China's 2025 summer box office revenue had surpassed 11.5 billion yuan (around 1.6 billion U.S. dollars) as of Friday, with domestic productions dominating the top three spots, according to ticketing platforms.
China's summer movie season, running from June 1 through Aug 31, is one of the country's most lucrative box office periods.
The 2025 summer movie season has seen over 300 million cinema admissions as of Tuesday, more than the total attendance of 2024 summer movie season.
Dead To Rights, a film centered on the Nanjing Massacre during World War II, has topped the box office with 2.8 billion yuan (around 392.6 million U.S. dollars) in revenue since its release on July 25, setting a new record for China's summer film season.
It is followed by Nobody, a spinoff from the acclaimed Yao-Chinese Folktales animation series. Since its screening on August 2, the film has earned more than 1.3 billion yuan (about 182.3 million U.S. dollars), securing the eighth spot on China's animated film ranking and setting a new box office record for 2D animated features in Chinese film history.
Romance films I Swear and Gift from a Cloud were released on Friday, coinciding with the traditional Qixi Festival, or China's Valentine's Day.
The summer movie season has delivered not only remarkable box-office success, but also a significant parallel rise in sales of film derivatives.
According to industry statistics, the consumer market for film derivatives has expanded to a scale worth hundreds of billions of yuan. And data from ticketing platforms reveal a 120 percent year-on-year growth in revenue generated by derivatives during the 2025 summer movie season.
China's summer box office surpasses 11.5 bln yuan
