Female film audience boosts China's holiday box office

TAIYUAN, Oct. 8 (Xinhua) -- Over the eight-day Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holiday, China's box office notched up over 2.7 billion yuan (about 376 million U.S. dollars) in revenue, with some 65.1 million tickets sold, more than half of them purchased by the country's female movie-goers.

According to a market report by Dengta Pro, the data analysis arm of China's leading film-ticketing platform Taopiaopiao, about 54.2 percent of the Chinese movie viewers were female.

The box office figures for the past five years' National Day holidays show that females are the more active movie-goers during the period. One year, the female film audience made up more than 60.1 percent of the total, said the report.

In Taiyuan, capital of north China's Shanxi Province, those waiting for new holiday movies at a local cinema were mostly couples.

For the females, going to the cinema seems to be a more popular entertainment choice during the holidays. "I watch movies every single week, mostly with my girlfriends, which makes me feel at home," said a local female resident surnamed Ma.

Lin Yuanxin, a male cinema-goer from the city of Quanzhou in east China's Fujian Province, expressed different preferences.

"Usually, I go with my girlfriend to watch a movie. I rarely go to the cinema alone or with friends of the same sex. I prefer reading and doing sports in my spare time," said Lin.

In July, Morning Consult, an American consulting firm, surveyed 681 Chinese movie fans who claimed to have made watching movies at cinemas part of their monthly routine. It found that females made up 52 percent of the monthly cinema-goers.

Notably, 32 percent of the females visited cinemas no less than three times a month, whereas only 27 percent of the male counterparts would do so, according to the survey.

A cinema employee surnamed Wu in Taiyuan, said that, based on her observations, today's female audience tends to favor realistic films with gender-related themes.

The suspense thriller "Lost in the Stars," a front-runner in China's summer box office that concerns the dilemmas faced by woman has raked in more than 3.5 billion yuan in box office revenue as of Sunday, with more than three quarters of the revenue contributed by females.

Such growth in "she-power" in the movie market means that global filmmakers will pay more attention to the demands of female audiences, according to industry insiders.