there, which are easily accessible with a VPN. Especially the younger ones, we use that system to regularly bypass censorship and watch banned movies or browse Western social networks," explains a boy named Liu in a Shanghai cafe.

The unexpected movement of the Film Administration, which is the division of the propaganda department that decides which foreign films can be released in the country, coincides with the success that the

, which has earned more than 200 million euros in China so far.

After a timid box office premiere in December because it coincided with the first major explosion of Covid infections since the beginning of the pandemic, James Cameron's film was picking up in theaters in big cities when the peak of infections reached and much of it of the population passed the virus and resumed an old normality that has been difficult to embrace after freeing itself from the yoke of the draconian policy of mass confinement under Covid zero.

knows this well , which was very affected at the end of 2022

: the annual box office -with a release of 263 films, a decrease of 38% compared to 2021- was 29,400 million yuan (3,880 million euros). , much lower than the 47,000 million yuan of the previous year, with notorious box office failures of Hollywood productions such as

-the first superhero movie made in the USA to arrive in China in more than two years, which barely raised 20 million of euros- or Fantastic Beasts: Dumbledore's Secrets.

According to official figures, 85% of the revenue in 2022 was generated by local films.

The Hollywood Reporter

reported last year in a report that, beyond the political brawl between Beijing and Washington, censorship and restrictions due to Covid, for years there has been a trend of

as its national film industry produces increasingly successful films of its own.

In 2012, Hollywood movies amassed a 48.2% share of China's box office receipts.

But in 2021 it was 12.3%.

That year, the Asian powerhouse surpassed the US as

.

Since 2019 - apart from the previously mentioned case of Avatar - only two Hollywood films have earned at least 100 million dollars, while more than 20 Chinese titles exceeded that figure.

In those two years with theaters at half gas due to the continuous blockades, Marvel movies did not pass the filter of Chinese regulators.

Last year, for example, it was published that the long-awaited release of

was stopped because the film's distributor, Sony, refused to accept the Chinese administration's request to remove a scene in which the Statue of Liberty came out.

In China, as often happens, there was silence about it.

Silence also

when various reports appeared in the international media pointing out that

had been blocked due to the inclusion of a character with two lesbian mothers, or that

did not see the light because its director, Chloé Zhao, who was born in Beijing, had been highly critical in various interviews with the Chinese regime.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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