China Box Office: ‘Love You Forever’ Nabs $39M Tuesday As ‘Eight Hundred’ Nears $200M Cume

The romantic drama Love You Forever nabbed the biggest single-day gross for any movie anywhere since the domestic debut of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

Yesterday was the Chinese equivalent of Valentine’s Day, which is why Trinity Cine Asia released Yao Tingting’s Love You Forever on a Tuesday. The romantic drama, starring Li Yitong as an aspiring dancer who befriends an old theater attendant (Lee Hon-chi) which eventually involves a hidden diary and an inter-dimensional love story, was supposed to open on Valentin’s Day weekend, or February of 2020, before the coronavirus caused Chinese theaters to shut down in late January. However, Love You Forever joins The Eight Hundred as the second delayed Chinese biggie to take another shot at box office glory. It earned a jaw-dropping $39.39 million yesterday.

That’s the biggest single day gross anywhere for any movie since the domestic opening weekend ($77 million on Friday, $47 million on Saturday and $40 million on Sunday) of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker in December of 2019. While it can be assumed that the opening day was inflated due to the “Qixi Festival,” that’s still a near-$40 million opening day for a movie that I will presume cost a lot less than, say, The Wandering Earth. For a possible comparison point, Fox’s remake of The Omen opened specifically on June 6, 2006 (06/06/06), which was also a Tuesday, and flamed out with $54.6 million.

If it really flames out like New Line’s 2009 remake of Friday the 13th, which earned $65 million from a $19 million opening day (02/13/09), Love You Forever will still end up with around $133 million by the time it wraps up its run. But it may not flame out, and for the moment it has knocked The Eight Hundred from the top spot if only for a day. Not to be outdone, the shot-on-IMAX war epic earned another $27.5 million on Tuesday to bring its five day cume (counting $30 million-worth of Mon-Thurs previews) to $167.4 million. Yes, that’s past Sonic the Hedgehog’s $146 million domestic total.

It should pass $200 million today or early tomorrow, at which point it’ll zoom past Bad Boys For Life’s $204 million domestic cume to snag the year’s biggest single-territory gross. That relative milestone may not be bested for awhile, as Tenet getting to $200 million in North America is frankly a long shot without New York and California currently in play and Mulan is going PVOD in America with a Chinese theatrical release yet to be officially scheduled. But if The Eight-Hundred soars to $350 million-plus in China, not even Wonder Woman 1984 or Black Widow’s respective domestic totals may be able to approach it.

Little Women earned just $1.57 million on its first day in China, which would be disappointing if the $42 million Greta Gerwig-directed flick hadn’t already earned $209 million worldwide. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone may have dropped 70% last weekend, but it has still earned $24.69 million in China via the 3-D reissue, topping Interstellar ($17 million) and Dolittle ($19 million) in terms of new or old Hollywood releases. Solstice Studios’ Unhinged has now earned around $15 million worldwide following a decent $4 million Fri-Sun American debut. Meanwhile, Gerard Butler’s Greenland (opening in America on September 25) has earned $7.8 million worldwide thus far.