The hottest film in China this summer is not The Odyssey, despite the hoopla around the China promo tour the team went on and the subsequent drama with one of the Nolan interviewers, Zhong Shu.
The dark horse of the summer blockbuster season is Niu Lai, a film made on a budget of a few thousand dollars by a two-person team, which got onto China’s big screen with almost no market interest until it became a cult favorite for how bad it is.
My theory
Niu Lai‘s success is the anti-AI-slop version of the “little guy who made it” overnight success story. It’s bad and juvenile but it is “manual crafted” (手搓). It’s a story of the little guy making it — a mother-and-son team driven by a deep conviction to bring a story they cared about to the big screen. Or at least that is the story we want to believe. Niu Lai’s film aesthetic is anachronistic, with a hint of nostalgia, and the nostalgia economy is having its moment.
I wrote about AI and the fil…
