"Detective Chinatown 3" saw advance ticket sales for the weeklong Spring Festival holiday, usually a busy moviegoing season in China, top 500 million yuan (about 78 million U.S. dollars) by Wednesday 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 latest installment in Wanda Pictures' well-received "Detective Chinatown" comedy film franchise was originally set to be released during the same holiday a year ago but was postponed due to COVID-19.
"Detective Chinatown 3" 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.
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 100 million yuan as of Wednesday morning.
China's box office continues to see robust growth in 2021 after scoring record-high earnings on New Year's Day. The total box office revenue so far in 2021 has exceeded 3.7 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 box office market, one of the world's largest.