The Chinese animated mythological movie Ne Zha 2 made history this weekend by surpassing over $1 billion in box office sales, the first non-American film to do so and the first to make over a billion in a single national market, China’s.
The state-run Global Times propaganda outlet described Ne Zha 2 as “China’s most-watched film” ever, attracting 160 million viewers since it debuted on Lunar New Year’s Day, January 29. Lunar New Year is the largest holiday of the year in much of Asia. In China, families traditionally use their time off to the go to the theater, making Lunar New Year week one of the Chinese box office’s most lucrative times of year. Ne Zha 2 was responsible for about half of all box office sales during the Lunar New Year “Golden Week” in China.
Ne Zha 2, the sequel to an animated movie based on medieval Chinese lore about a magical child, debuted in select American theaters this weekend and is expected to gross nearly $1 billion. If Chinese predictions are true, the movie would become the most lucrative animated feature in global box office history, state outlet Xinhua observed on Monday.
Ne Zha 2‘s success comes during a languid time for the American box office in which even Hollywood’s top grossing films are struggling to maintain high sales in U.S. theaters. Super Bowl weekend is traditionally one of the slowest theater weekends of the year in America, but the decline in theater attendance in 2025 appears to have preceded that expected event.
“In just eight days and five hours after its release, Ne Zha 2 became China’s highest-grossing film of all time on Thursday, exceeding the 5.77 billion yuan record set by The Battle at Lake Changjin,” the Global Times observed. “A day later, it overtook Star Wars: The Force Awakens to become the highest-grossing film ever in a single market, reaching over 6.79 billion yuan (including presales) in China on Friday.”
Nezha is a legendary boy god described in several religious sects common in China, including Buddhism and Taoism. Nezha was reportedly born as a grown child after his mother endured three and half years of pregnancy and went on to engage in legendary battles with various traditional monsters. Ne Zha, the film, concluded with the boy sacrificing his body to fight the villain but retaining his soul, which begins a new journey in the sequel.
Ne Zha 2 presents the success of a new breed of “patriotic” Chinese communist propaganda movie. The aforementioned The Battle at Lake Changjin and its predecessor as top-grossing Chinese movie, Wolf Warrior 2, are explicitly anti-American communist propaganda films. Lake Changjin retells the story of Chinese communists fighting in the Korean War, defeating cartoonishly evil American military commanders at the titular event. Wolf Warrior 2 tells the story of Chinese special forces saving Africans from fictional rogue American guerrilla. For Lake Changjin, the government menacingly encouraged moviegoers to eat frozen potatoes in the theater to make the experience of fighting in the Korean War more realistic to them. As China uses a “social credit system” to control individuals’ behavior by lowering their “social credit” scores if they are insufficiently enthusiastic about propaganda, these films received outsized support at the box office.
Shortly after the success of Wolf Warrior 2, the Chinese Communist Party announced that its “Publicity Department” would be in charge of controlling all filmmaking in the country, ensuring filmmakers only produced regime-approved propaganda. China became the largest theater market in the world in 2020, largely as a result of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic shutting down theaters throughout the world, and Lake Changjin became a dominant artistic force defining subsequent Chinese movies for a time. The result was a barrage of war films such as Lake Changjin and its much less successful sequel and, social credit system notwithstanding, a slow decline in interest from the Chinese public in war movies.
Following a wave of protests in 2022 – and a massive failure in the promotion of a “patriotic” movie copying the American Top Gun franchise known as Born to Fly – Chinese theaters began offering more personal dramas, comedies, and science fiction in 2023. The failure of Born to Fly was especially embarrassing for the Chinese government as the film was delayed out of debuting during the Communist Party anniversary holidays in October and out of Lunar New Year due to poor quality effects, according to multiple reports.
Ne Zha 2 offers an overtly Chinese story based on folklore not commonly known outside China – a “patriotic” angle – without wading into tedious militaristic propaganda, an improvement on the “patriotic” film format used in the past. As an animated feature, it is also attractive to families and suitable for children, unlike the violent displays in Wolf Warrior 2 and Lake Changjin.
“This robust performance marks a major win for China’s film industry, which faced a tough year in 2024, with box office revenues down 23 percent from 2023 and 34 percent from the pre-pandemic peak in 2019,” the Global Times gloated on Monday.
The next frontier for Ne Zha 2 is America. Unlike the Chinese box office, which the government closely regulates to keep Hollywood films out, American theaters welcome international features that show financial promise. Ne Zha 2 debuted in Los Angeles on Saturday with a Chinese government-backed event attracting hundreds of spectators. “Pre-sale tickets [are] flying off the shelves” in America, the Chinese government’s CGTN network reported on Monday.
“With an occupancy rate exceeding 90 percent, the pre-sale tickets in the U.S. are now in very high demand, making them very hard to come by, the movie’s distributor CMC Pictures told China Media Group,” CGTN added.
In contrast, early 2025 has seen slow ticket sales in the United States for American movies. The top film in the U.S. box office is currently also an animated movie, Dog Man, which made $13.7 million at the box office this weekend.
“It wasn’t a banner weekend for Dog Man,” the Associated Press observed. “It fell steeply, dropping 62% in it second weekend. But with a production budget of $40 million, Dog Man has already tallied $54.1 million domestically in two weeks.”
Hollywood is hoping for a boost in ticket sales next week, as the Super Bowl no longer presents a challenge and two major blockbusters are expected to debut: Captain America: Brave New World and Paddington in Peru.
Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.
