A film attendee gets her ticket from an automatic machine after booking it online. [Photo by Xu Congjun/For China Daily]

A dark horse to take second place is fantasy-romance Love You Forever, which has brought in over 430 million yuan.

Alongside the domestic film Wild Grass and the Oscar-winning Little Women, the film has created a new box-office bonanza on Qixi Festival, the Chinese equivalent of Valentine's Day, which fell on Aug 25.

It was the highest-grossing day since Chinese theaters reopened, generating over 500 million yuan.

The week between Aug 24 and 30 brought in 1.7 billion yuan, up nearly 83 percent year-on-year. It was the first time this year that market performance exceeded the same period of 2019.

Beijing-based Capital Cinema's deputy general manager Yu Chao considers The Eight Hundred, which started advanced screenings from Aug 14, a turning point to "rescue" the sluggish market, adding that the recovery has surpassed some insiders' expectations.

A coincidence helpful to the war film's popularity is that the national film authority increased theater attendance from 30 percent to 50 percent of total capacity and removed the two-hour length requirement for each screening from Aug 14, as China effectively brought the epidemic under control.