BEIJING — This month China’s great masses are being mobilized by their leaders for an unusual purpose. Employees at state-owned companies and at all levels of government are joining students from grade school to universities as they leave their homes, head out into the heat and do their duty: ensure the financial success of the government’s latest propaganda film, “Beginning of the Great Revival.”

The movie, which opened on Wednesday on almost all of the country’s 6,200 screens, is part of a campaign to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party next Friday. It is also playing in 29 American theaters, including ones in New York and Los Angeles.

The movie, along with its sister film, “The Founding of a Republic,” which was made for the 60th anniversary of the birth of the People’s Republic of China, in 1949, is an attempt to update the state-sponsored propaganda movie to appeal to younger audiences, by adding screen stars, a subplot and modern production methods. The government has stacked the deck, so success is virtually guaranteed. Government offices and schools are buying tickets in bulk and organizing viewing trips in the middle of the workday, and there are officially sanctioned movie review contests, presentations of paintings inspired by the film and group singing of classic Communist songs at cinemas.

The film claims to have a cast of 178 of the most well-known Chinese-language actors, including Chow Yun-fat and Andy Lau. It borrows stylistic cues from popular Korean soap operas and makes Mao Zedong, the Communist Party leader who died in 1976, both a romancer and a revolutionary, playing up the love story between him and his second wife. It cost $12 million to make. By contrast, just over 10 percent of movies made in China last year had a budget of more than $1.5 million.