Still from Niu Lai
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Inside the real reason ‘terrible’ $200 movie Niu Lai is beating Spider-Man at the box office

'Even AI couldn't produce something so outrageous'

Daisy Phillipson
21st August 2026, 15:47
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A crudely animated movie made by a mother and son has taken the internet by storm this week after going from selling fewer than 300 tickets to becoming a box office sensation in China. And there’s a reason (multiple, actually) why it’s such a success. 

Niu Lai – roughly translated as Here Comes the Cow or The Arrival of the Ox – is an 86-minute animated movie about a timid calf embarking on a journey of growth in a dreamscape, alongside the skylark Yunque and leopard Baola.

It was released in China on August 5 with virtually no marketing, no recognisable stars and animation so shoddy, viewers initially questioned how it made it into cinemas in the first place.

The entire movie was created over five years by landscape designer Xin Yumeng and his mother, Sun Lifang. They did so with no formal training in filmmaking and on a reported budget of just $200 (this varies, but just know it took the term ‘low budget’ to a new level). 

Together, they covered all bases. Xin directed, animated, modelled, edited and voiced the male characters in the film, while Sun taught herself screenwriting and penned the script, voiced the female characters and even wrote a song for the film’s final theme. 

Still from Niu Lai
Credit: Tianjin Yamazaki Film

When it was first released, it looked like Niu Lai was destined to disappear into obscurity. During its first 10 days in cinemas, it made just 7,711 yuan – around $1,000 – and sold fewer than 300 tickets… Then people started talking about how bad it was. 

Clips showing Niu Lai’s crude 3D models, jarring animation and awkward dialogue began circulating on Chinese social media, where people relentlessly mocked the film. 

One viewer commented online, “The animation was terrible. I really don’t know how it was released. It was incredibly abstract, and the dubbing was strange too.”

But instead of killing it, the ridicule had the opposite effect: thousands of people suddenly wanted to see just how strange it really is.

Within days, cinemas that had barely been showing Niu Lai were scrambling to add screenings. Its daily box office jumped from almost nothing into hundreds of thousands of yuan, before its total surged into the tens of millions.

It has since found itself competing at the Chinese box office with movies that exist in a totally different financial universe, including Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

According to the latest reports, its box office total has reached 29 million yuan ($4.3 million). And because its production costs were so small, it’s said that Niu Lai is now the most profitable movie ever made in terms of return on investment.

So how did a virtually unknown animation with terrible reviews turn into an actual phenomenon?

The real reason everyone is suddenly going to see Niu Lai

Well, just like The Room, it all started with curiosity. As increasingly brutal reactions to Niu Lai spread online, going to see the movie became less about the art and more about experiencing something people couldn’t quite believe existed. 

One audience member interviewed at a cinema in Wuhan told Jiupai News that he had bought a ticket late at night simply because he was curious, joking that he needed to experience such “avant-garde art” for himself.

His reaction afterwards was, frankly, hilarious. He said he sat in his seat for three minutes trying to process what he had watched, questioned whether its modelling could really have been made with 2026 technology and joked that even AI couldn’t produce something so outrageous.

And he wasn’t alone. The outlet spoke to cinema employees, who revealed that the worse Niu Lai’s reputation became online, the more people wanted tickets.

One staff member said the distributor hadn’t even provided proper promotional materials or a detailed synopsis. They initially scheduled a single screening just to see what would happen, only for tickets to sell fast. 

At another Wuhan cinema, all 80 seats for one afternoon screening reportedly sold out half an hour before it began.

There is now an element of simply wanting to be part of the joke. Niu Lai has become a full-blown internet meme in China, with related topics generating billions of views and users creating fanmade parodies and AI-generated spinoffs.

But that isn’t the only reason movie-goers have been showing up. Once people discovered how Niu Lai had actually been made, this became part of its appeal.

Modern Express spoke to two recent graduates at a cinema in Nanjing after they discovered the movie online. As one of them explained, “[We] thought it looked really interesting. AI short dramas are very popular now, so we wanted to see what this kind of completely handmade animation was actually like.”

Chinese stock investors have another reason for buying tickets

Among Niu Lai’s growing audience is a group who aren’t necessarily there for the animation (or the memes) at all: stock-market investors.

You see, the movie’s Chinese title, 牛来, is considered a homophone for “牛市来”, meaning “the bull market is coming”. As such, some investors see the film as something of a good luck charm.

KNews even interviewed one investor outside a Shanghai cinema who had a very specific wish after buying a ticket: “I hope the A-share market hits 6,000 points!”

Modern Express mentioned some of the attendants in Nanjing were investors too, with one cinema employee saying: “Whenever we schedule Niu Lai, people buy tickets to see it. Some of them are stock-market investors.”

The irony in all of this is that virtually everything that should have doomed Niu Lai – its tiny production, lack of marketing, crude visuals and terrible early word of mouth – has ultimately become the reason it’s an unprecedented success. 

Now, the question remains: will it get an international release? For now, it’s set to hit Singapore in September – here’s hoping it branches further out, if only to see what all the buzz is about. 

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Featured image credit: Tianjin Yamazaki Film