(Yicai) Sept. 19 -- Box office earnings from Chinese theaters during the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday were less than half of the record high of CNY803 million (USD113.3 million) in 2019.

China's Mid-Autumn Festival box office totaled CNY389 million between Sept. 14 and Sept. 17, with about CNY332 million or 85 percent of the total coming from Chinese movies, according to data released by the China Film Administration yesterday. Nearly 9.6 million tickets were sold in the four days.

However, the number of movie screenings achieved record 1.36 million in the period, according to data from ticketing platform Maoyan.

This year's box office takings reached CNY33.5 billion (USD4.7 billion) as of Sept. 3, with about 780 million tickets sold, data from MoviePro showed. In comparison, the cinema earnings totaled CNY43.2 billion a year earlier, with 1.02 billion tickets sold.

The real impact of the Covid-19 pandemic is beginning to show just now, Sun Jiashan, an associate researcher at the Central Academy of Culture and Tourism Administration, told Yicai. It takes one to two years to make a medium-to-low-budget movie and three to four years to make a high-budget one, so the lower number of projects in the past years resulted in fewer films now, Sun explained.

The Chinese movie industry is still clearing inventory, said Cheng Fei, chief executive officer of movie research institute TopData. More than half of the domestically produced feature films released between January and August with box office takings exceeding CNY10 million (USD1.4 million) were initiated two years ago, while more than 30 percent of them started three years ago, he noted.

While last year there was an ample supply of quality content, this year there is a clear shortage of premium movies, Cheng added.

Editor: Futura Costaglione