Actor Chow Yun-fat and actress Carina Lau promoting The Man From Macau II in 3D.[Photo by Jiang Dong/China Daily]

On the first day of the Lunar New Year, which fell on Feb 19, nearly 10 million Chinese moviegoers went to the cinemas to create the highest single-day ticket sales record of 360 million yuan in China.

With New Year holidays considered the golden period for China's box office, eight films premiered on Feb 19.

But the trend among Chinese to watch films at theaters during Spring Festival is relatively new. The entertainment business was so bad during the season that cinemas were kept shut for the first three days of the New Year until the early 1990s. With family taking precedence over all else in China during the celebrations, filmmakers usually kept box-office expectations low.

In 1995, when it became public knowledge that Chan's Rumble in the Bronx－the story of a Hong Kong policeman taking on a New York gang－would be screened on the mainland on the first day of the Lunar New Year, trade analysts doubted it would be watched at all.

But when the film hit the halls, large crowds showed up, making it the second-highest grossing movie that year (95 million yuan), after Arnold Schwarzenegger's True Lies, the first Hollywood blockbuster to be cleared for general screening on the mainland.

　　Since then filmmakers have looked to hesuidang, or the period of festivities from Christmas to the Chinese New Year, to make profits.