‘US AND THEM’ TAKES NO.1
The Chinese mainland box office of the Labor Day holiday that ran from April 29 to May 1 reached a record-high 1 billion yuan ($158 million), a 27.4 percent year-on-year increase.
The biggest winner was Chinese romance movie Us and Them directed by Taiwan-born singer/actress Rene Liu. The film raked in more than 640 million yuan from Sunday to Tuesday, contributing to 64 percent of the total box office revenue during the holiday. This number jumps to 925 million yuan if you add in the 284 million yuan earned during its opening day on Saturday.
The film follows the romance between two young people who leave their hometown to work in Beijing. Though holding a poor 5.9/10 on Chinese review platform Douban, the film’s opening day box office set a new record for a domestic romance film.
Despite the achievement, news of a high rate of ticket refunds on Chinese ticketing platforms have led to accusations of the studio trying to artificially inflate presale numbers.
Some 380,000 tickets for the film on Chinese ticketing platform Maoyan, roughly equivalent to 13 million yuan, were refunded on Saturday, according to an announcement from Maoyan on Sunday.
Taopiaopiao, another major ticketing platform in China, also announced on Wednesday that the film’s ticket refund rate reached a stunning 9.16 percent, “about three times the normal refund rate on our platform.”
The refunds are being investigated according to a statement from China’s State film bureau on Sunday, which referred to the refunds as “abnormal.”
Media speculation about the refunds has ranged from theories that the film’s studio purposely bought a large number of tickets to inflate presale numbers to a possible act of sabotage by the film’s competitors.
“We will work with relevant authorities to investigate and try to steer the discussion back to one that is purely about the movie itself,” Rene Liu Studios said in a statement released on Monday.
Following Us and Them were Chinese crime thriller A or B with 153 million yuan in second place and Dwayne Johnson’s monster movie Rampage at third with 102 million yuan.