Disney’s Mulan story fails to win Chinese audience

Disney’s new Mulan, an action drama based on a centuries-old traditional Chinese story, made its debut in the Chinese mainland on Friday. Though starring popular Chinese actors, the film received a cold shoulder due to its self-righteous depiction, which failed to resonate with Chinese audiences.

As of 9 pm Friday, Mulan raked in 48 million yuan ($7 million), realtime box office monitoring platform Maoyan showed. Maoyan forecast that Mulan’s total box office in the Chinese mainland could reach 291 million yuan, compared to the spy film Tenet’s 406 million yuan and Chinese war epic The Eight Hundred’s 2.91 billion yuan.

With COVID-19 under control, Chinese theaters have been gradually reopening. Domestic and overseas films are lining up to be screened after months of delays. Among the first batch of films, The Eight Hundred grossed 141 million yuan on its first day, with projected box office receipts 10 times that of Mulan.

Shi Wenxue, a film critic and professor at the Beijing Academy, told the Global Times on Friday that the poor box office performance of Mulan in the Chinese mainland is not surprising because it failed to tell a Chinese story in an accurate and attractive manner.

The movie is just a mixture of oriental elements and symbols in the eyes of Westerners, Shi said.

Some Western politicians and media outlets have relentlessly politicized the movie, hoping to trigger a backlash in the Chinese mainland, such as defaming the movie’s credits, which thanked Xinjiang regional government organs that helped in the filming, and its leading actress Liu Yifei’s support for Hong Kong police amid months of riots in the city last year.

However, their hope is once again doomed, experts said. The unpopularity of the film has nothing to do with the West’s defamation, which the Chinese audience do not care about. It is just the poor art level it showcases and misunderstandings of Chinese culture that disappointed the market, they added.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian on Friday slammed the ill-intentioned moves of anti-China forces, saying that crediting regional government organs in Xinjiang that offered help is nothing more than common practice.