(Yicai Global) April 6 -- China’s cinema ticket sales plunged 86 percent over the three-day Qingming Festival long weekend that ended yesterday from the same period last year, as more than half of the country’s movie theaters are shut due to the latest Covid-19 outbreak and also because of a lack of new releases, Securities Daily reported today.

Box office takings from April 3 to April 5 came to CNY112 million (USD17.6 million), the report said, citing statistics from online data provider Cbdio. It is the lowest figure in the past ten years with the exception of 2020 when many movie theaters were also closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Only 46.3 percent of the nation’s cinemas, some 5,568 theaters, were open as of April 5, according to Cbdio data.

The large-scale shuttering of movie theaters will probably last a long time, a media industry brokerage analyst said. Smaller cinemas will struggle to survive and larger firms will take up more and more market share.

“We are losing money every day,” a cinema manager in Beijing told the reporter. The company predicted business would be bad over the long weekend but did not expect it to be as bad as it was. The attendance rate was 4 percent on average, with only two to three people at a screening at times.

There are many reasons for the box office disaster during Qingming this year making it different from previous years, said Zhu Yuqing, chief executive of Beijing Juyinghui Film Culture. There weren’t many new releases and those films on offer weren’t very attractive. Also, the high ticket prices during the Chinese New Year holiday in February put movie goers off, he added.

There are 10 blockbusters set to be released for the next major public holiday in May, said Zhang Rongdi, an industry analyst at Cbdio, adding that they will be worth the wait.

Editor: Kim Taylor