Homegrown “Kung Fu Mulan” is Even Bigger China Box Office Flop
This year, China’s eight day-long October National Day holiday created winners and losers in the country’s recovering film market, which saw a box office take of 3.95 billion RMB (around 581 million USD) over the course of the week.
Winners include patriotic comedy My People, My Homeland, sports biopic Leap, and animated feature film Jiang Ziya: Legend of Deification. Among the losers: Mulan. No, not that one, but another interpretation of the female warrior’s tale —Kung Fu Mulan.
The homegrown animation flick was hoping to outdo Disney’s controversial live-action Mulan, and it certainly did that — but unfortunately for its creators, it was in bad reviews. If you thought the reception to Disney’s take was negative, it at least limped on in cinemas for longer than a week. After a wave of brutal feedback, Kung Fu Mulan was pulled from theaters in China just three days after it was released.
On Douban, the 3D animated film sits at a woeful score of 3.2, much lower than the 4.9 rating that Disney’s Mulan has received. Critics’ issues with the film were its poorly-constructed plot, oddly animated characters, and terrible script.
Just weeks before, Disney’s new live-action Mulan film was lampooned for its hollow presentation of Chinese culture, despite a clear effort on Disney’s part to cater to Chinese audiences. A promotional poster for Kung Fu Mulan had even seemingly addressed the Disney adaptation with the tagline, “Real China, Real Mulan.”
But netizens have even more of a bone to pick with this adaptation. The most upvoted Douban comment on the film simply reads, “Liu Yifei’s Mulan is better.”
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