Maoyan Piaofang China Box Office Scraper

Scrape real-time China box office data from Maoyan Piaofang — the canonical Chinese box-office data source. Extracts daily split revenue, market share, screening counts, seat occupancy, and cumulative totals for all currently-screening films.

What it does

Makes two API calls per run:

1. Dashboard snapshot — GET piaofang.maoyan.com/dashboard-ajax returns all currently-screening films with live box-office data.
2. Film detail enrichment — GET piaofang.maoyan.com/movie/<id> fetches genre tags, director, and audience intent count for each film.

Returns one record per film combining both data sources.

Output fields

Field	Type	Description
movie_id	integer	Maoyan movie ID
movie_name	string	Film title (Chinese)
release_info	string	Days-since-release string (e.g. "上映31天")
box_split_unit_yuan	float	Today's split box-office in yuan
sum_box_desc	string	Cumulative box-office display (e.g. "12.76亿")
sum_box_yuan	float	Cumulative box-office in yuan
daily_box_split_yuan	float	Today's split box-office in yuan (daily portion)
box_rate_pct	float	Market share % for the day
show_count	integer	Number of screenings today
show_count_rate_pct	float	Screening share %
avg_seat_view_pct	float	Average per-screening seat occupancy %
avg_show_view	float	Average viewers per screening
split_box_rate_pct	float	Split box-office rate %
genre_tags	string	Genre tags (pipe-delimited)
directors	string	Director(s) (pipe-delimited)
wish_count	integer	"Want to watch" count (想看)
snapshotted_at	string	ISO-8601 capture timestamp

Notes on glyph obfuscation

Maoyan's API encodes box-office digit fields using Unicode Private Use Area (PUA) codepoints that rotate daily. This actor automatically decodes them by:

1. Parsing the per-response WOFF font (URL embedded in the API response fontStyle field)
2. Using a glyph shape fingerprint to map each PUA codepoint to the correct digit 0-9
3. Falling back to an algebraic solver (using film market-share ratios as constraints) if the fingerprint table does not match a new font variant

Use cases

• Hollywood studio Asia-Pacific box office monitoring
• Equity research on Chinese cinema companies (CNMC, Wanda, Alibaba Pictures)
• Entertainment ESG datasets requiring daily China market data
• Cross-referencing with Douban movie ratings for sentiment plus commercial signal