The terrible films Chinese movie-goers had to watch during October Golden Week 2022

China’s National Day holiday from October 1 to 7 is traditionally a box office bonanza. Last year, despite COVID-19 still lingering on people’s minds, tickets sales during the seven-day break, also known as “Golden Week,” topped 4 billion yuan ($562.1 million), only 5% short of the revenue recorded in 2019, the last year before the coronavirus pandemic disrupted the global film industry. 

But 2022 has been a massacre, even by zero-COVID standards. As of today, domestic box office revenue has only reached 1.5 billion yuan ($210.8 million), the lowest takings for the National Day holiday in seven years.  

How did that happen? At face value, it’s a case of zero-COVID. Before the holiday kicked off, the National Health Commission urged people to stay put and exercise caution in public places. But in Beijing, people still filled bathhouses, malls, and public squares the past week. Meanwhile, three cinemas I visited at peak-time in busy shopping malls were mostly deserted.  

That’s partly an industry problem. According to Bào Biàn 豹变, a WeChat social media account that covers Chinese films and the entertainment industry, fewer movies were released this year than in the past, with studios withholding flicks, fearing that surprise COVID spikes would deter cinemagoers. Promotion periods were shortened, with some marketing departments given just a week to drum up interest before the Golden Week. And all of this happened against the backdrop of declining interest in theater-going among young Chinese: A report from People’s Daily Online last year concluded that a trip to the cinema had become a harder sell than it used to be as China’s Gen-Z preferred to consume entertainment digitally. 

But most likely, this year’s films are just boring. “I wish the site had a ‘I don’t want to watch’ label. I would put it on all of the movies during this year’s National Holiday!” reads one popular comment on Douban, China’s premier reviewing site.  

The cream of the crop, Born to Fly 长空之王, a Top Gun-esque tribute to the Chinese military’s air force, starring heartthrob Wáng Yībó 王一博, was abruptly withdrawn from distribution on September 27.  The rom-coms, actions, dramas that usually pack out theaters during the week-long break were absent, replaced with a few kids’ movies and propaganda films, which are also known as “main melody” (主旋律 zhǔ xuánlǜ) movies because they sing the tune the Communist Party wants to hear.  

Here’s a taste of what’s on Chinese silver screens this holiday, and what audiences had to say about them, falling roughly into three themes:  

1. The Party and the People : A Match Made in Heaven

Steel Will

钢铁意志 (gāngtiě yìzhì)

A commander of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) falls in love with smelting. It’s 1948, and the Anshan Steel Plant in snowy Shenyang has been liberated from the Kuomintang (KMT), who had failed to revive the plant from Japanese sabotage.  

Once experts say something can’t be done, you can bet your bottom yuan this PLA commander will not only get it done, but better and quicker than the KMT did. Only because, as it is regularly spelled out, the people are on the CCP’s side.   

Douban users have overwhelmingly voted down this title, complaining about its slow plot, superficial characters, and eye-rolling melodrama. “I left after twenty minutes, it was too red,” a reviewer on Maoyan, a Chinese movie-ticketing and film review platform, said of the film’s excessive patriotism. Another Maoyan user pointed out that although data on Mouyan showed 90% of tickets for each screening were sold, he was the only person in the theater when he arrived. “Is it because the government bought it with their own money?” the person wrote.

2. A Good Nation Never Leaves a Citizen Behind

Home Coming

万里归途 (wàn lǐ guī tú)

Home Coming is the holiday’s best-seller, winning viewers with explosive action sequences and fresh-faced Wáng Jùnkǎi 王俊凯, originally of the hugely popular boy band TFBoys.

Set in 2015, the film revolves around the Republic of Noumia (It’s so obviously Libya one wonders why they bothered to rename it), which is ravaged by civil war. In streets strewn with litter, corpses and exoticist stereotypes, two Chinese diplomats swear to “bring everyone home” (as long as they’re Chinese), leading a group of miners through the desert to the promised land of the Tunisian border.   

Bombastic patriotism is the name of the game: For the safe release of citizens, one of the diplomats plays Russian roulette twice with a swashbuckling big boss who looks ready for his audition in Pirates of the Caribbean. It ends with the whole group marching up the airplane gangway, joyously waving little Chinese flags, past Libyans desperately reaching out for help.   

Ordinary Hero

平凡英雄 (píngfán yīngxióng)

There’s a true story in here somewhere, under all the sugar-coating, exaggeration and sentimentality. In Khotan, Xinjiang, a boy has his arm cut off in a tractor accident. A gaggle of people band together to get the seven-year-old to Urumqi in time to sow the arm back on.  

From then on, 90% of the actors’ screentime is spent crying — the screaming hysteria of the mother, the dignified but steady streams of the older brother who accompanies the boy on his journey, the dewey-doe-eyes of the appropriately cute child who drifts in and out of consciousness on the passenger plane.  

The film oozes with irrationally-positive messages: that the military would usually allow planes to fly over military airspace to help small children with missing limbs; that the Khotan police, who work in a fifth-tier city, would have budget for a sleek Apollo-11-style Mission Control room to guide the boy to the hospital.  

The director tries to twang our heartstrings rather than pluck them, laying on corny clichés with a trowel. The overkill climaxes with the older brother’s flash back to skipping joyously with his brother through a field of cotton. 

But it’s all for naught. “No amount of background music, no amount of melodrama, no amount of sermonizing can make people vicariously enter into this story which is flat, with no explosive points,” reads one Douban comment. 

3. Looks Like Your Kids Could Do With Some Positive Energy

New Big Head Son and Little Head Dad 5

新大头儿子和小头爸爸5 (xīn dà tóu érzǐ hé xiǎo tóu bàbà)

The film is part of a long-running series that started in 2014, the adventures of a little boy (the aforementioned “Big Head Son”) and his Little Head Dad. The fifth installment launches them into space, in a plot that boils down to Big Head Son (and any children in the audience) being inspired by China’s space project and the values you need to become a Chinese astronaut, helped along by a mysterious alien.  

Maoyan reviews praise the wholesome education, but keep schtum about how it went down with the target audience. “My kid screamed that she wanted to go home and was bored,” said one Douban user, blaming the slow pace and lack of laughs. Another said their family were the only people in the theater that morning. A screening I attended the next day was similarly sparse.    

Final verdict

Patriotic films can be wildly popular. For example, released earlier this year, The Battle at Lake Changjin is the highest-grossing film in Chinese history.  

But a bad film is a bad film. Many positive reviews this holiday praised the ideas the films upheld, rather than whether or not they were a good watch. Audiences aren’t obliged to feel for characters who’ve been dipped in patriotism but ring hollow. There’s also no such thing as spoilers and suspense, when anything less than a happy ending would mean the film could never be shown.  

Audiences have apparently voted with their feet, choosing not to watch films that, in the words of one Douban user, “Do not seek artistic merit, but seek no fault in politics.”