Film & TV4 min(s) read
Published 11:13 16 Aug 2026 GMT
A Chinese animated film made by two people with visuals so rough that viewers said they were 'worse than AI-generated animation' has become one of the surprise box office stories of the summer after the internet turned it into a meme.
Niu Lai opened in Chinese cinemas on August 5. It made 3,400 yuan on its first day - that is $474.
Fewer than 300 people watched it across the entire country over its first nine days. Its total take after more than a week was 7,169 yuan, roughly $995.
Then someone posted about the numbers on social media and the whole thing flipped.
On August 14, a post about the film's nine-day total of just over 7,000 yuan went viral on Chinese social media.
People were stunned that a film this obscure, this rough-looking, and this poorly attended had somehow made it into actual cinemas.
Terms like 'the most basic theatrical film', 'disaster-level', and 'worse than AI-generated animation' started circulating online.
Some people said they could 'hardly believe it was a Chinese animated film released in 2026'. Others said they wanted to buy a ticket purely to find out 'just how bad it could be'.
The curiosity wave hit fast.
By the time the Global Times reported the story on August 16, the cumulative box office had jumped from 7,000 yuan to over 2.5 million yuan, roughly $350,000.
Still not a lot by Chinese box office standards, but a 350x increase driven entirely by people wanting to watch something terrible.
Then it got even stranger.
Niu Lai translates literally as 'the bull is coming'. Chinese social media users latched onto this almost immediately.
Stock market investors, who have spent years waiting for China's sluggish markets to turn around, started joking that the bull market had finally arrived.
Some said they were heading to cinemas 'to manifest' the market recovery.
Others posted edited versions of the film's little bull character into posters for Hollywood blockbusters, which only made it more viral.
At the same time, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opened in China on August 14, the same day the Niu Lai meme exploded.
Netizens joked that Nolan probably hadn't expected a two-person animation project with $474 opening-day sales to become his unlikely rival.
The official Weibo account for Niu Lai posted a statement acknowledging the situation with what sounded like genuine humility.
The film 'falls short of established industry standards for theatrical animation in terms of visuals, storytelling and other aspects', the account said.
The positive feedback was something the filmmakers were grateful for. The criticism should be 'accepted with an open mind and regarded as valuable reminders for improvement'.
It is hard to ask for a more gracious response from a team of two people whose film just got called 'disaster-level' by an entire country before accidentally outselling its entire opening run by a factor of 350.
Zhang Peng, a cultural researcher at Nanjing Normal University, told the Global Times that Niu Lai was being driven by 'curiosity and social currency' rather than any genuine interest in the film itself.
"Audiences are essentially paying a premium for the feeling of being part of a trending phenomenon," he said.
"Curiosity can generate genuine audience interest, but social-media-driven hype is essentially a bubble built on traffic."
He warned that cinemas adding extra screenings for Niu Lai were 'giving in to online buzz rather than making decisions based on the quality of the film itself'.
He added that The Odyssey's strong performance in China showed that quality content combined with a distinctive theatrical experience is what actually sustains the industry long term.
"A fleeting viral frenzy can never replace a solid creative foundation," he said.
He is probably right.
But the two people who made Niu Lai went from $474 on opening day to a quarter of a million dollars in a week because the internet decided their film was so bad it became essential viewing.
There are worse fates for a debut.
