This Year's Spring Festival Left Box Office Records in Tatters

While this year's Spring Festival may have been somewhat subdued for many in China, with Covid-19 ensuring limited travel and low-key celebrations for millions of people, the country's box office has been anything but.

Seeing box office records smashed during the Lunar New Year holiday in China hasn't exactly been unusual in recent years, but this year we’re seeing not one but two films absolutely destroying records. Both family time travel comedy Hi, Mom and slapstick action adventure Detective Chinatown 3 have achieved massive box office takes, even while the latter gets slammed on reviews site Douban.

Detective Chinatown 3 smashed the opening weekend box office record previously held by Avengers: Endgame after taking in a whopping 424 million USD over its first three days. The figures appear to have vindicated the decision to delay the film’s release by an entire year after 2020’s Spring Festival release schedule was decimated by Covid-19.

Variety put those mind-boggling numbers in some interesting context: “In three days, ‘Detective Chinatown 3’ made over $100 million more than did Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” worldwide, and nearly triple the global sales of ‘Wonder Woman 1984.'”

Meanwhile, Hi, Mom has emerged as this year’s dark horse at the Spring Festival box office. The film has earned writer and star Jia Ling top spot among China’s highest-grossing movies led by a female director after taking 161 million USD on its opening weekend.

Despite numerous pandemic-related restrictions still in place in many theaters across the country — including alternate seating and mandatory face coverings — China’s box office broke 1 billion RMB (155 million USD) a day consecutively for the first three days of the Lunar New Year holiday, the first time such a feat has been realized.

The extraordinary box office performance comes even as Detective Chinatown 3 continues to get panned on notoriously hard-to-please user ratings site Douban. At time of writing, the film has a score of 5.7 out of 10 there, putting it into Disney’s Mulan territory on the platform.

While one of the most uprated reviews on Douban includes the 💩 emoji, others blast the movie as “boring” and compare it unfavorably with the Spring Festival Gala. One pithy write-up provides a breakdown of the film’s 136 minute run-time: “110 minutes of running around, 15 minutes of the parents’ story, 10 minutes of deduction, + 1 minute of ads.”

The Douban score for the film even became a trending hashtag in its own right on Weibo during the first few days of the nationwide New Year holiday. As some accused the platform’s users of snobbery, others felt the movie’s box office success showed just how bored people were this Spring Festival, after many in the country opted to stay put rather than travel due to fears around Covid-19.

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