Critics panned Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer sequel — China made it the summer's biggest hit

Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Soccer opens in cinemas in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland on 23 October, The Hollywood Reporter revealed on 14 October. Singapore's Encore Films, which holds the rights outside mainland China, will show it in the original language and with a brand-new English dub. One of the English voices is Chow himself, alongside Jimmy O. Yang and MC Jin. It is his first film as director since The New King of Comedy in 2019, and it lands here as the biggest hit of China's summer.

The reviews are landing with it. Screen Daily called it a poor imitation of his early classics. The South China Morning Post gave it two stars out of five, and Screen Anarchy wanted it sent off with a straight red card. Even at home it got no free pass: a few days after release it sat at 6.6 out of 10 on Douban, China's main review site, with viewers grumbling that the jokes felt dated.

The scoreboard

Chinese audiences read all that and bought tickets anyway. Here is how the summer went, in Maoyan and Artisan Gateway numbers:

• Opening: RMB 500.3 million ($73.6 million) in two days from 11 July, per Artisan Gateway.
• Nine days in: $214.3 million.
• The summer: RMB 2.315 billion ($344.4 million) between 1 June and 31 August, according to Maoyan, first place in a season worth $1.86 billion.

That is nearly a fifth of China's entire summer box office, earned by one film about an amateur women's football team. The premise is Shaolin Soccer with the genders flipped: instead of washed-up Shaolin brothers, the underdogs are the Emei women's team, ordinary working women with no money, a lot of injuries and Zhang Xiaofei as their captain. Chow wrote and directed but doesn't appear on screen. He hasn't acted since CJ7 in 2008.

Chow has never needed the critics

My view: the reviews were never the point, and they weren't the point 25 years ago either. Chow's Western fame was built almost entirely without help from the people who sell films here.

• 2004: Miramax, which had bought Shaolin Soccer and sat on it for roughly two years, finally released it in April with around 20 minutes cut. It took $489,600 in North American cinemas.
• 2005: Kung Fu Hustle made $17.1 million in North America and more than $100 million worldwide, which is about as close to a hit as a Cantonese comedy gets over here.

Read more: Rocky's loan shark was never just his boss — Stallone wants to film what the studio cut

Everything else happened on DVD, on the telly and in the heads of people who still can't watch a penalty without thinking about Mighty Steel Leg Sing. That audience is now in its thirties and forties, and nobody had to sell them anything. They are exactly who Encore is booking cinemas for.

What happens on 23 October

Western critics will most likely land where Screen Daily did, and to be fair, they may well be right: a gender-swapped sequel built on 25-year-old gags is a big ask. Encore isn't stopping at English either, with a Cantonese dub also finished and its voice cast still to be announced.

Miramax once spent two years trimming Stephen Chow for Western audiences. This time he is dubbing himself.

But the question on 23 October isn't whether Kung Fu Soccer is as good as Kung Fu Hustle. It's whether the people who discovered Chow on a scratched DVD turn up for the first new one in seven years. China already answered that question for itself. The reviews were there too.

Read more: Resident Evil, Cregger's biggest hit, was sold as practical horror — 83% of it has VFX