Actress, director and pop singer Vicki Zhao

The Chinese box office rocketed on the release of So Young, directorial debut of actress Vicki Zhao. With a whopping RMB 45 million in receipts, the movie shattered opening day box office records for a non-3D Chinese-language film. By day 16 the lowbudget rom-com had grossed RMB 600 million.

China’s movie box office surpassed RMB 900 million during the International Labor Day week (April 29 to May 5). Iron Man 3 earned RMB 396 million and So Young RMB 332 million, according to China Film Distribution and Exhibition Association statistics. These figures are all the more impressive when bearing in mind that, at the end of the year 2000, China’s total annual box office earnings amounted to just RMB 950 million.

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Everyone in China knows So Young director Vicki Zhao. She became famous overnight in 1998 for her starring role in the highly successful TV drama My Fair Princess. The series scored record ratings – a 54 percent audience share the first season and 65 percent the second. But this was partly because at that time Chinese audiences had forsaken cinema for TV.

The same year, Zhao’s fellow Beijing Film Academy graduate Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu, about a provincial pickpocket, won the Wolfgang Prize and Netpac Award at the 48th Berlin International Film Festival’s Young Filmmakers Forum. The leading sixth-generation director went on to win laurels at both Venice and Cannes. Jia, like most of his peers, wanted his films to be admired for their artistic, individual quality rather than the box office they generated. Their box office results were consequently lackluster.