Like a high-flying space robot shot out of the sky, the Transformers film franchise has crash-landed in China — singeing a promising Hollywood business model in the process. 

The fifth iteration of the movie about alien cyborgs battling over earth’s destiny was widely expected to take the China box office by storm. Transformers: Last Knight opened strongly, raking in $126m in its first three days — the fourth-best opening ever in China. But since then it has fallen fast: in its third week, it made only 6.7 per cent of its first-week sales, according to Financial Times calculations based on data provided by ticketing service platform Maoyan.

“Such a massive drop is a bit too dramatic for a blockbuster,” said Huang Guofeng, a film industry expert with Beijing consultancy Analysys International.