"Detective Chinatown 3" tops 100 mln yuan in advance Spring Festival sales

"Detective Chinatown 3" has seen advance ticket sales exceed 100 million yuan (about 15 million US dollars). It will join six other domestic titles to screen in China on Spring Festival, the Chinese lunar new year, which falls on February 12 this year.

The highly anticipated comedy from Wanda Pictures led the advance sales chart for the week-long Spring Festival holiday starting February 11, contributing more than two-thirds of bookings, data from film data and e-ticketing platform Maoyan showed at noon on Sunday.

It is a 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.

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 hallmark of the recovery of the country's box office market, one of the world's largest.

The other six films to be released on the same day are time travel comedy "Hi, Mom"; mobile game turned fantasy film "The Yinyang Master"; "Boonie Bears: The Wild Life," the latest installment in the domestic animated comedy franchise; fantasy thriller "Assassin in Red"; animation "New Gods: Nezha Reborn"; and comedy-drama "Endgame."

Advance sales for the seven titles opened on Friday.

China's box office continued to see robust growth into 2021 after scoring a record high for New Year's Day earnings. The total box office revenue so far in 2021 has exceeded 3.2 billion yuan.