BEIJING - As of Tuesday noon, the total box office of films screened during the 2025 National Day holiday, including presales, had exceeded 1.6 billion yuan (about $225 million), according to data from online platforms.

The eight-day holiday, which kicked off on Oct 1, is typically a bustling movie-going season for consumers and a highly competitive arena for the movie theater sector in China.

Currently leading this year's National Day box office is domestic war epic The Volunteers: Peace at Last, the finale of director Chen Kaige's The Volunteers trilogy. The film recreates the intertwined struggles of battlefield combat and tense diplomatic negotiation during the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea (1950-1953).

It is followed by Evil Unbound, a domestic production that depicts the atrocities that Japanese germ-warfare Unit 731 committed in China during World War II. The film revolves around the fates of a group of innocent victims who are imprisoned by Unit 731 and become subjects of inhumane torture experiments such as frostbite, poison gas and vivisection experiments.

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A Writer's Odyssey Ⅱ, a sequel to the 2021 fantasy-action hit, currently ranks third on the holiday chart. The film centers on a novelist's journey to tackle a dual crisis taking place in both the real world and the virtual world of his artistic creation.

So far this year, more than 300 films have been released nationwide, covering a wide range of genres including history, comedy, animation and drama.