criterionforum.org

In a year where Obsession, Iron Lung, and Backrooms returned massively on low budgets due in part to heavy internet investment, here comes Chinese animated film Niu Lai, a non-professional film made presumably for essentially nothing by a mother and son team that went viral for being awful and could now potentially be the most profitable film (in terms of ROI) of all time if it continues to capture audiences. Snakes on a Plane has to be the biggest Right Idea, Wrong Time imaginable these days…

There's a partial precedent for this: a couple of years ago a husband-and-wife team released an animated film called The Summer of Mermaid (which one of the filmmakers uploaded to YouTube just over a month ago in an uncanny display of foresight) that also went viral but didn't break out to nearly the same degree. That's partly because it just didn't have the same outsider-art patina—for one thing it had actual marketing, plus a baseline of technical competence that's completely missing in Niu Lai, which somehow looks worse than those '90s direct-to-video Pixar knockoffs with titles like "An Insect's Life" or whatever. Summer of Mermaid also wore its influences on its sleeve and came off as a bad Miyazaki pastiche, whereas Niu Lai is rather less easy to pigeonhole that way.

But I think the most interesting difference is that Summer of Mermaid had support from local cultural/tourism bodies and looked enough like a "real movie" to get advance puff pieces positioning it as a milestone in Chinese independent animation, building up some awfully unreasonable expectations and all but inviting a backlash. Niu Lai came out of nowhere and is something the online grassroots can plausibly embrace as their own, since without them the movie would've disappeared into total obscurity after making less than $2,000. And when Summer of Mermaid got picked up by international media, it was an example of vicious Chinese netizens dogpiling a scrappy independent labor of love, which inevitably filtered back to China and made the discourse around the movie (which wasn't really as vicious as all that) much less entertaining. The coverage of Niu Lai is framing the haters as stick-in-the-mud authority types (cf. "state-run outlet Beijing News") putting up "NO FUN ALLOWED" signs, which reinforces the grassroots discourse—one reason people are rushing out to theaters to see it is because there's a conviction that the regulators will pull the film at any moment, which I doubt will happen (all movies in China go out with a preset KDM expiration date and I think it's more likely they'll just reject any request to extend it) but illustrates how this is bound up with a bit more than ironic shitposting for its own sake.

The total number of moviegoers was 12 on its opening day, even though it was released in 245 theaters

How does such a small-scale movie like this made by unknowns open in 245 theaters?

Here’s a good, quick video covering the phenomenon, with lots of clips of reactions and covering amusing asides like how the movie theatres showing it have had to hand draw their own posters since no official ones exist

swo17 wrote: Wed Aug 19, 2026 5:05 pm How does such a small-scale movie like this made by unknowns open in 245 theaters?

I think that's actually the number of screenings, not the number of screens. On day 2 it went down to 25, and by day 3 it was four. The movie opened on a Wednesday, so by the time the actual opening weekend arrived it was pretty much gone. Today the number of screenings is 9,819 (out of a total of ~155,000).

Nobody really knows much about how this happened—the filmmakers have so far maintained complete radio silence, which I kinda respect—but the film was released through a small distributor that's been around for a few years (notably they were one of the distribution partners on I Am What I Am 2, an unironically well-received animated film from 2024). The head of the company says he strongly advised against a theatrical release, but the director insisted and handled all the necessary permits himself, and the distributor went ahead out of supposed loyalty. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess the filmmakers also covered at least part of the distribution costs themselves (the estimate going around is 160,000 yuan exclusive of marketing, which was basically nonexistent).

domino harvey wrote: Wed Aug 19, 2026 5:24 pm Here’s a good, quick video covering the phenomenon, with lots of clips of reactions and covering amusing asides like how the movie theatres showing it have had to hand draw their own posters since no official ones exist

There is actually one official poster, which is comically unrepresentative and constitutes the entire marketing campaign. I would be surprised if any theater received a printed copy. The memes around the movie have long passed the point of diminishing returns—at least two people seem to have independently hit on the idea of photoshopping the cow into the Summer Palace poster—but I thought this had some relevance to the forum.

The Fanciful Norwegian wrote: Wed Aug 19, 2026 6:07 pmThe memes around the movie have long passed the point of diminishing returns—at least two people seem to have independently hit on the idea of photoshopping the cow into the Summer Palace poster—but I thought this had some relevance to the forum.

Ha that actually made me laugh! I feel like he’d love everything about this phenomenon too

Hey, the official poster is pretty good. They should pat themselves on the back for that, if nothing else (presuming it isn't an AI creation)