January box-office earnings hit record high
China DailyA woman walks past movie posters in a cinema in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang province on Jan 27, 2023. Buoyed by huge Spring Festival movie ticket sales, the first month of the 2023 took a giant leap to become the highest-grossing January of all time in China, according to the China Film Administration. The appealing lineup of seven new movies — coupled with China's optimization of COVID-19 control measures, the first such adjustment in three years — further made the January box-office earnings soar, some analysts said. Full River Red — director Zhang Yimou's twist-studded story loosely inspired from a loyal general who was framed and executed — topped the charts, followed by sci-fi movie The Wandering Earth II and animated film Boonie Bears: Guardian Code in second and third places. Zhang's film generated so much enthusiasm among its audiences that many visited the memorial sites of Yue Fei, the Southern Song Dynasty general whose story inspired the movie, in provinces such as Zhejiang and Henan.