On his birthday, Stephen Chow officially announced the new movie "Kungfu Women's Football Team" (English name: Kungfu soccer), directed and written by him.
The film is scheduled to be released in theaters in July, marking Chau Tinh Tri's return to the film market after 6 years, since the work "New Comedian King" in 2019, when he took on the roles of screenwriter, director and producer.
However, right from the project announcement in 2023 to now, the "Kungfu Women's Football Team" has always stood between expectations and doubts.
The Kungfu Women's Football Team" is introduced to inherit the spirit of the classic film "The Shaolin Football Team" (2001) which was very successful by Stephen Chow.
But this time, he did not directly participate in acting but assigned the main role to Truong Tieu Phi, Dich Le Nhiet Ba, Truong Nghe Hung, and many former Chinese women's football players to participate as guests or play themselves.
However, Chinese media commented that in the context of the billion-people film market declining in revenue, the summer movie season gathers a series of blockbusters, the label of "remixing old dishes" of Stephen Chow is very difficult to remove, and audiences today no longer easily pay for it just because of nostalgia.
In addition to the market context, Stephen Chow himself in recent years has also been a controversial figure.
From 1990 to 1999, his films continuously ranked in the top 3 annual box office revenue in Hong Kong (China), including 5 times topping the charts. By 2016, "Mermaid" had a great hit in mainland China, helping him become the first director whose film surpassed the revenue milestone of 3 billion RMB.
However, that almost absolute influence seems to have disappeared. Stephen Chow's 2019 "New Comedian King" was criticized by many long-time audiences, although the work had an initial advantage thanks to the past glory of "Comedy King" (1999).
Now, "Kungfu Women's Football Team" has a theme almost identical to "Shaolin Football Team" 25 years ago: it is still a combination of martial arts and football, only replacing the men's team with the women's team. This makes many people question whether this is just "old wine in a new bottle".
The film's production budget also worries many people. According to sources in the industry, the film has a budget of up to 380 million CNY (about 1,470 billion VND), including 1,200 special effects scenes. Among them, there is a ball pass scene that is said to take up to 9 months of post-production processing and cost 20 million CNY.
The actors are also very hardworking, for example, Truong Nghe Hung suffered a cracked rib when filming a reverse hook scene in the rain.
However, the sacrifice of actors does not mean that the work will definitely achieve box office success. According to the practice of the Chinese film industry, a film with a budget of 380 million CNY needs to achieve revenue of about 1.4 billion CNY to ensure that it is not loss-making.
This summer, there is fierce competition from works such as Jia Ling's "Chuyển niệm hoa khai" and Shen Teng's "Chào mừng đến Nhà hàng Long" starring. Therefore, people in the industry predict that reaching the revenue milestone of 1 billion CNY is also not easy.
