Walt Disney’s Mulan isn’t doing very well in China.
The movie, which debuted in China recently, only drew in $23.2 million in its opening weekend, a significantly lower amount than producers expected. The cost for producing the movie was $200 million.
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To make things worse, the movie suffered from heavy criticism not just in China, but in many other parts of the world — especially among the Chinese community, mainly for being “culturally inaccurate” and “lacking substance”.
Mulan also provoked a backlash on overseas social media, with many netizens calling for a boycott over the main actress’s support of Hong Kong police and for being partly filmed in the Xinjiang region — an area where China’s clamp-down on ethnic Uighurs and Muslims has been heavily criticised by some governments and rights groups.
“The iconic-to-all-Chinese Mulan story has been told many times in the country already. For Hollywood to tell the Mulan story successfully for a Chinese consumer is close to impossible, especially when a non-Chinese director and writers were used”, said Chris Fenton, a trustee of the U.S.-Asia Institute.