Chinese films charm audiences with better storytelling

Chinese-produced films have amazed audiences with increased maturity in terms of storytelling this year and continued to smash box office records in one of the world's biggest movie markets.

They helped spur the annual total box office revenue of all films screened in China to reach a record high of 62.9 billion yuan ($9 billion) as of Wednesday morning, 3.6 percent higher than that for the full year of 2018.

Box office

Domestic films accounted for eight out of the 10 highest-grossing movies this year, with Ne Zha, an animated fantasy adventure featuring the Chinese mythological character of the same name, topping the chart with nearly 5 billion yuan, according to the China Movie Data Information Network.

The Wandering Earth, a film depiction of a Chinese science fiction novel by Hugo Award-winning author Liu Cixin, came second on the chart with 4.68 billion yuan, followed immediately by Disney and Marvel's Avengers: Endgame with around 4.25 billion yuan.

Two patriotic films that premiered around the National Day - My People, My Country, a film recalling historical moments over the past seven decades; and "The Captain," a cinematic portrayal of the real-life miraculous emergency landing of a Sichuan Airlines plane in 2018 - both made it to the top 10 list, garnering fourth and fifth places. The US film Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw came 10th.

"The development of Chinese films has entered a transition period from pursuing film quantity to focusing on quality, with their overall quality improving significantly," Yin Hong, vice chairman of the China Film Association, told Xinhua while commenting on the performance of Chinese films in 2019.