A photo posted by MMFF Official (@mmffofficial) on Dec 24, 2016 at 3:35pm PST

MANILA – The box office haul in the 2016 Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF) is significantly lower compared to previous years, as the latest figures show.

Producer Star Cinema announced on Thursday that its entry to MMFF 2016, “Vince & Kath & James,” is the overall top grosser with earnings of P105 million.

“Die Beautiful” starring Paolo Ballesteros ranked second with P98 million, according to Star Cinema. This was followed by “Seklusyon” (P82 million), “Ang Babae sa Septic Tank 2” (P45 million), “Saving Sally” (P27 million), “Sunday Beauty Queen” (P7.8 million), “Kabisera” (P4.3 million) and “Oro” (P4.2 million).

All these amount to only P373.3 million, less than half of the earnings in MMFF 2015 of P1.020 billion from December 25 to January 7, 2016. It should be noted that the 2016 festival only ran from December 25 to January 3, 2017 -- or four days shorter than usual.

In 2014, the eight entries of MMFF raked in P1.014 billion.

MMFF Executive Committee member Boots Anson-Roa earlier admitted that there might be a dip in earnings in the 2016 festival because of the exclusion of tested box office draws such as Vice Ganda’s “Super Parental Guardians” and Vic Sotto’s “Enteng Kabisote 10 and the Abangers.”

MMFF 2016 spokesperson Noel Ferrer has said that they want to give opportunities to great independent films with small production budgets.