China’s National Day holiday box office smashed records, raking in over 1.1 billion yuan ($155 million) by Saturday evening as moviegoers flocked to theaters during the eight-day break. 🍿 The season, running from October 1, is a hotly contested period for film releases, blending blockbuster entertainment with historical storytelling.
Top Films Dominating the Charts
🏆 Leading the pack is The Volunteers: Peace at Last, the epic finale of director Chen Kaige’s trilogy. The film dramatizes the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea (1950–1953), mixing battlefield action with high-stakes diplomacy. Think Oppenheimer meets 1917—but with a Chinese lens.
🔍 Close behind is Evil Unbound, a chilling dive into the atrocities of Japan’s WWII Unit 731. The film exposes harrowing human experiments on Chinese victims—frostbite, poison gas, and vivisection—a stark reminder of history’s darkest chapters.
🎮 In third place, A Writer’s Odyssey Ⅱ serves fantasy fans with a meta-narrative: a novelist battles crises in both reality and his fictional universe. If Inception and Stranger Things had a cinematic baby, this might be it.
Why It Matters
With young audiences driving ticket sales, these films blend education, escapism, and national pride. The mix of historical epics and genre-bending sequels shows China’s film industry catering to diverse tastes—and breaking box office records in the process. 🚀
