Dr Tingting Fan
25 March 2026
Night King, a Lunar New Year film that opened in Hong Kong on 17 February 2026—the first day of the Chinese New Year (CNY)—achieved strong popularity and financial success within just a month. With over $90 million in local box-office takings alone, the film became not only the opening box-office champion among CNY films in Hong Kong history but also the fifth highest-grossing Hong Kong-produced film.
Given its humorous style, eye-catching theme, and a gradual word-of-mouth effect, the film went on 23 February from local release in the Guangdong–Guangxi region as originally scheduled to nationwide release, with Mainland box-office takings in excess of RMB150 million so far.
Surprising breakthrough in a sluggish market
The success of Night King is worth celebrating not just because its box-office takings have far exceeded its production costs and publicity expenses, but because its outstanding performance in a generally soft yet extremely competitive market is especially commendable. With the popularity of streaming platforms such as Netflix, Disney+, consumers around the world are increasingly staying away from cinemas. Based on the total cinema admissions in 2024 and the mid-year local population estimate, Hongkongers went to the cinema to watch only 2.5 films on average during the year. Similarly, across the ocean, Americans went to the movies only 2.2 times on average in 2025. How to ensure that a film is one of the two consumers’ pick to watch in cinemas is a thorny challenge facing the film industry worldwide.
On the one hand, there is persistently lacklustre market demand; on the other hand, competition within the industry has escalated to white-hot levels. Besides The Snowball on a Sunny Day, another Hong Kong production, the Lunar New Year films released at the same time as Night King included Blades of the Guardians, Pegasus 3, and Scare Out from the Mainland. These rivals came on fast and furious. Not only did they have more funding and wider cinema release, but their star-studded casts were far more impressive compared with Night King. As for other film markets in the world, the top box-office hits in 2025 were almost exclusively built around well-known intellectual property (IP) characters, such as Zootopia 2, A Minecraft Movie, and Wicked: For Good.
With neither the support of top-tier IPs nor huge capital investment, the unexpected success of Night King has inevitably rekindled hopes for the local film industry, which have seen a decline in recent years. From the 1980s to the 1990s, Hong Kong was once the world’s third largest film production centre after Hollywood and Bollywood. However, with intensifying market competition, the rise of streaming platforms and shifting audience tastes, the Hong Kong film industry has since gone downhill.
Reflecting on the present in light of the past, what lessons can film companies seeking to mount a comeback draw from this history?
Former glory as a lesson for today
At the turn of the 1960s, Hong Kong was already an important film export centre in East Asia. During the golden era of its film industry between the 1980s and the 1990s, a series of landmark films were produced, including A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, Police Story, Chungking Express, Happy Together, and the “mo lei tau” (nonsensical humour) series represented by Stephen Chow. From 1982 onward, Hong Kong-produced films fared better than imported films at the box office for the first time. With annual film production reaching as many as 186 in 1993, the impact of Hong Kong films rose sharply as a result.
The extraordinary achievements of Hong Kong films back then can be put down to their high degree of commercialization, the synergy between star actors and renowned directors, and the one-of-a-kind culture of the city. On the one hand, through highly efficient coordination across production, distribution, and exhibition, coupled with a well-established Southeast Asian distribution network, the local film sector facilitated standardized production and rapid iteration of film genres, making it possible to create economies of scale while satisfying the diverse tastes of consumers.
On the other hand, a high degree of commercialization also contributed to talent cultivation. The actor training system during the golden era produced award-winning stars such as Chow Yun-fat, Stephen Chow, Maggie Cheung, and Tony Leung. Under the aegis of top directors such as Wong Kar-wai, Ann Hui, John Woo, and Tsui Hark, local productions not only grew in number but also improved in quality. Celebrity charisma broadened the local films’ social appeal, while big-name directors enhanced their recognition at international film festivals. Under this twin effect, Hong Kong films have enjoyed growing cachet on the world stage. With the city’s unique history and immigrant urban culture, combined with the popularity of Cantonese slang, local films contained a perfect mix of “Eastern expression” and “Western narrative” to strike a responsive chord with Chinese communities worldwide and gain unimpeded access to European film festivals and the North American market.
The nightclub as workplace: turning weakness into strength
Although the glory days of Hong Kong’s film industry have become a thing of the past, the box-office performance of Night King may give us a glimpse of a way out for Hong Kong films. First of all, the script is captivating, particularly for Mainland audiences: the nightclub story is so Hong Kong. However, how best to make a respectable show out of such colourful material? Careful inspection of the plot would reveal that, as a matter of fact, business management in a nightclub is not so different from that in a corporate workplace. Be it meeting performance expectations of the boss, motivating employees, or offering personalized customer service, even viewers who have never been to a nightclub will understand it right away.
What is more, as Night King is a Cantonese film, many of its memorable lines can only be fully expressed through Cantonese slang and colloquial expressions. For example, only audience members who are familiar with Hong Kong place names will laugh out loud at the inside joke about “Kwai Fong”. To a certain extent, the dialect and local culture may have hampered the film’s wider popularity. After all, most Mainland viewers do not speak Cantonese and are unfamiliar with most local place names. Outside its cultural context, Night King may well lose much of its charm. That is exactly one of the reasons why the film was originally scheduled for release only in Hong Kong, Macau, and the Guangdong and Guangxi region.
To everyone’s surprise, with an ingenious twist, the film managed to turn this disadvantage into an advantage. Through publicity on social media, the memorable lines had been deciphered for the public before viewers even bought their tickets, giving them a sense of the creative ingenuity of Cantonese slang expressions and the vibrancy and humour of Hong Kong culture. The line spoken by the club hostess Kwai Fong: “Zero to four, round down; five to nine, round up… So I’m 19 years old” instantly made Kwai Fong MTR station a social-media hotspot. This also reminds us of how the big tree at the Shek O Health Centre and the gas lamps on Duddell Street gained instant fame thanks to Stephen Chow’s King of Comedy.
As Brother Foon in Night King says, “Life may be difficult these days, but we’ve never been afraid. Things have never been easy for us anyway, right? But if the lights must go out, we’ll drink till the very end.” The world of Hong Kong films is no less difficult. Yet I am convinced that the lights will never go out for films with Hong Kong characteristics. The tougher the journey, the harder we push on! This is what the Hong Kong spirit is all about.
