A Chinese animated film that only earned 7,711 yuan in box office after ten days of release suddenly topped 72 Weibo hot search topics on August 15, with its daily box office reaching 717,000 yuan, and the next day approaching 4.19 million yuan. The film's title "Niu Lai" sounds like "Niu Shi Yao Lai" (the stock market is coming), which immediately made more than 200 million A-share investors identify with this "poorly made" movie.
Investors seek luck, a collective performance art
The production company, Dalian Jingyuan, was originally a decoration company with a registered capital of only 100,000 yuan, and the entire crew consisted of only a mother and daughter. Director Xinyu Meng is not a professional, and she single-handedly handled writing, directing, editing, and voice acting. With just a home computer, she and her mother spent five years "hand-crafting" the film without outsourcing or capital investment. This crude modeling and frequent model glitches became a spiritual comfort for investors who saw it as a sign of "bull market coming," with investors booking entire screenings, sharing tickets as if they were "new share subscription results," and even South Korean investors worshiped it as the "ancestral god of semiconductors" due to the homophonic meaning of "stumbling" and "semiconductors."
The more absurd part is that the louder the criticism, the higher the box office. Audiences criticized the film while filming and uploading it online, turning watching into a collaborative performance art. Cinemas added more showtimes and even scheduled them in Dolby theaters. Caixin commented that audiences had grown tired of formulaic mediocrity. "Niu Lai" was raw and lacked industrial packaging, becoming a rare "authenticity." People laughed at the bad movie but cheered for an uprising against mediocrity.
The more AI can generate, the more "hand-crafted" becomes precious
In 2026, where AI video generation has reached the point of being indistinguishable from reality, AI faces and AI voices have already caused public disgust. A mother and daughter who did not use AI, creating each frame manually, showed a rare sense of originality and courage. Viewers said that the bull determined to go straight ahead was the self in everyone's heart who holds onto their principles.
Their popularity is essentially an emotional release using the film as a tool, with limited content concentration and difficult to replicate. But when a group of people surrounded by the market, formulas, and AI collectively entered the cinema to cheer for a stubborn, unyielding cow, they found long-lost relaxation and resonance.
