China's box office is running 30% behind last year, and Golden Week did not rescue it
Photo by Rafi Mohammed on Unsplash
China's week-long National Day holiday, the biggest cinema window in the calendar after Lunar New Year, ended on Wednesday with the national box office running close to 30% behind the same point in 2025.
Year-to-date takings stand at $4.52bn, down 29.7% year on year, according to Artisan Gateway figures reported by Variety. The holiday itself passed ¥900m including advance sales by Wednesday, state broadcaster CCTV said, after five consecutive days above ¥100m.
Chen Sicheng's forensic procedural Traces of Justice led the holiday. It took RMB208.9m over the 2–4 October weekend for a cumulative $41.8m, Variety said, with Beijing Joy Fun Pictures' comedy Mr. & Mrs. Pardon second on $24.5m.
The National Day holiday closed on Wednesday. The year-to-date total is down almost a third, after a Lunar New Year that fell by more than a third.
The decline is not a holiday problem. Lunar New Year takings fell 38.6% against 2025 across the first six days, the Hollywood Reporter reported in February, despite Pegasus 3 opening above $300m.
The one bright period was summer. The June-to-August season grew 4.45% to ¥12.498bn on a record 38.51m screenings, growth achieved by running more shows at lower average ticket prices rather than by selling more expensive seats.
Domestic films have held the market throughout. Chinese titles took 71.71% of the summer season, and have remained dominant from the start of the year through the holiday, Xinhua said.
Nine films have crossed ¥1bn in 2026, more than the eight that managed it across the whole of 2025, a market where the top end is holding up and everything beneath it is thinning out.
British audiences will get the holiday's biggest film shortly. Trinity CineAsia has taken UK, Ireland and Malta rights to Traces of Justice from Beijing's Blossoms Entertainment, Screen Daily reported on 2 October.
Cedric Behrel, managing director of Trinity CineAsia, said the company saw potential to reach both existing Asian cinema audiences and fans of true-crime and detective stories, having previously released three Detective Chinatown films by the same director in Britain.
In its holiday coverage, CCTV devoted much of its reporting not to ticket sales but to film-induced tourism: visitors travelling to Jiangmen in Guangdong to see the qilou buildings from the crime film V, and bakeries there selling out of the pineapple buns that appear in it.
WHERE TO WATCH IN THE UKTraces of Justice (神探之痕迹) UK and Ireland cinemas from 30 October 2026, with previews from 17 October. Distributor: Trinity CineAsia.
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