China's Spring Festival box office returns to the big screen

A poster of the movie Full River Red draws visitors outside a cinema in Shanghai, Jan 25, 2023. PHOTO VCG BEIJING -- After enduring the negative impact of COVID - 19 China's cinemas welcomed crowds of moviegoers during the Spring Festival holiday.

This is the first spring festival holiday after the country's response to the virus was adjusted earlier this month.

The audiences are all back! Dong Wenxin, a cinema manager in the eastern Chinese city of Jinan, was thrilled to see the return of crowds to her theater. They are back. It is usually a lucrative period in China.

The holiday box office sold 117 million tickets as of Friday, generating a whopping revenue of 6.16 billion yuan $909 million, according to box office tracker Maoyan.

The earnings of the same holiday last year overtook that, making this year's Spring Festival holiday the second highest-grossing to date.

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Six domestic titles were released on the Spring Festival, or Chinese Lunar New Year, which fell on January 22 this year.

The twist-filled Full River Red was Zhang Yimou's first foray into the suspense plus comedy genre. The ending of the film moved many to tears with thousands of soldiers recitation of a prose by patriotic Song Dynasty 960 -- 1279 General Yue Fei in concert. The historical drama raked in 2.34 billion yuan, accounting for about 38 percent of the box office total.

It was immediately followed by Guo Fan's The Wandering Earth II, a prequel to the 2019 sci-fi blockbuster The Wandering Earth, which pulled in 1.98 billion yuan. Guo described the filming of space elevators, which amazed many moviegoers who were fans of Liu Cixin's original novel, as a nightmare.

The latest installment in one of the longest-running movie franchises in China was third on the chart, as was the animated film Boonie Bears: Guardian Code. The other films are Cheng Er's spy actioner Hidden Blade, which stars Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Deep Sea, an animated fantasy by Tian Xiaopeng, the helmsman of Monkey King: Hero is Back, Five Hundred Miles, a comedy starring Zhang Xiaofei, best known for her part in the 2021 dark horse Hi, Mom.