The 10 Biggest Opening Weekends in China, Ranked

"The biggest opening weekend in China belongs to a Hollywood superhero film, and the race at the top is tight." That's the sentence most readers carry into this chart, and Box Office Mojo's China chart breaks both halves of it in the first two rows.

Here's the short version, in four lines. A Chinese sequel, "Detective Chinatown 3," holds the record at $398 million. The runner-up trails by $126,275,742. Five of the ten films on this list opened in February. And the film at No. 10 keeps its seat by exactly $1 million.

Run the machine small before the real figures land. Shrink this chart to pocket money, in round numbers: the leader gets $400, the runner-up gets $272, the film in tenth gets $159, and the film in eleventh gets $158. On that scale, the leader beats the runner-up by $128 — nearly half the runner-up's whole pile, added on top. Tenth beats eleventh by a single dollar. A list with a runaway at the top and a coin flip at the bottom behaves like two different lists sharing one page, and this list does exactly that.

The Contract: One Chart, One Column, One Cutoff Date

This list is exhaustive against a single source: Box Office Mojo's "Chinese Top Opening Weekends" chart, read in full and in rank order. Criteria: a film's opening gross in China, in US dollars, exactly as Mojo's Opening column prints it. Scope: every film on that chart, across all years. Cutoff: November 9, 2026. The ranking below follows Mojo's rank order, and each entry prints the opening figure, the total gross Mojo reports for the same film, the share of that total the opening represents, and the release date Mojo assigns the film. Margins between neighbors come from subtracting Mojo's figures, and each subtraction shows its work.

An "Opening Weekend" on This Chart Doesn't Start on a Friday for Four of the Ten

Mojo frames the number plainly: an Opening column, a Total Gross column, and a Date for each release. The chart prints no day count beside the figure, and the dates give the game away. Six of the ten films below opened on a Friday. Two opened on a Tuesday. Two opened on a Wednesday. A Tuesday opener and a Friday opener sit in the same column under the same label with no asterisk, so a reader who pictures a neat Friday-to-Sunday strip for all ten has the wrong machine in mind. The window follows the local release date, and the calendar shows the clustering plainly: five of the ten opened in February, and two of those five — the leader and the film at No. 4 — share a single date, Friday, February 12, 2021.

The share column warns a reader off any single story about what an opening means. Across this ten, the opening runs from 22.6 percent of a film's total gross to 58.1 percent. One film in this list banked more than half its whole China run in its opening frame. Another banked under a quarter of its total in its opening and still finished with the largest total on the page. Both facts sit in Mojo's own columns, side by side.

$398 Million Stands Alone at the Top, and the Contest Runs From No. 2 Down

1. "Detective Chinatown 3" (2021) — $398,000,000

Mojo dates this opening Friday, February 12, 2021, and reports a total gross of $685,070,000, with the opening supplying 58.1 percent of it. Do the arithmetic out loud: $398,000,000 minus $271,724,258 leaves $126,275,742 between this film and the runner-up. For every $100 the runner-up opened with, this film opened with about $146. A lead that size turns the rest of the chart into a contest for second place, and the share tells the same story from the other side — well over half the film's entire China run arrived in its opening frame.

2. "Zootopia 2" (2025) — $271,724,258

Mojo dates this opening Wednesday, November 26, 2025, and reports a total gross of $651,398,000, with the opening supplying 41.7 percent of it. The gap down to No. 3 runs $68,524,258 — $271,724,258 minus $203,200,000 — a margin larger than most films on the full chart ever open with, and this entry spends it on a single step. A Wednesday start holds the second-biggest opening on the chart, which is the framing lesson in one row: the calendar day matters less than the crowd that shows up for it.

3. "The Battle at Lake Changjin" (2021) — $203,200,000

Mojo dates this opening Friday, October 1, 2021, and reports a total gross of $899,400,000 — the largest total in this ten, by $78,400,000 over the next-largest. The opening supplies just 22.6 percent of that total, the smallest share on this list. Hold the two facts together and the entry teaches the chart's central distinction: the opening column crowns a sprinter, and this film ran a marathon. Its total beats the leader's total by $214,330,000, and its opening still trails the leader's opening by $194,800,000.

4. "Hi, Mom" (2021) — $195,000,000

Mojo dates this opening Friday, February 12, 2021 — the same date as the leader — and reports a total gross of $821,000,000, the second-largest total in this ten. The opening supplies 23.8 percent of that total. The step down from No. 3 runs just $8,200,000, the tightest margin in the top five, and the step up from this entry's opening to its total tells the longer story: a film that opened fourth among ten finished second among the same ten once the full run counted.

5. "Avengers: Infinity War" (2018) — $191,034,859

Mojo dates this opening Friday, May 11, 2018, and reports a total gross of $359,543,153, with the opening supplying 53.1 percent of it. More than half the film's whole China run landed in the opening frame — the opposite profile from the two entries directly above it. This entry also leads the chart's Marvel pair, and the sequel's bigger reputation makes the order worth printing plainly: the earlier film opened bigger in China, whatever the later film did worldwide or at home.

6. "Monster Hunt 2" (2018) — $187,908,839

Mojo dates this opening Friday, February 16, 2018, and reports a total gross of $356,336,096, with the opening supplying 52.7 percent of it. The margin under No. 5 runs $3,126,020 — $191,034,859 minus $187,908,839 — a gap of under two percent on a figure this size. Two films in a row banked more than half their totals in the opening frame, and the near-identical shares make a clean comparison pair: similar shape, similar scale, separated by one ordinary weekend's worth of tickets in a mid-size market.

7. "The Fate of the Furious" (2017) — $184,908,284

Mojo dates this opening Friday, April 14, 2017, and reports a total gross of $392,807,017, with the opening supplying 47.1 percent of it. This entry is the oldest film in the ten — a 2017 opening holding a top-seven seat against every February giant the chart has added since. Longevity at this level works as its own kind of evidence: later charts brought bigger crowds to newer titles, and this figure still stands just $6,126,575 under the film ranked two places above it.

8. "The Wandering Earth" (2019) — $179,892,945

Mojo dates this opening Tuesday, February 5, 2019, and reports a total gross of $690,994,017, the third-largest total in this ten. The opening supplies 26.0 percent of that total. Run the cross-check this entry invites: its total beats the leader's total by $5,924,017 — $690,994,017 minus $685,070,000 — while its opening trails the leader's opening by $218,107,055. A Tuesday start, a modest opening share, and a total that outran almost every film on the page: this row belongs in any honest account of what an opening can hide.

9. "Avengers: Endgame" (2019) — $175,961,330

Mojo dates this opening Wednesday, April 24, 2019, and reports a total gross of $632,100,298, with the opening supplying 27.8 percent of it. Now the comparison the reader's wrong sentence gets backwards, priced both ways: this opening trails the earlier Marvel entry's opening by $15,073,529, while this total beats that entry's total by $272,557,145. Opening rank and total rank measure different races. A chart that prints both columns lets a reader run both races at once, and this pair of rows shows why the distinction earns its keep.

10. "Pegasus 3" (2026) — $158,500,000

Mojo dates this opening Tuesday, February 17, 2026, and reports a total gross of $653,900,000, with the opening supplying 24.2 percent of it. This entry is the newest film in the ten, and its seat is the least comfortable on the list. The margin underneath it runs to a single round number, and the section below prints that number with the film it belongs to.

The Cutoff: No. 11 Misses the List by Exactly $1 Million

No. 11 on Mojo's chart is "My People, My Homeland" (2020), at $157,500,000, dated Thursday, October 1, 2020, with a reported total gross of $422,000,000. The proof of the cutoff is one subtraction: $158,500,000 minus $157,500,000 leaves $1,000,000. On a base of $158,500,000, a million dollars works out to about six-tenths of one percent — the price of a rounding decision in a smaller market decides the last seat here. Any list that hides its eleventh film hides its weakest claim, so this one prints the eleventh film in full view.

Count the ten once more, as frequencies, before the page closes. Five of ten opened in February. Six of ten opened on a Friday, and four of ten opened on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Three of ten banked more than half their total gross in the opening frame. Those counts, each one a small division a reader can redo from the entries above, describe the chart more honestly than any single record does.

The Test to Take to the Next Opening-Weekend Chart

Here's the trick, and it hands you the test on the way out. When the next opening-weekend chart lands, ask three questions before quoting any figure on it. Whose column is the figure sitting in, and who published the chart? Which date anchors the window, and which weekday does that date carry? And how large is the opening beside the same film's total — half the story, or a quarter of it? A chart that answers all three questions can survive your kitchen table. A figure quoted without its column, its date and its share can't, whatever the headline above it promises.