How giant shark movie The Meg, starring Li Bingbing and Jason Statham, became the highest grossing China-US co-production in history
- Since Jaws invented the summer blockbuster in 1975 shark movies have always been popular with the public, so The Meg’s premise was a winner from the beginning
- Lead actors Jason Statham and Li Bingbing may lack chemistry, but it succeeds by treating the Chinese characters with as much dignity as the American ones
In 2018 The Meg caught Hollywood commentators completely off guard. Jon Turteltaub’s giant shark movie became the highest-grossing Chinese-American co-production of all time, making US$530 million worldwide and beating the previous record holder, Kung Fu Panda 3 .
So how did a movie dubbed “the thinking fan’s Sharknado” triumph against the odds?
Based on a 1997 book by Steve Alten, and starring Jason Statham and Li Bingbing, The Meg pits the crew of an underwater research facility against a 23-metre megalodon, a creature previously thought to be extinct.
By almost any measure, the movie is terrible. The script is awful (sample line: “Meg versus man isn’t a fight, it’s a slaughter!”), the CGI indifferent, and Statham and Li lack even the most rudimentary romantic chemistry, with the former struggling to land his own accent, let alone a gigantic rampaging shark.
“We were being laughed at by a lot of people for making this movie,” said Turtletaub, as quoted by Variety. “Before it came out, the tracking was horrible. They were saying this is a huge mistake, Warner Brothers has blown it, China is done.”