China is poised to become the world's biggest and most lucrative market for motion pictures over the next three years as its increasingly affluent population is expected to spend more and more money on movie tickets, according to the BBC.   

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Chinese moviegoers have spent more than $6.3 billion on film tickets so far this year, affording the country's theater owners 48 percent more money from the box office than they did this time last year.  Chinese films have accounted for 59 percent of the country's box office earnings over the last four quarters.

Rich Gelfond, CEO of IMAX Corporation, told The Financial Times that demand for filmed entertainment in China has held strong even as the country's economy has slowed.  "The gloomy predictions that have come out of exports and the manufacturing sector don't seem to apply to discretionary spending," he explained.

While consumers in the US still spent more of their hard-earned cash on movies this year, their share of the market is expected to dwindle as Chinese movie patrons begin buying more tickets.  Cinemas in the US sold some 1.3  billion tickets worth $10.9 billion in 2013.  Ticket sales appear to have fallen to their lowest since 1993 in the US as American movie theaters have so far sold just over a billion movie tickets over the past four quarters, taking in a total $9.9 billion at the box office.

Universal Studios' Jurassic World is the highest grossing film in the US to date this year, raking in some $652 million from the domestic box office.  Disney's Avengers: Age of Ultron follows, earning just over $459 million in domestic ticket sales.   

In China, official figures have the Chinese CGI movie Monster Hunt earning some $379 million from the box office, making it China's highest grossing film of all time.  But the figures currently attributed to the movie may undergo some changes soon. 

The makers of the CGI hit -- which opened last summer -- have come under fire for inflating the movie's ticket sales figures in an effort to break records in China's increasingly competitive movie market.  The film's distributor Edko has admitted that the count included some 40 million tickets handed out for free to children, workers and disabled moviegoers under Beijing's mandatory "public welfare screening" policy. 

China's moviegoers meanwhile appear to have acquired a taste for Hollywood action movies.  US action and fantasy films currently comprise half the titles on China's all-time top 10 box office leaders,  with Avatar, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and Titanic 3D occupying positions in the top five.

Tagsbox office sales, filmed entertainment, Monster Hunt