The Projector | China’s golden week: which movie will win big at the box office, Shadow, Project Gutenberg or Hello, Mrs Money?
A small-time film production company may have found the formula for big-screen success with its comedy of manners starring Celina Jade
As China’s National Day “golden week” begins, so does the latest battle for box-office supremacy. The holiday is, traditionally, a lucrative period for the Chinese film industry and many observers predict a race between Zhang Yimou’s epic Shadow and Felix Chong Man-keung’s action movie Project Gutenberg.
The former, a period piece in the same vein as Zhang’s international breakthrough Hero (2002), received critical acclaim at the Venice and Toronto film festivals while the latter is by a director who counts the Overheard and Infernal Affairs (as screenwriter) trilogies among his works and boasts a stellar cast including Chow Yun-fat and Aaron Kwok Fu-shing.
Both films are bound to generate brisk business but the real deal lurks elsewhere. The winner, we predict, will be the feel-good film starring Hong Kong-born Celina Jade that is set in an exotic location, driven by an over-the-top narrative and filled with sensationalist gags and one-dimensional characters.
No, we are not talking about Wolf Warrior 2 (2017), China’s highest-grossing film of all time, in which Jade stars as a United Nations doctor and which is taking a second stab at the box office after being re-released on September 19. Instead, the winner-in-waiting is a movie called Hello, Mrs Money, which, like Shadow and Project Gutenberg, hits mainland screens on September 30.
Set in a luxury resort in Malaysia, this comedy of manners involves a group of men who go to farcical lengths – including an extended gag in which one of them dresses up as a woman – in an attempt to swindle a rich widow (Jade) out of her fortune.
Before you brush it off as a crass mash up of Some Like It Hot (1959) and Tootsie (1982), it is worth noting the commercial pedigree of those behind Hello, Mrs Money. Originally a theatrical troupe specialising in comical plays aimed at festive audiences during the New Year holidays, Mahua FunAge has diversified into filmmaking with remarkable success.
