Moviegoers watch the film The Eight Hundred on August 14 in Shanghai. Photo: cnsphoto

China's pre-sale movie bookings for the upcoming Spring Festival holiday season hit 400 million yuan ($61.86 million) on Saturday. The optimistic numbers are raising hope for China's cinemas, many of which were on the brink of bankruptcy during the pandemic.

According to statistics from Maoyan, a Chinese ticketing platform, 400 million yuan of pre-sale bookings have been made for the Spring Festival, which falls on February 12.

A worker surnamed Li at a cinema in Beijing told the Global Times that the Spring Festival box office might be picking up fast, as pre-sale bookings have shown momentum. "This Spring Festival box office will be supported by some blockbusters," Li said. "Detective Chinatown is the third of the series, and it is promising because of its high popularity."

According to Maoyan, the movie Detective Chinatown 3 alone attracted more than 100 million yuan of bookings in 36 hours, a record for a domestic movie. 

However, due to recent flare-ups of COVID-19, authorities have tightened restrictions on public gatherings. In Beijing, where many people will need to stay put for the Spring Festival, cinemas were told to keep the occupancy rate below 50 percent.

"The restriction will put some pressure on the box office, compared with market expectations," Shi Wenxue, a Beijing-based film critic and industry analyst, told the Global Times on Sunday.

"The total box office of this Spring Festival is expected to be around 5 billion yuan, slightly below 5.9 billion from 2019," Shi added. 

The suggestion that people stay in the cities where they work might also affect this year's box office, Shi said. According to a report from a research department under Alibaba, from 2017 to 2019, around 15 percent of the box office will shift from first- and second-tier cities to third- or fourth-tier cities.

"For this year, cinemas in smaller cities might have fewer visitors than what they would normally expect for the festival season," Shi said. 

However, for many theaters, there is still a beam of hope that the time of running at a loss due to the pandemic is almost over. 

The film industry was hit hard by prolonged pandemic closure. In May, the China Film Association released a survey showing that around 40 percent of Chinese cinemas were shut down permanently.

A ticket salesperson at Beijing's Suning Cinema told the Global Times on Sunday that the week prior to the Lunar New Year's Eve saw fewer ticket sales this year compared with the same period in 2020.

He said that the cinema was suddenly closed on Lunar New Year's Eve last year following the sudden COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, Hubei Province. Many consumers got refunds for their tickets and the cinema's income just evaporated. 

Looking ahead, however, the salesperson believed that the whole Spring Festival holiday season could be seen as a turning point for cinema industry recovery with more movie-goers entering theaters as the virus is broadly brought under control.