Niu Lai: 300 tickets in ten days, then 45 million yuan

The motive is traced to one line that travelled with the clips: a bad film you skip, a film this bad you have to see for yourself. Reporters who bought tickets describe viewers arriving from the memes rather than from any word of mouth, and screenings where the laughter had started before the film did.

Here the mechanism arrives through box-office figures and platform posts rather than through the auditorium: the ridicule became the marketing, and the question of whether it could really be that bad did the work a trailer would have done. The reports also describe the mockery doing the recruiting, as people who had watched the clips ironically began telling others to go and see for themselves.

The reports quote rather than judge. Practitioners are brought in to say there is nothing here to review at all, and to read the film as a public event rather than as a work; viewers are quoted calling it unbelievable. The reporting voice stays on what was said and by whom.

The same pattern holds, assembled from review platforms and named viewers rather than from the auditorium: the most-shared Douban lines are quoted at length, a moviegoer is quoted saying he appreciates how bad it is but that there is heart in it, and the comparison to something made on basic consumer software is attributed to viewers rather than made by the writer.

AI enters these reports as a measuring stick rather than a theme. The comparison they reach for is an ordinary hobbyist's AI animation practice piece, and the point each time is that the finished feature does not clear it. What is being placed is the floor, not a judgement about how the film was made.

Here the same roughness is read as evidence rather than as failure. The reports describe viewers treating visible handwork as proof that the makers had not used a model, and set the film against the machine-generated material filling their feeds. A report in the set adds that the film was not conceived as an anti-AI project, and that its limitations became appealing only after it went viral.

The conclusion drawn runs through the licence itself. Holding a release permit, these reports argue, is not the same as passing on quality, and a cinema release is a public work whichever way it was licensed. What they ask for is addressed to screens rather than to viewers: turn away what is plainly below standard, or watch the entry bar for a commercial release drop again.

The conclusion drawn runs through the audience. These reports set the film against the slick domestic animation that has been filling Chinese cinemas and read the reversal as a verdict on that polish — coarse grain after a long diet of refined, in one quoted academic's phrase. What the episode exposes, on this reading, is an appetite rather than a failure.

The question is procedural and it stays open. Commentators read the regulations back and report that the listed grounds for refusing a licence are all content red lines, and that the technical clause covers projection engineering rather than how finished a film looks. A financial column reports that artistic quality is nominally assessed by outside experts and asks what their written opinions on this film said; a newspaper commentary notes that the cinema-manager preview which would normally stop a release like this is trade custom rather than law.

Only a few clusters in the English-language sample were annotated as answering how the film obtained its licence, and none of them answers it directly. Where the approval route is touched at all it attaches to the distributor, quoted from Chinese media as having been advised against release and having gone ahead because the director was a friend, or to a passing note that audiences wondered how a film this odd reached cinemas.