Mixed reception for Home Coming, top film at the box office in China on National Day holiday
- Home Coming, drama based on real events about diplomats evacuating Chinese citizens from a war-torn country, hogged the box office on National Day in China
- However, it took much less than last year’s box office king, and other films vying for a share of holiday ticket sales have been a disappointment too so far
Box office takings at Chinese cinemas this year will not make good reading for owners or filmmakers, judging by ticket sales on October 1. The first day of the seven-day National Day holiday is seen as a benchmark for annual box office performance, and takings this year were down by nearly 58 per cent compared to a year earlier.
A record low seven new films were premiered during the holiday. Usually, competition for opening slots over the National Day holiday is fierce.
Moreover, the number of film-goers on October 1 was down more than 50 per cent year on year, to 6.39 million, according to data from Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post.
It did not help that thousands of cinemas did not open because of China’s “dynamic zero” Covid policy. On average one in six were shut, but in the worst-hit regions, such as Xinjiang, Tibet and Ningxia, fewer than one in ten were operating.
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While there are still four days of the holiday left, it will be difficult for cinemas to make up lost ground. From 2019 to 2021, the share of annual box office takings accounted for by takings over the seven-day National Day holiday was 6.96 per cent, 19.57 per cent and 9.32 per cent, respectively.
Of the 262.5 million yuan (US$37 million) in takings on the first day of the holiday, the lion’s share was accounted for by just one film – patriotic drama Home Coming, which took more than 184 million yuan in ticket sales.
Directed by Rao Xiaozhi, it depicts Chinese diplomats Zong Dawei (Zhang Yi) and Cheng Lang (Wang Junkai) leading trapped citizens out of a foreign war zone and returning to China.
Home Coming is based on the true story of Chinese diplomats who helped evacuate Chinese citizens from Libya during the North African country’s 2011 civil war. This was one of the most significant evacuation operations China has carried out, with 35,860 people successfully evacuated.
Some critics said that the portrayal of fragile and complex sides to the diplomats marked a departure from the paradigm for patriotic films of recent years in China. But others criticised the film’s plot as trite. Home Coming is rated 7.6/10 on Douban, the country’s best-known film review site.
“The characters in the film are realistic and vivid, allowing us to see the other side of the heroes as ordinary people,” Zong Ning, the diplomat who is the prototype of the main character, Zong Dawei, said in his review of the film.
“As a former diplomat who worked in the foreign ministry for 18 years, I hope this film brings more attention to the diplomats working on the front line. Each of them has their own story,” Zong added.
The second-most popular release is also a patriotic movie. Based on a true story, Ordinary Hero tells the story of a boy in Xinjiang with a broken arm who must travel 1,400 kilometres within eight hours to have surgery.
Directed by Hong Kong filmmaker Tony Chan Kwok-fai and starring Li Bingbing, the film earned 23.55 million yuan at the box office on National Day, accounting for 8.8 per cent of total takings.
Steel Will, directed by Ning Haiqiang, is another patriotic film. It tells the story of Communist steelworkers’ contribution to the war against the Nationalists. The film grossed only 4.72 million yuan at the box office, with its earnings ranking behind those of three newly released animated films.
It tells the story of a police search for a lost child in the Changbai Mountains of northern China, and at the time of writing had around 2 per cent of the holiday week box office so far.
By comparison, this year’s box office front runner, Home Coming, took only 522 million yuan at the box office in its first four days, lagging behind The Battle of Lake Changjin by a large margin.
According to data from ticketing platform Maoyan, the total box office of Home Coming is projected to be around 1.6 billion yuan.
