Chinese studios bet 400M yuan on Shanghai Fortress — it needed 950M and made 125M

The Wandering Earth, released in early 2019, briefly made Chinese science fiction look bankable, and Shanghai Fortress was rushed out months later as the genre's follow-up. Adapted from a 2006 novel, it starred pop idol Lu Han and was backed by producer HS Entertainment at a reported cost of about 400 million yuan, roughly $57 million.

It opened on 9 August 2019 to a collapsing weekend: about $11 million on Friday, $3 million on Saturday and $1.7 million on Sunday, finishing fourth with $15.4 million including previews. Caixin put the opening day at 74 million yuan and forecast the entire run at just 125 million yuan.

That was catastrophic because the film needed around 950 million yuan at the box office just to break even after theatres took their share. Douban's rating slid from 4.2 to 3.2/10 as audiences savaged the plot, the effects and Lu Han's performance, and the director publicly apologised.

Analysts called it the death of the Chinese sci-fi boom that The Wandering Earth had started, and HS Entertainment's planned public offering was thrown into doubt. The Shanghai Fortress collapse became shorthand in China for a hype cycle that had outrun the product.