The Curse of Turandot, a Chinese romantic fantasy movie, has been declared the worst movie of 2021. Last Sunday, the hashtag for the worst movie of the year became a trend on Chinese social media.
The film comprises a group of popular people including director Zheng Xiaolong. the other notable personalities in the film are actors namely, Jiang Wen and Hun Jun, Guan Xiaotong, Dylan Sprouse, and Sophie Marceau.
According to Chinese ticketing platform Maoyan, the movie was released in mainland China on October 15 and only earned 18.90 million yuan ($ 2.95 million).
According to Media, the film’s screen share was 20.7 percent on its premiere day, which was only marginally lower than The Battle at Lake Changjin. Nonetheless, owing to bad word of mouth, it only remained at 9.6 percent for a short time.
The film has a 3.2/10 score on Douban, a Chinese media review platform. A lot of Chinese people complained for the poor performances of the actors who lacked spiritual communications in their movie roles.
The opera Turandot served as the inspiration for this film, which features a new plot based on a Chinese novel called Sansezhuo (three-colored bracelet).
The main issue with the film, according to some spectators, is that it was shot in the same way as a TV drama, resulting in an unorganized tale structure.
The poor performance of The Curse of Turandot is largely due to the fact that the story’s core did not truly respect Chinese moviegoers, according to Shi Wenxue, a film critic from Beijing.
“The movie’s biggest flaw is that the narrative isn’t a good one or an Eastern tale. The filmmakers simply attempted to include numerous Eastern elements in order to please Chinese audiences, just as Disney’s Mulan does,” he continued.
He said that fantasy themes are easier to understand for both Eastern and Western viewers, which is an important consideration when selecting a film topic. However, the tale of The Curse of Turandot as a whole is too idealistic and lack faith.
Some Chinese netizens, on the other hand, named renowned Hong Kong director Ann Hui’s film Love After Love (also known as Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier), which featured Ma Sichun and Eddie Peng, as the worst film of the year for its poor adaptation of Eileen Chang’s story Aloeswood Incense