"Detective Chinatown 3" saw advance ticket sales for the weeklong Spring Festival holiday, usually a competitive season for films in China, top 300 million yuan (46 million U.S. dollars) by Sunday morning.
The figure represented two-thirds of the market's total bookings for the holiday starting Feb. 11, according to data compiled by film data and e-ticketing platform Maoyan.
The highly anticipated comedy from Wanda Pictures was originally set to be released during the same holiday a year ago but was postponed due to COVID-19. It will now join six other domestic titles to screen in China this Spring Festival, the Chinese lunar new year, which falls on Feb. 12 in 2021.
It is the sequel to the 2018 comedy hit "Detective Chinatown 2," which generated nearly 3.4 billion yuan at the Chinese box office. More than 4 million Maoyan users have expressed interest in seeing the upcoming film.
The other six films opening on the same day are time travel comedy "Hi, Mom," fantasy thriller "A Writer's Odyssey," mobile game turned fantasy film "The Yinyang Master," comedy-drama "Endgame," animated fantasy "New Gods: Nezha Reborn," and "Boonie Bears: The Wild Life," which is the latest installment in the domestic animated comedy franchise.
"Hi, Mom" ranked second on the advance holiday sales chart compiled by Maoyan, with bookings totaling more than 60 million yuan as of Sunday morning.
China's box office continues to see robust growth in 2021 after scoring record-high earnings on New Year's Day. The country's total box office revenue so far in 2021 exceeds 3.5 billion yuan.
As the first such moviegoing period following the COVID-19 outbreak, the upcoming holiday is of great importance to China's film industry and will be seen as a further mark of recovery in the country's box office market, one of the world's largest.
Source: XSS/ Xinhau
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