China's costliest film pulled from cinema

The fantasy blockbuster "Asura", said to be China's most expensive movie production with a 750-million-yuan (110 million U.S. dollars) budget, was pulled from cinemas just three days after its debut.

A poster for "Asura". [Photo: VCG]

The news that the film would be pulled broke on Sunday on the film's official Weibo account, saying that the last screening would be at 10 p.m. that day. It also said that the decision to pull the film was made collectively by its investors, and apologized to the audiences along with the film's actors and partners.

The producers subsequently told Sina.com that future plans for "Asura" had not been finalized, adding that it was pulled for reasons that were "beyond itself", and suggesting that "unfair market competition" was to blame.

Based on Buddhist mythology, "Asura" is said to be similar in style to "Game of Thrones", and was originally expected to be the first film of a fantasy trilogy. The cast included some of China's most well-renowned actors, including heartthrob Wu Lei, four-time Hong Kong Film Award-winner Leung Ka-fai, and award-winning actress Carina Lau.

Pulling in only 46 million yuan (around 6.85 million U.S. dollars) during its opening weekend, the film has fallen far short of box office success.

By comparison, "Hidden Man," directed by veteran director Jiang Wen, debuted the same day as "Asura" and has pulled in 312 million yuan in box office receipts in its first three days.

Besides its poor performance at the box office, the film was poorly reviewed on some well-known rating websites. On Maoyan, it was given 4.9 out of 10. And on Douban.com it scraped through with an even lower 3.1 out of 10.

According to report by Beijing News, the producers have questioned the ratings on the two websites, and suggested that the film was being deliberately targeted with poor ratings. The film scored an 8.4 on Tao Piao Piao, a review site owned by Alibaba – one of the investors in the film.

A screenshot of the announcement published on the official Weibo account for the film. [Photo: weibo.com]

However, many insiders are laying the blame for the poor reviews at the quality of the film.

"If the story itself is not good enough, it is hard to attract Chinese audiences into the cinemas, even with big spending on the special effects," said Luo Tianwen, a box office analyst quoted by Beijing News.

"The bad performance at the box office is one of the reasons for the film being pulled from screens, which is a crisis for a film with such heavy investment," said Li Han, a film industry insider who spoke with Beijing News. "Based on its current situation of the box office, even if the film was still being shown at the cinemas, it would vanish from the market gradually as some other highly-anticipated new films are released."