"Evil Unbound," a Chinese historical drama portraying wartime atrocities by Japan’s Unit 731 during Word War II, drew 9.14 million viewers on its premiere day, setting national records for single-day and opening-day screenings.

The film was released on Sept. 18, coinciding with the 94th anniversary of the September 18 Incident, which marked the beginning of the Chinese People's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression. This year also commemorates the 80th anniversary of China’s victory in that war and in the broader World Anti-Fascist War.
As of Saturday morning, the total box office, including pre-sales, have reached 736 million yuan (about 103.04 million U.S. dollars), according to data from online ticketing platforms.
The film follows Wang Yongzhang, a local vendor, and others imprisoned in the "special prison" of Unit 731, where they were lured by false promises of freedom in return for cooperating with supposed health checks and disease prevention research, only to become victims of horrific medical experiments, including frostbite tests, gas exposures and vivisections.
To ensure historical authenticity, the production team spent nearly a decade developing the script and filming. They collected archival materials from home and abroad, consulting more than a million words across countless documents.
On September 18, 1931, Japanese troops blew up a section of the railway in Shenyang and accused the Chinese military of doing it. Using the blast as a pretext, Japanese forces bombarded Shenyang on the same night, launching a full-scale invasion of northeast China. The incident marked the beginning of a 14-year bloody struggle for the Chinese nation.
From 1937 to 1945, with the direct involvement of Unit 731, Japanese militarism established biological warfare organizations in various parts of China and Southeast Asian countries, leaving behind one of humanity’s darkest chapters.
Unit 731, a top-secret biological and chemical warfare research base in Pingfang District of Harbin, the capital of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, served as the nerve center for Japanese biological warfare in China and Southeast Asia during WWII. Historical records suggest that between 1940 and 1945, Unit 731 used at least 3,000 people in its human experiments, and more than 300,000 people in China were killed by Japan's biological weapons.
The film was released in multiple countries around the world on Thursday, and in the United States and Canada on Friday.