Laughs give China's film market a boost

BEIJING - During the week-long Lunar New Year holiday, Chinese people not only bought presents and delicacies, but also paid to laugh.

In movie theaters around the country, film fanatics were treated mainly to comedies, with most laughs watching Hong Kong actor Stephen Chow's fantasy action comedy "Odyssey".

The film took 510 million yuan ($81.7 million) in the week ending February 15, accounting for 67.1 percent of all ticket sales during the seven-day period, according to China Film News' postings on Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, on Monday.

Built on the popularity of Chow's "A Chinese Odyssey" series in 1994, the film is a retelling of the classic Chinese tale "Journey to the West".

It had been poised to be a box office smash before its release on February 10, said Peking University professor Zhang Yiwu.

Moviegoers are looking for fun after a year of grind, Zhang said. "A movie that can generate laughs is definitely what they want."

The professor also attributed the movie's success to the growing Chinese film market. China's box office sales hit 17.07 billion yuan in 2012, surging 30.18 percent year on year and making the country the world's second-largest film market, data from the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) showed.

The most watched film last year, "Lost in Thailand," which debuted December 12, raked in an unprecedented 1.2 billion yuan in less than a month, earning more than "Avatar" and "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" to become the highest-grossing movie ever shown in Chinese theaters.

"If the comedy 'Lost in Thailand' tapped in the growing potential of the Chinese film market, then 'Odyssey' is there to accelerate its growth," Zhang said.

But the two comedies are not the only beneficiaries.