The mainland's blockbuster answer to Avatar, a biopic about the Great Sage, Confucius, was a box-office flop.
But the online community flocked by the thousands - and before too long, millions - to see an online movie that its makers claim was made with a budget no bigger than the electricity bill for running their computers for three months.
War of Internet Addiction was released by volunteer filmmakers Oil Tiger Machinima Team on January 21. It was initially blocked. But, when it reappeared on popular mainland video site Youku.com days later, it immediately started to generate traffic.
Conservative estimates say it has been viewed several million times - some sources state more than 10 million.
The 64-minute movie is a 'machinima' - a movie made using the graphics engine of an existing game. If a game has a function that allows gamers to record their own game-play, it is also possible to creatively produce a movie.
In this case, the moviemakers used Blizzard's World of Warcraft (WoW), the world's most popular pay-to-play Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game.
Anywhere from four million to half of the game's worldwide 11.5 million players are thought to be on the mainland - and many of them are frustrated by shutdowns of the game and the failure of authorities to approve expansion packs, among other problems.