The highest-grossing animated film in history is Chinese. In American theaters, it couldn't outdraw Madame Web. That's possible. But is it likely?
Ne Zha 2 passed Avengers: Infinity War. It passed Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It became the first animated film ever to cross $2 billion, the first non-English film to do so, and the highest-grossing movie in a single market in cinema history. When it finally got a wide US release in August (distributed by A24, English-dubbed, a cast led by Michelle Yeoh, 2,200 theaters, the full prestige treatment), it opened to $1.5 million. That's a per-theater average of $628.
The total international take was $23 million. On a $2.2 billion film, that's barely 1%. When Endgame made its billions, 70% came from outside the US. When Avatar: The Way of Water crossed $2 billion, international markets represented 70% of the total. Ne Zha 2 made 98% of its money in a single country and virtually nothing everywhere else. A world champion knocked out in the first round of a regional qualifier.
The standard explanation is cultural specificity. Ne Zha 2 is built on the bones of The Investiture of the Gods, a 16th-century Ming Dynasty text dense with Taoist cosmology, celestial bureaucracy, and a pantheon of demons whose character arcs span centuries of context the average American doesn't have. Hollywood conquered the 20th century because its exports were frictionless; you didn't need to read the New Testament to understand Superman was the good guy. Fair enough. Mythology doesn't travel. Except when it does.
Genshin Impact, developed by Shanghai-based miHoYo, has grossed over $5 billion globally, with only 30% of revenue coming from China. Black Myth: Wukong, based on Journey to the West (the same mythological tradition as Ne Zha), sold 25 million copies and was the most-downloaded PS5 game in North America, Europe, and Japan in August 2024. TikTok colonized Western attention spans so thoroughly that Congress held hearings about it. China knows how to export. When something is genuinely beloved by hundreds of millions of people, some of that enthusiasm leaks across borders. Cultural specificity can explain a dropoff, but it struggles to explain a 98-to-2 ratio.
So either Ne Zha 2 is the most culturally impenetrable film ever made, a movie so aggressively Chinese that it repels all foreign interest despite massive marketing spend and A-list voice talent, or the domestic numbers are telling a story that the international numbers contradict.
This is where it helps to remember that Chinese box office fraud is a documented phenomenon, investigated by Chinese regulators and reported by Chinese state media. In 2016, the distributor of Ip Man 3 admitted to purchasing $8.6 million worth of tickets to its own film and fabricating more than 7,600 "ghost screenings": sold-out shows scheduled after midnight, often with screenings starting ten minutes apart in the same auditorium, at prices five times the normal rate. These screenings never happened. The tickets were never used. The revenue was booked anyway. The same year, an MPAA audit found that Hollywood films were being undercounted by approximately 9%, with studios losing an estimated $40 million annually to unreported sales.
There is no independent body that audits Chinese box office data. Maoyan, the platform that tracks ticket sales, is a Chinese company operating within China's regulatory framework. The same government that commissions films for propaganda purposes (The Battle at Lake Changjin was explicitly ordered by the Central Propaganda Department for the Party's 100th anniversary) is the government that oversees box office reporting.
Let's do some math. Ne Zha 2's reported gross is 15.8 billion yuan. At an average ticket price of 40 yuan (about $5.50, generous for Chinese cinemas), that's 395 million tickets sold. China's population is 1.4 billion. That means roughly 28% of the entire country bought a ticket. Not 28% of moviegoers. 28% of all humans in China, including infants, the elderly, and people in rural areas without nearby theaters. For comparison: Barbie, the highest-grossing film of 2023 in North America, sold approximately 65 million tickets in a country of 330 million. That's a 20% penetration rate, and it was (appropriately) treated as a once-in-a-generation cultural phenomenon.
Maybe Ne Zha 2 really did convince nearly a third of China to show up. Maybe word-of-mouth was so strong that people saw it three, four, five times. Maybe the cultural pride around Chinese animation reaching global respectability drove unprecedented turnout. But if any of that were true, you'd expect some of that fervor to translate. You'd expect the diaspora to show up. You'd expect curiosity from animation fans worldwide. You'd expect something better than $628 per theater in the country that produces the most theatrical revenue outside China.
The international market is the only external data point we have. And it suggests the domestic story doesn't hold.
This is the trap. Cultural specificity becomes the perfect cover. Of course it didn't travel. Of course you can't verify. It's mythology you don't understand, from a market you can't audit, about a character whose name you can't pronounce. The explanation pre-explains why no external validation is possible. Trust the numbers.
The global film industry has quietly agreed to take these figures at face value because China is too big and too lucrative to question. When Ne Zha 2 passed $2 billion, trade publications ran the headlines straight. Gower Street Analytics adjusted its global projections upward by a billion dollars. Box Office Mojo updated its all-time rankings. The machine kept turning.
Ne Zha 2 made $2.2 billion. The receipts are in a language you can't read, from a system with a documented history of fraud, verified by no one outside the apparatus that produced them. The only independent test was the international market, where real audiences could vote with real money in real theaters that file real reports.
They voted $23 million. Congratulations. It's the fifth biggest movie of all time.
