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 According to the Motion Picture Association of America, China overtook Japan as the biggest market outside the U.S. and Canada combined, with sales there growing 36 percent to $2.7 billion.
As a whole, the Asian box office grew 15 percent to $10.4 billion, while in Europe, Middle East and Africa, ticket sales fell 1 percent to $10.7 billion. Latin American revenue rose 6 percent to $2.8 billion.
In the U.S. and Canada, sales rose 6 percent to $10.8 billion, driven higher primarily by moviegoers who attend once a month or more.
Those super fans represent only 13 percent of the population but bought 57 percent of all movie tickets, an increase of 7 percentage points from a year ago. Super fans grew as a share of the population by 2 percentage points.
About two-thirds of people in the U.S. and Canada saw a movie at least once last year.
And even as the number of 3-D movie screens grew, enthusiasm for the format appeared to plateau. There were 9 percent more 3-D screens in the U.S. and Canada, but revenue from 3-D showings was flat at $1.8 billion.
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 Globally, the number of 3-D screens rose 27 percent to 45,500.
The lackluster 3-D result was partly due to the six major studios that make up the MPAA releasing fewer movies in the format. Those studios
-- Sony, Universal, 20th Century Fox, Disney, Paramount and Warner Bros. -- released 36 3-D movies in 2012, down from a peak of 45 in 2011.
Attendance for 3-D movies peaks among teenagers but declines rapidly as people get older, MPAA data showed.
[Associated
Press]
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