Hollywood studio executives should start their summer Mondays by bowing and praying to the east. That's because this Monday, as in so many recently, Chinese audiences have bailed out a high-profile blockbuster that underperformed on its home turf. Chinese movie-goers are becoming the saviors of summer for an industry that's having trouble connecting with franchise-fatigued American movie-goers.

Over the weekend, China came to the rescue of Paramount Pictures and Transformers: The Last Knight, which opened at a franchise-low $69 million domestically but made a franchise-high $123 million in China over the weekend. It's a pattern that mirrors the lopsided performance of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales ($170 million in China vs. $154 million here) and Universal’s The Fate of the Furious ($393 million in China vs. $225 million here).

“China loves the spectacle,” said Megan Colligan, Paramount’s worldwide president of marketing and distribution. “More mature markets like the U.S. and Europe are atrophying. But in newer markets like Latin America and Asia, they like it when their favorite movies come back bigger and better.”

For now, anyway. China’s marketplace is maturing fast, and its appetite for Hollywood grandeur may slow. “That’s the big unknown,” says one source who conducts box-office research for movie studios. “They’re eating up all of our franchises now. Will they always? It’s hard to please every audience.”

At the moment, studios have one major advantage they've lost at home: Chinese moviegoers rely less on critic-review aggregation sites like Rotten Tomatoes, and more on the audience scores posted on ticketing Web sites, according to Colligan. “You can have audience playability even if your critical reaction is not super strong,” Colligan said. Certainly that helps on a franchise like *Transformers,, which film critics have never cared for—the Rotten Tomatoes score for the latest is a dismal 15 percent.

Without critics to stand in the way, studios just have to build enough hype for their projects—or “Create the heat,” in the words of Duncan Clark, president of Universal Pictures International. For the latest Transformers, Paramount packed 5,000 people into a sports stadium in the southern China city of Ghanzhou for the world premiere. Director Michael Bay thanked Chinese fans for their loyalty; Chinese pop singer Jason Zhang performed a ballad; and Chinese social-media sites live-streamed the event to fans, including those in 400 theaters owned by China's Dalian Wanda Group.