China trots out The Eight Hundred, other patriotism fare to rescue Asia’s largest movie box office as Covid-19 lockdown ends

‘The Eight Hundred’ leads box-office takings in an industry interrupted by months of cinema closures due to Covid-19 lockdown

Film studios look to the Golden Week holiday for respite as China’s movie industry heads for worst year since 2011 in box-office receipts

7-MIN READ7-MIN

Published: 9:45am, 29 Aug 2020Updated: 9:45am, 29 Aug 2020

On the evening of August 14, Huang Xin and her boyfriend headed for the premiere of The Eight Hundred , a heroic depiction of Shanghai resistance against the invading Imperial Japanese Army in 1937.

The historical war movie, the first Chinese blockbuster to hit the cinemas since the coronavirus outbreak in January, has been a runaway hit so far. Playing to the patriotic feelings of audience, the 147-minute reel took director Guan Hu a decade to plan and conceptualise, with a whole year spent on building all the production sets that recreated wartime Shanghai.

“It deserves to be the first film I watch in the cinema this year,” said Huang, 27, who took the trouble to go to an unfamiliar theatre in Beijing with wide IMAX screens after work, where she also had her temperature checked and her health code scanned before she was allowed into the screening hall. “The visual effects were great, and there were war scenes that can only be enjoyed on a silver screen in an immersive way.”

The Eight Hundred, pulled from local cinemas at the last minute a year ago and held from distribution without a public explanation, generated 134 million yuan (US$20 million) on its first public screening on August 21. In all, it has raked in 1.5 billion yuan at the box office through Friday, or one-third of the industry.

The takings are a promising sign for China’s US$9 billion movie industry hoping for a reprieve as cinemas reopened in late July after six months of nationwide shutdown. China’s box office of 4.5 billion yuan so far this year could be headed for its worst year since 2011, one analyst estimates, after notching an all-time high of 64.3 billion yuan in 2019.

The upcoming eight-day Golden Week holidays from October 1, in conjunction with China’s National Day, could not have been a better time for movie studios to make up for lost ground. Many potential big-hitters are being lined up for screenings, after the pandemic interrupted their Lunar New Year debuts in February.