A glimpse at Spring Festival Chinese film releases

The week-long Spring Festival holiday starting on Feb 11 is usually a busy, lucrative movie screening season in China. It will see the release of eight titles, all domestic productions, according to the schedule already disclosed by film data platforms.

Detective Chinatown 3, the newest installment in China's well-received Detective Chinatown film franchise, topped the list of most-anticipated holiday films compiled by movie-ticketing platform Maoyan.

A sequel to the 2018 comedy hit Detective Chinatown 2 that grossed 3.4 billion yuan ($526 million), Detective Chinatown 3 is set for release on the Spring Festival that falls on Feb 12. As of Wednesday, it joins six other titles. More than 3.7 million Maoyan users have expressed interest in seeing this film, according to data.

The other six films to be released on the same day are the time travel comedy Hi, Mom starring popular comedians Jia Ling and Shen Teng; the mobile game-turned fantasy film The Yinyang Master that stars Chen Kun and Zhou Xun; Boonie Bears: The Wild Life, the new installment in the domestic animated comedy franchise; Assassin in Red, a fantasy thriller film based on a novel co-starring popular actress Yang Mi; New Gods: Nezha Reborn, a new animated film from Light Chaser Animation (the same production company behind the 2019 animated movie White Snake); Ren Chao Xiong Yong, a comedy-drama co-starring singer and actor Andy Lau.

My First Love is Eighteen Years Old, a romance movie, is set to hit theaters on Feb 14.

China's box office continued robust growth into 2021 after scoring a record high for New Year's Day earnings. The total box office revenue in the first ten days of 2021 exceeded 2 billion yuan, up by more than 730 million yuan year on year.

The market's total earnings in 2020 were 20.4 billion yuan. Of these, the top 10 earners were all domestic productions, according to official figures.