“Furious 7,” the latest installment in the “Fast and Furious” series from Universal Pictures, has broken global box-office records at a dizzying pace since its release in North America in early April.

But over the past weekend, the high-octane action thriller starring Paul Walker and Vin Diesel notched one of its most impressive titles yet: China’s most successful movie ever.

“Furious 7” took in an additional $72.7 million in China over the weekend, bringing its 15-day total box-office earnings in the country to more than $324 million, according to the research group EntGroup. This is well over the $62 million brought in by the franchise’s previous installment in China in 2013.

Despite a later release date in China, the film, directed by James Wan, has been even more successful in Chinese theaters than in those of the United States, where it has brought in $320 million in cumulative box-office receipts, according to Rentrak, which compiles box office data. Overall ticket sales in China are expected to receive a lift during the May 1 holiday weekend.

“While it’s not unprecedented for films that do moderately well in North America to perform better in China than in their home territory,” wrote Rob Cain on his website China Film Biz, citing the 2013 Guillermo del Toro film “Pacific Rim” as an example, “never before has a bona fide American smash hit exceeded its own domestic gross in a foreign territory.”

“This is truly uncharted territory,” he added.

With its whopping box-office take, “Furious 7” seizes the China crown from “Transformers: Age of Extinction” from Paramount Pictures. After its June 2014 release, the “Transformers” sequel directed by Michael Bay raked in $319 million in China, setting a new box-office record and surpassing James Cameron’s “Avatar,” the previous Chinese record-holder.

The runaway success in China of the fourth “Transformers” installment has been attributed in part to efforts by the film’s producers to reach out to Chinese audiences. While it did not rise to the level of an official co-production, the film featured many Chinese elements, in terms of product placement, actors and filming locations, as well as a targeted marketing campaign.

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“Furious 7,” however, did not contain any obvious Chinese elements, but it did have the support of China Film Group, the country’s largest state-run movie distributor. The Chinese movie industry behemoth was an investor in the film and is said to have taken a nearly 10 percent stake.

“Furious 7” had one of the most widespread theater releases in Chinese movie history, taking up about 70 percent of China’s screens with more than 90,000 showtimes per day, according to China Film Biz.

Contributing to the outsize success of “Furious 7” was the relative lack of competition for Chinese moviegoers. Trailing far behind “Furious 7” was a slate of domestic films including “The Left Ear,” the directorial debut of the Taiwanese singer and actor Alec Su. “The Left Ear” was the second-highest-earning film last weekend, with $31.5 million after opening on Friday.

“Ever Since We Love,” a romantic youth film starring Fan Bingbing and Han Geng, took third place with $10.2 million.

DreamWorks’ 3-D computer animation buddy comedy, “Home,” was in fourth place with $8 million over the weekend, following its opening on Friday.

In China, as in the rest of the world, moviegoers were especially drawn to real-life subplot of “Furious 7″: the untimely death of Mr. Walker. On Douban, a popular online Chinese social networking website, many of the nearly 55,000 film reviews left by users mentioned the actor, who died in a car crash in 2013 while the movie was still being filmed.

“Paul Walker made up for the whole movie,” read one user review.

“Thank you to the film for giving everyone a satisfactory ending,” read another, referring to the film’s conclusion in which Mr. Walker’s character drove off into the sunset. “I couldn’t help but cry when I saw that white car in the mountains in the distance.”

The user posted, in English: “For Paul, it’s never goodbye…”

Follow Amy Qin on Twitter at @amyyqin.