Employees at Wanda Cinema in Beijing's Shijingshan district disinfect and block-off seats in screening halls on Thursday to prevent the spread of COVID-19 for its "restart" screening at midnight on Friday after film showings have been suspended for months. Photo: Li Hao/GT

A series of heart-warming movies including A First Farewell, Coco, and The Pursuit of Happyness will try to heal the souls of Beijing moviegoers, who had to bid farewell to cinemas more than half a year ago due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Sixteen cinemas among 262 cinemas in Beijing launched pre-sale ticket services on Thursday. A day before, a cinema in Xidan, Beijing's Xicheng district, had become the first such venue in the capital to launch pre-sale services. Within a day, the tickets sold out for six of the nine films set to hit cinemas on Friday. 

According to a statement from Chinese ticketing platform Maoyan on Thursday, a total of 118,000 tickets in Beijing have been sold, with the average price of each ticket reaching 32.6 yuan ($4.66).

Cinemas under Wanda Media will be the first batch of cinemas to premiere films starting from midnight on Thursday night in Beijing. Midnight tickets for US fantasy comedy adventure film Dolittle have all sold out according to Chinese ticketing platform Taopiaopiao.

Many movie fans contacted by the Global Times expressed their excitement over the return of Beijing's cinemas.

"No matter what the movie is, I definitely am going to buy a film ticket and sit there to enjoy the feeling of watching a film in a cinema," Zhang An, a 27-year-old white collar worker who bought a ticket for the award-winning Chinese film A First Farewell, told the Global Times. 

According to the Maoyan website, as of Thursday, the top three films Sheep Without a Shepherd, Coco and A First Farewell had earned 1.65 million, 660,000 and 247,300 yuan at the domestic box office since theaters opened in various cities in the Chinese mainland on Monday. 

According to Maoyan, the top three new unreleased movies that Chinese audiences most want to watch are Chinese films Love You Forever, Detective Chinatown Vol. 3 and Legend of Deification, while Oscar-winning film Little Women ranked the seventh. 

Shi Wenxue, a film critic and a teacher at the Beijing Film Academy, told the Global Times that audience enthusiasm for watching Oscar-winning films is certainly not as high as when the 92nd Academy Awards were held back in February.

Oscar films including Little Women and Marriage Story are on the slate to be released in the Chinese mainland but the dates have yet to be announced, while the film 1917 has just confirmed on Thursday to be released on August 7, according to reports.

As cinemas in the capital reopen, they must adhere to strict pandemic prevention measures. 

A visit to a Wanda Media cinema in Beijing's Shijingshan district by the Global Times Thursday afternoon showed that the theater had already begun preparing for the midnight reopening that was coming a few hours later.  

A banner reminding moviegoers to maintain one meter of social distance was been placed at the entrance to the cinema. The banner also had a health code customers must scan in order to enter. Additionally, a bottle of hand sanitizer was provided at the help desk.  

The manager of the cinema told the Global Times that staff had returned to work at the end of June to disinfect the venue to prepare for the reopening. He noted that as there are strict restrictions on food and beverage, the snack bar will remain closed.

As of Thursday, Beijing had not had any new local confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus for 17 consecutive days, meaning that the entire capital is currently classified as a low-risk area, Beijing News reported.