Huge demand for tickets to Beijing fest

BEIJING: There is a huge demand for rarely-screened popular and classic films that will be shown at the eighth annual Beijing International Film Festival.

More than 2,400 tickets for five screenings of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel sold out in only 10 seconds on Taopiaopiao, a ticketing subsidiary of Alibaba Pictures.

James Cameron’s new version of Titanic in the high definition format Dolby Vision was next, with all of its six screenings sold out in 12 seconds. Legendary director Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express was the third-fastest to sell out in 15 seconds.

Tickets also sold out soon to screenings of other movies, such as the restored editions of Rashomon and The Seven Samurai by Japanese film guru Akira Kurosawa, the Dark Knight trilogy by Christopher Nolan, The Virgin Spring by Swedish master Ingmar Bergman, never-beforereleased-in-China superhero flick Deadpool and rarely seen Chinese classics Beijing Bicycle and My Memories of Old Beijing.

Taopiaopiao publicists said this year’s sales have broken several records for the Beijing International Film Festival, and that tickets sold out faster compared with last year’s event.

“But do box office results and records matter?” the ticketing app asked in a celebratory infographic posted on its social network accounts later. “They do matter, but not that much. What matters most is that we love movies and fans.”