Romance returns to Chinese cinema – but off screen, the film industry is mired in relationship dramas

“Make love, not war,” Chinese directors seem to have been saying during the first half of 2018, as they coaxed strong commercial performances from locally produced romancefilms, a genre that has been muscled out in recent years by testosterone-filled blockbusters.

According to figures from entertainment research firm EntGroup, Dante Lam Chiu-yin’s Operation Red Sea – an artillery-heavy fictional account of the Chinese naval evacua­tion of war-stricken Yemen in 2015 – is the highest-grossing domestic release to date this year, with takings of 3.6 billion yuan (US$560 million), followed by Chen Sicheng’s Detective Chinatown 2(3.4 billion yuan) and Raman Hui Shing-ngai’s Monster Hunt 2(2.2 billion yuan). These numbers, however, need to be kept in perspective as all three films were released at the start of the week-long Lunar New Year holiday, in February.

Tian Yusheng’s The Ex-File: The Return of the Exes (2017), which was released on December 29, could only capitalise on the much shorter three-day New Year break. The third instalment of a franchise that began in 2014, the rowdy romantic comedy snowballed into one of the unlikeliest hits of 2018, and ended its two-month run with a gross of 1.9 billion yuan. (The previous instalment, Ex-Files 2: The Backup Strikes Back, took in just 252 million yuan, in 2015.)

Close on the heels of The Return of the Exes is Rene Liu Ruo-ying’s Us and Them, a drama revolving around a crumbling relationship between two 20-somethings in Beijing. Released on April 28, before the Labour Day holiday, the film chalked up earnings of 1.4 billion yuan, before it was mired in contro­versy as reports emerged about producers sweeping up advance tickets online to create hype around the movie and then having them refunded before the screenings began.