Xin Yumeng spent five years making Niu Lai with Sun Lifang, and the 86-minute animation is now one of the top-performing films of the year. The sharp turn is hard to miss: a release that drew fewer than 300 ticket buyers nationwide in its first 10 days has moved past 14.9m yuan.
5 August Release
Niu Lai, which translates to The Cow is Coming, opened on 5 August as a budget animation about a newborn calf and a skylark. It made just 7,700 yuan in its first 10 days, with no promotional tour, no pre-release publicity and no trailer to build advance interest.
That kind of start would usually bury a film quickly. Instead, the weak opening became the story.
Douban Mockery
Online discussion about how bad Niu Lai was turned it into a meme, and that ridicule appears to have done the marketing work the film never had. A film industry professional said it was “bad in every aspect imaginable, including the story, special effects and almost every element that a movie is expected to have” and added, “Ironically, this is exactly what attracted audience curiosity.”
A user on Douban put the reaction in sharper terms: “In an era where AI is so popular, did the creative team choose a handcrafted, somewhat crude visual style to convey a sense of ‘returning to one’s true self?’” The quote captures the odd commercial engine here: viewers were not being sold polish, but pulled in by the lack of it.
Xin Yumeng and Sun Lifang
Xin Yumeng and Sun Lifang made Niu Lai over five years as a two-person team, and Xin worked as writer, director, voice actor and producer. The distributor had been advised against releasing the film because of its quality, which makes the box office reversal more unusual, not less.
That reversal has now pushed Niu Lai into the same revenue conversation as The Odyssey, which earned 192m yuan across its official three-day opening weekend in China, and Once Upon a Time in the Middle East, which took in 477.9m yuan between Friday and Sunday. Niu Lai is still far below those totals, but the gap between 7,700 yuan and 14.9m yuan shows how fast curiosity can overwhelm an opening stumble.
14.9m Yuan Threshold
The film’s success appears to stem less from its merits and more from audience curiosity sparked by criticism of its quality. That is a rough business lesson for low-budget releases: online ridicule can substitute for advertising, but it can also reward the very work people are mocking.
For viewers deciding whether to go, the practical read is simple. Niu Lai has already made its case as a curiosity-driven hit, and the unanswered question is how much of the final total came from people who bought a ticket specifically because they heard it was bad.
