Whilst Beijing International Film Festival (BIFF) is a feast for movie lovers, it is also a matter of labor work – beginning with the highly competitive ticket-snatching process – no easier than grabbing a ticket home during the Spring Festival travel rush.
The reason? The locations of screenings are limited, but the demand is growing bigger than ever.
Sold out in seconds
In its eighth edition, the Beijing Film Panorama witnessed the fastest selling ticket record in history.
When the tickets went on sale at 12:00 BJT, April 1, the box office reached two million yuan (318,510 U.S. dollars) in just one minute. Within 12 minutes, the box office surpassed nine million yuan (1,432,305 U.S. dollars).
Compared with last year, the speed has more than doubled.
The fastest selling record of a single film went to Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel", which took only 10 seconds for all of the five screenings to be sold out.
It was followed by James Cameron's "Titanic" with 12 seconds, and Wong Kar-wai's "Chunking Express" at 15 minutes.
The sale of ticket packages started even earlier and the fans' enthusiasm was huge. The favorites were the Jurassic Park 25th anniversary series and the Batman films, which both took only seven seconds for the 100 packages to be sold out.
The 100 packages of classic Bergman series were sold out in 10 seconds and the X-Men series were sold out in 14 seconds.
6-10 films per person
According to an online survey on the popular movie site Douban, the majority of filmgoers bought 6-10 films during the festival, accounting for 30.9 percent of the 246 votes in total. It was followed by 1-5 films (22.4 percent) and 11-15 films (17.1 percent).
Twenty-four people said they are going to watch 21-30 films during the period, which could be a challenge not only to their purses but also to their physical strength.
Only four people voted "No interests".
In light of the difficulties in buying tickets, the organizers of the BIFF opened an official account on Weibo, China's Twitter equivalent, to offer a platform for audiences to transfer their tickets to those in need.
It also reposts other bloggers' posts to provide tickets-transfer information to better serve the audiences.
