Alibaba Pictures/Ningxia Film Group

With a budget of $100 million, the creator’s of fantasy epic Asura billed it as a “a triumph that the entire world will adore for years to come”. With an all-star cast and breathtaking special effects, this was the most expensive film in Chinese cinema history and had ambitions to rival The Lord of the Rings and Avatar. Then it launched.

After a disastrous weekend at the box office, Asura was unexpectedly yanked from Chinese cinemas earlier this month. Raking in a paltry 49 million yuan (£5.49m) of its record-breaking production cost, it seemed the producers had made a fatal miscalculation: Overnight, Asura became China’s biggest flop.


As China’s film industry grows at breakneck speed thanks to backing from the state and major private internet firms such as Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, it seems as though Asura has become a victim of the fast-changing tastes of Chinese cinemagoers. “This is one blockbuster out of many, so [producers] might feel they can withdraw the film without putting themselves in dire straits,” says Gary Bettinson, a film lecturer at Lancaster University.

For a Chinese audience with increasingly global tastes, Asura seemingly failed to deliver on its own hype. “The Chinese audience is smart and has good taste in movies because they’ve watched so many Hollywood blockbusters,” explains Chinese science fiction author and producer Stanley Qiufan Chen. “They know that VFX and stars aren’t everything. They need a convincing storyline.”

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By 2020, China’s box office revenues are expected to reach 200 billion yuan (£22.4bn), at which point it will overtake the US to become the world’s biggest film market in terms of revenues and audience size. Given the scale of the mainland market, producers can see how a film fares domestically then revise it accordingly for an international market if it shows potential. Bettinson says this is a risky strategy, but speculates that this could be what Asura’s producers attempt to do.

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Based on Buddhist mythology, Asura tells the tale of a shepherd tasked with protecting the mythical kingdom of Asura from an attempted coup. After taking six years to develop, on July 15, the producers, Zhenjian Film Studio and Ningxia Film Group, apologised to their partners and audiences for withdrawing it from cinemas, according to the film’s official Weibo account. No reason was initially given for the move, but in a second post, producers chastised online trolls for spreading bad reviews on sites such as Douban, a Chinese equivalent to Rotten Tomatoes.

But not everyone is buying the excuses. As China regulates the country’s social media platforms, some doubt the likelihood of a online smear campaign to disparage Asura getting out of hand. Instead, as China’s film audience diversify their tastes, with movie-goers turning to more niche imports from India and Japan, film experts stress the need for sharper plots.

The decision to package an ancient Chinese tale in the form of a futuristic Hollywood blockbuster also may have been a miscalculation, according to Ying Zhu, a China film expert and cinema professor at New York’s City University. She argues that the local offering may not have sat well with fans familiar with the format of popular US shows like Game of Thrones, which made the fantasy-blockbuster genre its own.

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At the box office, Asura faced stiff competition from surprise hit Dying to Survive, a comedy-drama based on an emotive true story about a Chinese leukemia patient’s quest to smuggle cancer medicine from India to China. Asura also followed on the heels of hit military action flick Wolf Warrior II, featuring macho Chinese soldiers defending others from arms dealers and rebels.

“Both resonated with Chinese audiences who yearn for stories with relevance either to their daily grind or nationalistic aspirations,” explains Zhu.

But despite the setbacks, China’s film sector seems focused on success. “Asura revealed China’s ambition to rival Hollywood and to show it has as much financial and transnational potential,” says Dorothy Lau, a film expert at Hong Kong Baptist University. “It was a big-budget film that captured China’s move toward spectacle-laden, profit-making moviemaking.”

Both Lau and Bettinson argue, however, that the country’s rapidly-expanding blockbuster film sector is bound to have some teething problems as it matures. “China used to specialise in low-budget art cinema about people and social issues. Now it’s investing in bigger Hollywood-style films,” explains Bettinson. “It will take the country time to make international blockbusters. It will happen eventually, just not overnight.”


Asura’s initial flop may have momentarily stolen the media spotlight, but in the wider scheme of things, like any other film market, China has already racked up a portfolio of hits and misses. In 2008 and 2012, co-producers of Asura, the NingXia Film Group, took the domestic market by storm with supernatural fantasy film franchise Painted Skin. The second installment quickly became the country’s highest grossing domestic film of all time, earning 806m yuan(£90.5m) at the box office. They’d hoped for the same success with Asura, but instead ended up with an expensive failure.

Others remain undeterred by Asura’s initial box office disappearance. American actor Matthew Knowles, who played Rawa, a rebellious demigod in the film, says it is currently being re-edited, with plans for a screening in Los Angeles in the US.

“I think Asura is a little out of the box for Chinese audiences, it’s two steps ahead of what they’re used to and they may apply different standards to it,” he explains. “Asura creates a completely new world. It’s not part of Marvel or DC, it’s something so new and fresh that I think people in the West will want to see it.”