BEIJING, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Six Chinese movies raked in about 6.38 billion yuan (1 billion U.S. dollars) in total just a week after their release on Feb. 16, the first day of Chinese Lunar New Year, according to Maoyan, a popular film database in China.

Maoyan's data show that as of 5 p.m. Thursday, Detective Chinatown 2's box-office sales was 2.06 billion yuan, Monster Hunt 2's was 1.77 billion yuan, Operation Red Sea's was 1.37 billion yuan, The Monkey King 3's was 629 million yuan, Boonie Bears: The Big Shrink's was 448 million yuan and The Faces of My Gene's was 96.8 million yuan.

On the first day of the Chinese Lunar New Year, total box office receipts of Chinese movies reached 1.26 billion yuan, an increase of about 56 percent over the same day in 2017.

"Chinese movies during this year's Spring Festival had a better online reputation than those of previous years. Good quality brings a good reputation and generates better box office receipts," Zhao Xiaonan, co-founder of Filmath, a Chinese site that offers movie data analysis, was quoted as saying by Friday's China Daily.