Why the world’s biggest movie bombed in America
The same epic storytelling conventions that delight moviegoers in China often turn off critics abroad.
Jeff Yang is the author of “The Golden Screen: The Movies That Made Asian America.”
In this weekend’s cinematic battle of Asian monster slayers, there was a clear flawless victor: Netflix’s solid-“Golden” juggernaut, “KPop Demon Hunters,” whose sing-along events did a “Takedown” of the theatrical charts, earning $18 million from 1,700 screens across North America.
On paper, it beat a formidable rival: “Ne Zha 2,” the animated action-comedy-fantasy from China that’s the highest-grossing movie in the world this year, the highest-grossing animated feature ever and the highest-grossing film in Chinese history. By the time an English-dubbed version opened, it had already earned over $2 billion, double the haul of “Lilo & Stitch,” its closest global competitor.
But when it hit American theaters this weekend, it bombed. Hard.
“Ne Zha 2” is estimated to have earned just $1.5 million on 2,228 screens, making it the weakest-performing wide-release premiere of 2025. A limited-release subtitled edition released in February earned a more respectable $21 million, leading distributor A24 to bet that a prestige version featuring Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh would help bring it mainstream bankability.
But the disappointing return, even as the Korea-set “KPop Demon Hunters” dominates, isn’t surprising. It’s part of a long history of cultural missed connections that have kept Chinese blockbusters from translating abroad. And the very things that Western critics complain about most in these movies are often core to the Chinese source material on which they’re based.
“Ne Zha 2” is a unique cinematic experience, with animation that meets and, to some, exceeds the bar set by American studios such as DreamWorks and Disney. For its home audiences, it tells the story of a culturally authentic superhero — a fiend-fighting teen named Ne Zha who shares a body with a dragon spirit named Ao Bing — in bona fide Chinese epic fashion. There are also some unsubtle digs at America for the Chinese nationalist crowd, including an evil clan that wears bald eagle badges and is led by a fat Uncle Sam analogue.
Those swipes aren’t why so many Western responses to “Ne Zha 2” have ranged from puzzled to perturbed to outright peeved. Instead, reviewers have been put off by its “baffling” story and its “bizarre” tone.
The Boston Globe’s Odie Henderson entered a screening excited to see its animation style, and “emerged 145 minutes later confused and nursing one of the worst headaches I’ve had in decades” as he tried to follow the movie’s vast number of characters and haphazard layers of subplots. The Post’s Chris Kilmek wrote that he was “confounded from the opening moments,” and called the film “as visually stunning as it is narratively opaque.”
Others blasted the film’s wild mood swings: “Ne Zha 2” shifts with little notice from intense action to high melodrama to body horror to, well, poop humor. As Robbie Collin, the Telegraph’s chief film critic, says in his one-star review, “Its plot comes from a fantastical Ming Dynasty novel that’s apparently roughly equivalent to Britain’s King Arthur legends. I can’t say I’ve personally read it, though I’d be interested to hear from scholars if the source text features quite as many incidents of a pig loudly flatulating in a blind man’s face (two), supporting characters unwittingly drinking Ne Zha’s urine (three), or Ne Zha beating up a tribe of marmots after vomiting in their soup (once, though frankly once is enough).”
In fact, the mythical roots of “Ne Zha 2” go a long way toward explaining the gap between Chinese and Western storytelling — even down to the poop jokes.
In Chinese culture, epic fantasy sagas have been passed down for centuries and play a role similar to the one Greek myths have played in Western classical traditions — inspiring countless retellings and reinterpretations in literature, onstage and now in cinema.
Indeed, they provided the material for three of China’s biggest movies of the past decade: “Journey to the West” was the source for 2015’s “Monkey King: Hero Is Back,” which was previously China’s most successful animated feature ever; “The Classic of Mountains and Seas” inspired “Monster Hunt,” at the time the highest-grossing film in Chinese history; and a tome called “The Investiture of the Gods” introduced the characters seen in “Ne Zha 2.”
None of the trio’s domestic success translated internationally. “Monkey King: Hero Is Back” made $153 million in China, but only $242,000 globally. “Monster Hunt” made $382 million in China and $4.5 million everywhere else. “Ne Zha 2” seems fated for a similar ratio.
Which isn’t the fault of the filmmakers. The same choices that delight Chinese audiences familiar with the adapted texts are often what turn off Western ones that aren’t.
Enormous casts, with key characters introduced suddenly in the middle of stories and others dying or disappearing just as suddenly? Check. Plotlines that are so intricate they require spreadsheets to track, with villains and heroes constantly betraying one another, embracing like brothers and then betraying one another again? Check. Gods and demons switching allegiances between good and evil so rapidly that the terms “god” and “demon” lose any kind of relevance? Check, check, check.
And yes, these epics often feature the tonal whiplash of slapstick comedy and juvenile toilet humor paired with high-minded musings about the nature of morality and the purpose of humanity. (One classic example: To show his spiteful defiance of the Buddha, the Monkey King urinates on a pillar at the edge of the universe, only to find out later that the “pillar” is actually one of the Buddha’s fingers.)
But the biggest difference is a fundamental expectation of what a full story with a beginning, middle and end looks like. Western stories are rooted in a hero’s journey formula in which an individual protagonist is plucked out of nowhere, achieves greatness through luck or talent, defeats monstrous evil, and subsequently receives their reward of a kingdom, true love or happiness ever after. They tend to be linear, goal-oriented and focused on progress.
Meanwhile, Chinese epic fantasies aren’t really about individuals at all. They focus on collectives that have fallen out of harmony — sometimes because of bad choices, sometimes because of outside threats, sometimes for no reason other than the passage of time and the turning of cosmic cycles — and that must go through a seemingly endless series of shifts and adaptations to reach a new balance. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t heroes. It does mean that there often isn’t a singular hero or one correct — and “good” — point of view.
In that way, they reflect China itself, which has more than a billion people and a history that stretches back millennia. Americans are used to thinking of their history as a continuous ascent toward greatness (occasionally interrupted, which makes necessary a “return” to that path of greatness). China is more culturally resigned to the notion that everything is temporary, good and bad are relative (and frequently switch places), and instead of “happily ever after,” humans should settle for “peaceful … for now.”
It’s a wide-aperture, long-term, blurred and complicated view of reality. And because of that, it makes Americans — used to things happening fast and on-demand, with obvious objectives and simple labels — impatient and uncomfortable, which makes a lucrative journey to the West for even super-successful movies based on Chinese epic fantasy unlikely.
To be clear: It’s not that Western-friendly versions of Chinese stories couldn’t be created. “KPop Demon Hunters,” which has a more classic hero’s journey arc, is a terrific example of how a story rooted in Asian mythology can be both culturally authentic and universally accessible all at once.
But now that Chinese storytellers are able to make billions from their moviegoers alone, why should they even care about catering to Western tastes?
correctionAn earlier version of this op-ed misspelled Chris Klimek's last name.