cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/23926636

If you don’t know Chinese, you might not know that right now, the biggest movie in the world is Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants. This blockbuster adaptation of Jin Yong’s classic wuxia epic novel, The Legend of the Condor Heroes, is one of the defining works of the wuxia genre. It stars Xiao Zhan as hero Guo Jing and is being hyped as director Tsui Hark’s biggest comeback in decades. It opened this week for Chinese New Year, the biggest Chinese holiday and movie season of the year, and has already racked up 300 million ticket sales. You wouldn’t know any of this because until Deadline reported on the Chinese New Year opening day box office earnings, no Western media had written about it at all.

The original novel of The Legend of the Condor Heroes has an official English translation from a UK and US publisher, all four volumes of it, and is bigger than Lord of the Rings – virtually every Chinese person knows it, and not just in China. Tsui Hark is one of the most influential action directors in the world next to John Woo, who has helped shape action movies in Hollywood and the rest of the world since the 1980s and 1990s, not counting his two forgettable Hollywood-funded Jean-Claude Van Damme movies in the 1990s. Yet there’s not a single article written about this movie in English language or Western media, not even the Hollywood trades beyond a report on the box office charts.

Trailer

IMDb:

The Mongols, led by Genghis Khan, went west to destroy the Jin Dynasty, wanted to go south to destroy the Song Dynasty. Martial Arts Masters from several Schools in the Central Plains of China fought gathering strength to defend Xiangyang