China’s Fifth Generation filmmakers may have lost their touch, judging by poor ticket sales for Legend of the Demon Cat

Given the amount of money flowing into the Chinese film industry, it’s hardly a surprise to hear a film­maker boasting of spending US$200 million to reconstruct an “entire city” for one of their movies. One despairs, however, when that director is Chen Kaige.

Now comfortably ensconced in the commercial establishment, Chen, 65, is no longer that rebel who sprang to inter­national prominence in the 1980s and ’90s with dogma-challenging films such as Yellow Earth (1984) and Farewell, My Concubine (1993). But it’s still slightly disorienting to hear him wax lyrical about the many toys he was given to play with on Legend of the Demon Cat.

Speaking to the South China Morning Post in September, after a preview of an eight-minute teaser reel of Legend at the Toronto Film Festival, Chen told of the gargantuan set that would eventually be turned into a theme park, the army of extras he commandeered during the shoot and the 1,200 visual effects he deployed in the two-hour-plus film. All of this, he said, was meant to appeal to a young audience demanding pomp and spectacle.

Things didn’t play out that way, however. Released in China on December 22, the film’s box-office takings by January 3 of about 500 million yuan (US$77 million) paled in comparison to those of the two highest-grossing titles that opened during the run-up to the New Year holidays, both of which were made with comparatively less reliance on digitally enhanced bombast.

Feng Xiaogang’s rite-of-passage war drama Youth is a sweeping epic about a military performance troupe in the late 1970s, while The Ex-Files: The Return of the Exes is the third instalment of a decidedly lo-fi romcom series.

So what went wrong?