China’s ‘Ne Zha 2’ first non-Hollywood film to surpass $2 billion worldwide
Once it was said: “China is near!”
Today that saying is truer than ever — China is now the second largest economy in the world after the United States and is soaring in every field, including cinema, CE Report quotes ANSA.
A prime example is the animated film “Ne Zha 2: The Rise of the Fire Warrior” by Yang Yu, which has so far grossed $2.2 billion, becoming the first non-Hollywood film ever to surpass $2 billion worldwide.
Not only that: it is now the fifth highest-grossing film of all time at the global box office, behind Avatar (2009), Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), Avengers: Endgame (2019), and Titanic (1997) — an unprecedented achievement for a non-Hollywood feature film.
Produced with a budget of $80 million, much less than a typical Disney production, and running for nearly two and a half hours, the movie features an entirely digital cast drawn from Chinese mythology — a true Chinese blockbuster, like the recent Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants by Tsui Hark or Creation of the Gods II: Demon Force by Wuershan.
These films often take inspiration from The Investiture of the Gods, a 16th-century Chinese novel attributed to Xu Zhonglin, consisting of one hundred chapters that blend history, folklore, mythology, legend, and fantasy.
As for the plot: Ne Zha 2, arriving in Italian cinemas on November 6 distributed by Minerva Pictures and Filmclub Distribuzione, is the sequel to “Ne Zha” (2019).
The story revolves around the division of a mystical artifact, known as the Pearl of Chaos, into two parts — the Spiritual Pearl and the Demonic Sphere.
