China’s box office riding Lunar New Year wave to record Spring Festival holiday haul

China’s box office bookings have set a record for the first six days of any Lunar New Year holiday period, surpassing 7.6 billion yuan (US$1.05 billion) as of Monday morning, according to box office tracker Maoyan Pro.

With the holiday starting on January 28 this year, bookings have been up 9 per cent from the same corresponding period in the lunar calendar last year. The eight-day holiday ends on Tuesday.

China’s Spring Festival holiday tends to be lucrative for the film industry, as people spend time with family and most services are closed. Box office earnings are also considered a way to gauge consumption interest, which has been relatively weak in the past year amid economic struggles.

The animated fantasy-adventure sequel Ne Zha 2 has been leading the Lunar New Year box office, reaching 3.5 billion yuan in revenue as of Monday morning with 68.5 million tickets sold. It has surpassed last year’s best-performing film, YOLO, a comedy-drama that earned 3.4 billion yuan.

Also as of Monday morning, the comedy-mystery buddy film Detective Chinatown 1900 had grossed more than 1.9 billion yuan, ranking second at China’s box office. Meanwhile, the second instalment of the Fengshen trilogy, Creation of the Gods II, had generated 900 million yuan in revenue.

On the whole, China’s film industry has been still struggling to recover to levels seen before the pandemic, when three years of Covid lockdowns restricted public gatherings and decimated the domestic box office.