China Isn’t Crazy At All About ‘Crazy Rich Asians’
The hit U.S. movie has turned out to be a flop in the world’s largest population of Asians
On the opening night for “Crazy Rich Asians” in China last Friday, 25-year-old graduate student Hu Lianyu went to catch the movie that has won big audiences in America.
There were only a half-dozen people in the theater in the southeastern city of Ningbo, and the film left him feeling perplexed. “It was very light-hearted,” Mr. Hu said, but he didn’t like how it portrayed wealthy Chinese people as “having old-fashioned thoughts and behaviors that are in poor taste.”
“Crazy Rich Asians,” a Cinderella tale of a young Chinese-American woman romanced by the handsome scion of an extremely wealthy family from Singapore, was a box-office smash in the U.S. this summer. American viewers and critics applauded the movie for its predominantly Asian cast, and the movie won domestic sales of nearly $174 million, according to Box Office Mojo.
In China, home to the world’s largest population of Asians, it is bombing. Nationwide ticket sales have barely topped $1.4 million so far. Empty theaters have forced cinemas to cancel thousands of planned screenings. One online reviewer compared the movie to General Tso’s chicken, a uniquely American dish rarely found in China.
Warner Bros., which distributed the movie, declined to comment. A representative for Kevin Kwan, who wrote the book the movie was based on, didn’t respond to requests for comment. He told The Wall Street Journal earlier this year, “I based the book on a very small group of elite Chinese Singaporeans and am only really portraying the world in it.”
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