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Stephen Chow‘s perfectly timed return to soccer comedy kept on kicking in its second weekend at China‘s box office. Kung Fu Soccer, the comedy legend’s Shaolin Soccer spinoff, added $73.7 million (RMB 501.1 million) over the July 17-19 frame, lifting its total to $214.3 million (RMB 1.46 billion) in just nine days, according to data from Artisan Gateway.

In a market where second weekends routinely shed half their opening business, the film instead topped its two-day debut frame of $73.6 million (RMB 500.3 million), albeit spread across three days this time. Having crossed $147 million (RMB 1 billion) in its first week, the film has prompted ticketing giant Maoyan to raise its full-run forecast to $441 million (RMB 3 billion), up from the RMB 2.5 billion it projected on opening weekend. The film looks likely to finish just short of Chow’s personal box-office record of RMB 3.39 billion ($500 million-plus), set by the fantasy comedy The Mermaid in 2016.

Chow, 64, wrote and directed Kung Fu Soccer — his first feature behind the camera since 2019’s The New King of Comedy — but does not appear onscreen, having stepped away from acting after 2008’s CJ7. Released to mark the 25th anniversary of Shaolin Soccer, and to ride this summer’s FIFA World Cup fever, the film reworks the beloved original’s premise around an underdog, all-female squad whose players integrate martial arts into their game to make an improbable run at a tournament dubbed the Supreme Invincible Cup. Zhang Xiaofei (Hi, Mom) leads the cast as the team’s captain, with Dilraba Dilmurat as its star striker and Lay Zhang as its kung fu coach, plus guest turns from Hong Kong screen icon Carina Lau, Japanese star Takeru Satoh and U.S. comedian Jimmy O. Yang.

Chow’s singular blockbuster prowess has been demonstrated — yet again — by the way he released the movie with little to no conventional marketing campaign. He set the release date via a casual social media video on his birthday in late June, and the film hit theaters less than three weeks later with minimal advance marketing.

A North American theatrical release is expected later this year but remains undated. Singapore’s Encore Films, which handled the international rollout of China’s record-setting animation Ne Zha 2 last year, acquired worldwide rights to Kung Fu Soccer outside the mainland and is lining up territory-by-territory deals.

Kung Fu Soccer faced markedly stiffer competition in its sophomore weekend than its first in the form of All Wishes Come True, an animated tentpole from state-backed Pearl Studio, the Beijing outfit formerly known as Oriental DreamWorks, whose credits include Kung Fu Panda 3, Abominable and the Oscar-nominated Over the Moon. Written and directed by Mu Zhengyang, the comic fantasy reimagines the classic folk tale of the Eight Immortals crossing the sea, following a group of ordinary individuals who outwit the gods to earn their legendary titles. It opened Saturday and brought in $30.6 million (RMB 207.8 million) over two days — a solid start — for an early total of $39.6 million (RMB 269 million) including previews. Pearl and partner CMC Pictures have set a global rollout beginning Aug. 13 in Australia and New Zealand, with the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and other markets to follow from Aug. 14.

The rest of the weekend’s top titles trailed the two blockbusters from afar. Enlight Pictures’ A Part of Me, a female-friendship tearjerker starring Zhang Ruonan and Jin Jing — a remake of the 2015 Toni Collette-Drew Barrymore dramedy Miss You Already — opened third with $13.6 million (RMB 92.4 million). Universal and Illumination’s Minions & Monsters held fourth in its third frame with $3.7 million (RMB 25.1 million), nudging its China total to $40.3 million (RMB 274 million). And Triangle, Christopher Smith’s 2009 time-loop thriller starring Melissa George — a curious cult favorite among Chinese movie lovers — took fifth with $3.7 million (RMB 25 million) after arriving in mainland theaters Friday, 17 years after its original release.

China’s 2026 box office now stands at $2.97 billion, down 35.3 percent from the same point last year — a comparison skewed by animated mega-blockbuster Ne Zha 2, which earned over $2 billion in China alone during the first half of 2025. The gap has nonetheless narrowed considerably from the nearly 56 percent deficit of early March, as Chow’s comeback hit has given the country’s summer moviegoing season a healthy kick-start.

Curry Barker’s horror phenomenon Obsession, which has grossed more than $400 million worldwide since its mid-May debut, opens in the country on Friday. The film will pose an interesting test of whether the wave of young, internet-bred filmmakers taking Hollywood by storm can help revive the studios’ fortunes in China, where filmgoers have long grown tired of U.S. franchise fare.

The Locarno Film Festival will pay tribute to James Gray, bestowing upon the U.S. filmmaker the Pardo alla Carriera, the Career Leopard, presented by Ascona-Locarno Tourism, during its 79^th edition.

Gray will receive the award in the Swiss town’s Piazza Grande on Sunday, Aug. 9, and present his latest film, Paper Tiger, after the ceremony. Two key titles by Gray, We Own the Night (2007) and Two Lovers (2008), will also screen in the festival program. 
 
“Since winning the Silver Lion at Venice for Little Odessa (1994) at age 25, James Gray has forged a singular career rooted, with piercing realism, in his upbringing in New York’s Russian-Jewish community,” Locarno highlighted. “Films like The Yards (2000), We Own the Night (2007), Two Lovers (2008), and The Immigrant (2013), cemented Gray’s place as one of American cinema’s most artistically distinctive voices – a filmmaker as concerned with criminal underworlds, rendered with exacting detail, as with meticulous family portraiture, often situated within theBrighton Beach of his youth and shaped by a dialogue with classic American and European auteur cinema.”

Continued Locarno organizers: “As he has established himself at the top tier of filmmakers in the United States, Gray’s explorations of the often elusive promise of the American dream have, over the past decade, expanded into more varied thematic terrain – colonial exploration, space travel, racial prejudice – that reshaped the popular understanding of his work while remaining distinctively his own: The Lost City of Z (2016) with Charlie Hunnam and Robert Pattinson, Ad Astra (2019) with Brad Pitt, and Armageddon Time (2022) with Anthony Hopkins.”

Paper Tiger premiered in competition at Cannes this year and will open the 2026 New York Film Festival.

“James Gray is the last great novelist of American cinema,” said Giona A. Nazzaro, Locarno’s artistic director. “His films form a rich body of work that echoes the Jewish diaspora, film noir, and Russian as well as North American literature. A filmmaker with a humanist sensibility and profound cinephile knowledge, he has experimented with genres such as science fiction and adventure while retaining his own artistic identity and voice. Celebrating James Gray at the Locarno Film Festival means paying tribute to a unique and unmistakable artist, a filmmaker who speaks the language of cinema and knows how to pass it on to future generations.”

The Pardo alla Carriera is being handed out with the support of Ascona-Locarno Tourism, the destination partner of the Locarno Film Festival, which focuses on the development and promotion of tourism in the region. Previous winners of the award include Francesco Rosi, Claude Goretta, Bruno Ganz, Claudia Cardinale, Johnnie To, Harry Belafonte, Peter-Christian Fueter, Sergio Castellitto, Otar Iosseliani, Víctor Erice, Marlen Khutsiev, Bulle Ogier, Mario Adorf, Jane Birkin, Fredi M. Murer, Dante Spinotti, Costa-Gavras, Tsai Ming-liang, Shah Rukh Khan, and, last year, Jackie Chan. 

The 79^th edition of Locarno takes place Aug. 5-15. 

Fresh off the set of Star Wars: Starfighter, Daniel Ings (A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, The Gentlemen) has joined Jessica Brown Findlay (Peaky Blinders, Downton Abbey) in Olivia Grant’s directorial debut, a short film called The Two Week Wait.

Fenella Woolgar (Call the Midwife), Rick Warden (Happy Valley), and Sophie Colquhoun (Captain America) co-star in the project, following a woman in her late thirties (Brown Findlay), who comes up against a series of dissociative experiences as she navigates her deteriorating mental health during the rollercoaster of IVF alongside her incompetent, albeit guileless, boyfriend (Ings).

The Two Week Wait, penned by Grant, is a co-production between her new production banner Cavalry Films and Symphony Films, headed up by actor-producers Rebecca Night (Wuthering Heights) and Harry Hadden-Paton (The Crown). The film is set to premiere on Tuesday at the Indy Shorts Film Festival.

Grant, best known for her acting roles in Stardust, Lark Rise to Candleford and Indian Summers, told The Hollywood Reporter that her desire to start making film came from a mixture of timing and a new sense of urgency. “I’ve wanted to make my own work for a while now and, like many actors, had a feature script I’d been quietly writing for a couple of years, but there was always enough acting work not to focus exclusively on writing, and I was ambivalent about what I would write about. It was COVID that changed that; firstly because it cleared time to focus on generating new work and, secondly, because it coincided with my personal struggles with IVF and its mental toll. As a way to hold on to my sanity, I ended up writing a 30,000-word diary documenting the rollercoaster of grappling with my infertility and transcribing the arguments my husband and I were having, which felt very specific to the process and uniquely gendered.”

She continued about her personal experience influencing the process: “It was only as the world opened up again, and I was able to reconnect with more women and couples, that it became clear that many elements of my mental anguish were remarkably universal. My shame around not being able to have a child and what that meant was normal; my partner’s difficulty salving that particular wound for me was perhaps predictable, and the intense sense of dissociation that permeated that period was again part of the experience for many. Like a lot of women, I did not share the experience with my close friends and family and suddenly felt there was a real need to shed some light on what can be the profound interpersonal effects of this remarkably successful, albeit oft-harrowing, process.”

The Two Week Wait is a proof of concept for a feature-length narrative Baby Mine, slated for 2027, she added. Ings and Brown Findlay are also attached, with Amy Hubbard on board as casting director.

Ings added: “Olivia is a singular new voice in British filmmaking, with a lot to say on some fairly universal themes affecting many women. Getting to work with her, Nanu Segal and Jessica Brown Findlay on this beautiful film was an embarrassment of creative riches. You haven’t heard the last of Olivia Grant.”

Night describes the script as “so instantly unique, compelling and beautiful.” She said: “[It] deals with the choices we make, the relationships we foster, and people seeking love and connection as they journey together through life’s struggles. Full of drama, yes, but so witty and heart-wrenching too.”