https://www.scmp.com/business/china...cts-and-outsize-fees-how-asuras-record-budget
How ‘Asura’’s record budget produced an epic box office flop
On paper, China’s latest epic movie
Asura checked all the right boxes: The star-studded cast combined veteran Hong Kong actors with the latest mainland teenage heart throbs. It had dazzling action scenes, lavish costumes, technical and production support from the Hollywood crews that worked on
Furious 7 and
Deadpool.
Still, the movie failed miserably, grossing 49 million yuan after it was screened in 118,000 sessions over three days in the world’s largest movie market, earning less than 10 per cent of its 750 million yuan (US$111 million) production budget, according to Baidu Nuomi’s data.
Taking six years to develop, Asura is an epic based on Buddhist mythology that sought to make itself into the Chinese hybrid of The Lord of the Rings and the Game of Thrones.
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A third of the film’s budget went to special effects and computer-generated imagery in 2,400 scenes throughout the movie’s 141-minute running time. Costumes by an Oscar-winning costume designer cost 30 million yuan, while fees for the cast took up 75 million yuan.
Filming took place in the Ningxia and Tibet autonomous regions, filling the screen with blue sky, alpine lakes and open plains.
Despite the spectacular vista, the convoluted plot failed, spurring even Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of
Global Times, a nationalist tabloid that’s usually quick in celebrating Chinese achievements, to pan the movie.
“It could not even tell a proper story,” Hu wrote on his
Weiboblog site. “The producers just need to knock their heads against the wall” and reflect on what they’ve done, he wrote. “Millions of yuan just got wasted.”
The flop by China’s most expensive movie is a reminder that cinema patrons in the US$8.2 billion box office market are rapidly changing their tastes, and that Hollywood stardust may be coming off from multimillion dollar productions and blockbuster epics.
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Tony Leung Ka-fai, the four-time best actor winner at the Hong Kong Film Awards, and Carina Lau Kar-ling, lead the cast. Leo Wu Lei, the 18-year-old idol dubbed “Nation’s Little Brother” in China, also has a major role.
The movie’s lavish costumes took a year to design under Ngila Dickson, who won the 2004 Oscar for her work in
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, said Yang Zhenjian, the producer and major investor of the movie, who also wrote the script.
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Martín Hernandez, who worked on
Birdman, served as the audio director while Charlie Iturriaga, who took part in the production of
Deadpool and
Furious 7, was in charge of the visual effects.
All in, the project involved more than 200 people from 35 countries, with 1,600 local staff, Yang said.
“The concept of the film is ahead of the whole film industry by at least six years,” he said, according to a promotional video of the movie.
Besides Yang, the biggest investor of the movie was state-owned Ningxia Film Studio, which provided the location for the shooting. Other major investors include Beijing Weiying Technology, which develops online movie ticket booking platforms and CHS Media, a listed Zhejiang-based studio. Alibaba Pictures, a unit of this newspaper’s owner Alibaba Group Holdings, was a minority investor of the movie.
“This is a particularly bad situation,” Rosen said. “Unless they can somehow put the film back in theatres, re-edit it and do a better job with it, there won’t be any sequels.”
