'Once Upon a Time in the Middle East' Tops China Box Office With $70.3 Million Weekend
A Chinese comedy-drama about a chef who opens an eatery in the Middle East to pay off family debts led the China box office over the Aug 14-16 weekend, grossing RMB 477.9 million ($70.3 million) in three days. Variety
Once Upon a Time in the Middle East, directed by Wen Muye from a screenplay co-written with Lang Qunli and Wei Zhong, stars Shen Teng as the chef. The cast also features Jiang Qiming, Aarif Rahman and Omar Sherif. Produced by Dirty Monkeys and Damai Entertainment, the film rolled out Tuesday, Aug 11 after collecting $15 million from two days of preview screenings — a strong signal of audience appetite before the official opening.
By the end of the weekend, the film's cumulative China total stood at $134.1 million, including previews. It also collected $2.1 million from Imax screens, some of which carried over from Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, which had opened the previous weekend.
Nolan's The Odyssey placed second, pulling $28.4 million across its official three-day opening frame on a massive 20,000-screen release. Its cumulative China total reached $35.9 million including early previews. Imax reported $19.3 million from the format's screens — the biggest opening weekend ever for a Nolan film in China on both Imax box office and Imax indexing (the share of a film's total gross captured by Imax screens).
Pearl Studio's animated fantasy All Wishes Come True! held third in its fifth weekend, adding $13.1 million for a cumulative $235.9 million since its July 18 debut. Sony's Spider-Man: Brand New Day took fourth with $9.9 million in its third full weekend, reaching a cumulative $209 million since launching July 29 — the top-grossing Hollywood import in China that year. Enlight Pictures' animated romance To Your Island, directed by Zhou Haoran and adapted from Fan Dawang's web novel, rounded out the top five with $2.6 million in its second frame for a $15 million cumulative total.
Mainland China's overall weekend box office reached $132.9 million. Year-to-date revenue stood at $3.79 billion, down 30.4% from the same period in 2025 — a shortfall that the summer corridor has only partly narrowed. China's first-half box office had fallen 40.6% year-on-year to $2.56 billion, Screen Daily reported in July.
Box-office figures cited here come from Artisan Gateway, a film-industry consulting firm that tracks China theatrical data. Sunday grosses are studio estimates; Monday actuals may adjust totals slightly.
The frame offered something for nearly every audience segment: a local comedy star, a Hollywood blockbuster director, a family animated holdover, a superhero import and a literary adaptation. What gives the weekend its broader context is the gap it sits in — China's 2026 box office remains well behind last year's pace, and a $132.9 million weekend, while robust, lands against a market still searching for the volume of hits that defined 2025.
