Stephen Chow’s return to filmmaking is turning into the box office story of the summer in China, and the numbers keep climbing rather than fading. “Kung Fu Soccer,” the 64-year-old director’s spiritual follow-up to his 2001 hit “Shaolin Soccer,” added $73.7 million over its second weekend in mainland theaters, pushing its nine-day total to $214.3 million. That performance breaks the usual pattern of Chinese blockbusters losing roughly half their business in week two — this film actually topped its opening frame, even though the comparison spans three days instead of two. Ticketing platform Maoyan has revised its lifetime forecast upward twice, now projecting the film will finish near $441 million, a total that would fall just short of Chow’s career-best gross of roughly $500 million for 2016’s “The Mermaid.”
Chow wrote and directed the film but does not appear in it, having stepped away from acting after 2008’s “CJ7.” The story swaps the original’s male underdogs for a grassroots women’s soccer team that fuses martial arts with the sport during a fictional tournament, with Zhang Xiaofei as team captain, Dilraba Dilmurat as its top striker and Lay Zhang playing the squad’s kung fu coach. Carina Lau, Takeru Satoh and Jimmy O. Yang appear in supporting roles. It is Chow’s first directing credit since 2019’s “The New King of Comedy.”
The rollout itself has become part of the story. Chow announced the release date through an offhand social media post on his birthday in late June, and the film reached theaters less than three weeks later with almost no traditional marketing push — a strategy that has only sharpened comparisons to his reputation for turning minimal promotion into outsized results.
Competition intensified in week two with the arrival of “All Wishes Come True,” an animated fantasy from Pearl Studio that opened to $30.6 million and is bound for international markets starting in mid-August. Even so, “Kung Fu Soccer” outpaced it by a wide margin. China’s overall 2026 box office remains down more than 35 percent year over year, a gap driven largely by last year’s record-breaking run of “Ne Zha 2,” though Chow’s hit has narrowed that deficit considerably since spring. A North American release for “Kung Fu Soccer” is expected later this year, with dates still unannounced.
