‘Crazy Rich Asians’ flops in China debut
Such stories run ad nauseam in Chinese TV dramas. Who will go to cinema to see such fare?
BEIJING: After all the hype surrounding its RM991 million box office takings to date, Crazy Rich Asians has tanked during its opening weekend in China.
It brought in only RM4.2 million.
On the rating site Douban, it was rated 6.2 out of 10. Another Chinese rating site, Maoyan, didn’t even rate the film.
What made it worse for Crazy Rich Asians was the spectacular performance of a small-budget domestic production, A Cool Fish. With no big stars in its cast, the film unexpectedly chalked up single- day box office takings of nearly 40 million yuan and has chalked up more than 500 million yuan ( RM303.3 million) in ticket sales since its release on Nov 16.
Starring Tan Sri Michelle Yeoh, Constance Wu and Henry Golding, Crazy Rich Asians is the first Hollywood production to have a full cast of Asian descent. With scenes that emphasise Chinese culture (mahjong playing, dumpling making, Asian wedding rites and some Cantonese and Mandarin dialogue) and a soundtrack featuring a number of Chinese
Weibo user
tracks, the film should have been a sure-fire box office winner in China, the world’s second-largest movie market. So why has it tanked in China? A trawl through Chinese online chat rooms suggests reasons for the film’s dismal reception from Chinese film-goers.
Internet users said the plot of the film was bland. Not only are Cinderella-style stories a Chinese TV cliché, but the shenanigans of Michelle Yeoh’s character – the matriarch of a super-rich family in Singapore who tries everything to put a stop to her son’s romance with a modest American-born academic – come across as insipid to Chinese audiences more enamoured of the cloak- and- dagger, life- and-death intrigues of the imperial palace portrayed in hugely popular Chinese shows such as Story of Yanxi Palace.
A user called joy wrote on social media platform Weibo: “Such stories run ad nauseam in Chinese TV dramas. Who will go to cinema to see such fare?
Another user, named Johnny, found fault with the film’s title, writing: “Its English name is Crazy Rich Asians. Is Hollywood poking fun at us? If Chinese made a film called “Stupid Americans” or Crazy Westerners”, it would be popular in China too.”
Another Weibo user, “movie buff”, wrote: “Chinese family dynamics are not what is portrayed in the film. The family plot feels starchy.”
The drama of an uber-rich Asian family from Singapore also won’t necessarily appeal to Chinese audiences. Romantic comedies that have done well in China in recent years, such as How Long Will I Love U ( 2018, May), a time-travelling love story of a Chinese couple, and The Return of the Exes ( 2017) about how contemporary Chinese view former lovers, have featured ordinary Chinese characters.
In addition, while Crazy Rich Asians’ racially diverse cast appeals to Western audiences – in the same way Marvel’s Black Panther, screened early this year, was a historic box office success and has become a cultural phenomenon for its groundbreaking celebration of black culture – it isn’t a factor in China, where all that film- goers see are people from the same background as themselves.