A highly niche sci-fi movie quietly released on April 1 became a box office dark horse. Journey to the West, the debut of a 34-year-old Chinese film director, fetched 66 million yuan ($9.5 million), a no-big-deal number for blockbusters, but a sweeping win for its initial cost of “just” 2 million yuan ($290,000).
Bearing the same English name as the popular ancient Chinese classic novel that is a fictionalized account of the 17-year pilgrimage of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang (602-664) to India during the Tang Dynasty (618-907), the movie, or rather mockumentary, is about a sci-fi magazine editor’s trip from Beijing to the countryside in southwest China, looking for signs of alien life.
