Story in Taipei | 喜滿客京華影城, Core Pacific City — The Screens It Took From Wonder Woman

A film released on three screens took auditoriums away from a superhero picture that had the rest of the world.

《台北物語》 (Story in Taipei) opened on 19 May 2017 at 喜滿客京華影城, inside the sphere-and-glass mall on 八德路四段. The cinema was one of only three showing it — two in Taipei, one in Kaohsiung — and the first week drew almost nobody.

Then the internet found it. A review posted on 22 May spread across Facebook, curiosity turned into queues over the Dragon Boat holiday, and the chain began reassigning rooms to meet the demand.

Chinese-language accounts of the run all record the same detail: screens at 喜滿客 that had been set aside for 《神力女超人》, the DC film then arriving in Taiwan, went to 《台北物語》 instead.

The figures stayed small and strange throughout. In the third week the film was down to two Taipei auditoriums and still took about NT$1.78 million. The cumulative number usually quoted is NT$4.5 million, though sources disagree over whether that is Taipei's total or the whole country's — worth knowing before repeating it.

京華城 closed on 30 November 2019 after eighteen years. The building came down between 2020 and 2022, and the ground is now the 京華廣場 development, its completion pushed back to 2027. 喜滿客 has said it means to open screens here again.

There is nothing to see from the 八德路 frontage but hoarding and cranes. The auditorium that hosted the strangest box-office run in recent Taiwanese cinema is not merely closed; the volume of air it occupied no longer exists.

Cover photo: Core Pacific City in October 2008, by Peellden, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The mall is shown as it stood; the cinema was inside.