The Chinese animated film “Niu Lai”, conducted with a low budget and debuted almost without promotion, became one of the most unexpected box office phenomena of summer in the country after becoming viral on social networks.
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17/08/2026
by
Lusa
— Shanghai Daily (@shanghaidaily) August 17, 2026
The film was produced by Dalian Jingyuan Culture Film and Television Media, a company previously specialized in interior decoration, before switching from focus to animation in 2021.
Director Xin Yumeng and screenwriter Sun Lifang are the only members of the production team responsible for the voices of the characters. The distributor told the Chinese media that it initially advised the director not to release the film, but that it insisted, having spent five years creating it manually.
The popularity jump occurred after images recorded by the first viewers began to circulate on social media, drawing attention to the appearance of characters and scenarios.
In the Chinese version of TikTok, videos of the film today accumulated 1,460 million views, while other related themes amounted to tens or hundreds of millions, found EFE.
The film led Weibo's trends, surpassing Christopher Nolan's film "The Odyssey".
According to the local medium The Paper, daily revenue multiplied by 200 in just one day, from about 3,000 yuan (384 euros) to approximately 600,000 yuan (76,800 euros), while the initial shortage of sessions led to the exhaustion of tickets in some projections.
The phenomenon also generated a wave of memes and posters created by the netizens themselves, who parody famous titles such as “The Condemned Shawshank”, “Titanic” or “The Odyssey”, using the characters of Niu Lai.
Analysts quoted by the local press compare Niu Lai's success to the cult status acquired from "The Fourth", a 2003 Tommy Wiseau film, famous precisely for its technical deficiencies.