Big bucks don't necessarily translate into big blockbusters

A highly niche sci-fi movie quietly released on April 1 became a box office dark horse. Journey to the West, the debut of a 34-year-old Chinese film director, fetched 66 million yuan ($9.5 million), a no-big-deal number for blockbusters, but a sweeping win for its initial cost of "just" 2 million yuan ($290,000).

Bearing the same English name as the popular ancient Chinese classic novel that is a fictionalized account of the 17-year pilgrimage of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang (602-664) to India during the Tang Dynasty (618-907), the movie, or rather mockumentary, is about a sci-fi magazine editor's trip from Beijing to the countryside in southwest China, looking for signs of alien life.

How it all began

The movie's storyline starts at the editorial department of a sci-fi magazine called Universe Exploration in the early 1990s, when the Chinese penchant for spotting unidentified flying objects (UFOs) gave birth to a cluster of sci-fi magazines.

Tang Zhijun, chief editor of the magazine, is an eccentric character. He holds no interest in anything other than getting information on aliens. He's always seen carrying around an electric device—about the size of a handbag—on his shoulder. This device can pick up mysterious radio signals that might come from alien civilizations.

He keeps an eye on all the alien-related news out there, seeks confirmation when somebody claims to have seen a UFO, looks for any signs of extraterrestrial life on Earth, and so on. Unfortunately for Tang, he keeps hitting dead ends wherever he turns—until he travels to a tiny village in China's southwestern region in 2020. A young villager who claimed he was constantly getting messages from outer space gets beamed up from Earth. And Tang is the only eye witness.

Tang's narration, one of the highlights, sets the film's humorous tone. For example, he'll be sitting next to a TV, comparing the static on the screen to the Big Bang.

"He is quite serious and discusses things many would consider absolutely nonsensical," one moviegoer commented on Douban, a leading review platform in China. "This brings the movie a unique sense of humor." Setting the release date on April Fool's Day also lent the sci-fi flick a tongue-in-cheek vibe.

Kong Dashan, director of the film, in one interview at a screening in Beijing, said he'd found himself on the brink of despair quite a few times throughout the shooting process as he wasn't sure what the final product would look and feel like.

But audiences welcomed it with open arms, first at the Pingyao International Film Festival in October 2022 in Shanxi Province when the movie had its first public screening. It became the most popular film at the festival and the first one to see all its tickets sell out.

The market performance following its official release this year has echoed its popularity. Viewers love it for a myriad of reasons. Some love its humor, some find Tang's persistence to be very touching and some say they could see themselves in Tang—a feeling of loneliness and having ideas that others cannot understand. "He always appears disheveled, but he actually has a poetic and romantic soul," another moviegoer commented on Douban.

Han Song, who used to write for sci-fi magazines, said the film took him back to the 1980s and 1990s when many Chinese people were very interested in UFOs. "There were scientists, amateurs and people simply interested in the subjects," he told China Business Network, a TV station under the management of Shanghai Media Group.

"The world needs eccentric people like Tang and their voices deserve to be heard by more people," Meng Ying, a film director based in Beijing, told Beijing Review. "Anybody who has ever pursued something that was met with very little understanding might find in Tang a 'friend' and feel that they are not alone in the universe."

Not about budget

It was the film's small budget that originally piqued Meng's interest. "It seems impossible to make a sci-fi film with a budget this low given that all the fancy special effects and props are super costly," she said. "It's a struggle to make a regular feature film with this investment, let alone a sci-fi one. This film has opened new doors in sci-fi filmmaking."

Ma Heliang, who inaugurated in 2019 the Blue Planet Science Fiction Film Festival, China's first film festival in this genre, said the "big bucks create big blockbusters" mindset was a result of the Hollywood commercial blockbusters people got used to seeing, basically starting with the first Star Wars movie in the 1970s. "Over the decades, Hollywood has directly shaped our perception of sci-fi movies," Ma said at a forum during the festival on March 24.

Low-budget sci-fi movies are not new in China but simply haven't been seen on screen for decades. The 1980s saw a number of made-in-China sci-fi films, with some later becoming niche classics. Take Wonder Boy for example, telling the story of a boy born with electric powers who can control appliances. These movies had no fancy special effects and were based on daily life in the era.

The Wandering Earth, released in February 2019 and its sequel The Wandering Earth II, released earlier this year, were big commercial successes. Both are considered the first real sci-fi blockbusters made by Chinese filmmakers.

But this "accolade" is more or less still based on the Hollywood-style criteria. Guo Fan, director of the The Wandering Earth movies, has also been exploring more possibilities in sci-fi film making. Guo is also one of the financial backers of Journey to the West. Another interesting detail here is that Kong was one of the assistant directors of The Wandering Earth II.

"The success of small budget sci-fi films can encourage more young people to make their own sci-fi movies," Wang Hongwei, deputy head of the China Film Director's Guild, said at the forum during the Blue Planet Science Fiction Film Festival on March 24. "It is difficult for young film makers to collect big money for their first film. With that being the case, few young creators would choose to make sci-fi films."

Even with the staggering success of the The Wandering Earth movies, the overall situation of sci-fi movie creation in China still doesn't look all that optimistic. "Around 600 movies will go into production in China in 2023 and among them will be a maximum of 10 sci-fi ones," Wang said.

But he was happy to see the many sci-fi movie proposals submitted by young creators at the Blue Planet Science Fiction Film Festival two months ago. Some even combined Chinese folk stories or traditional operas with the genre.

"These perspectives have rarely been seen in previous sci-fi movies," Wang said. "We hope to see more sci-fi movies with Chinese features in the future."