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Legacy sequels have become one of the safest bets in modern moviemaking, but martial arts cinema has mostly been left out of that trend. Hollywood has revived The Karate Kid, Top Gun, and Ghostbusters decades later, while the kung fu comedy genre, which peaked commercially around the turn of the 21st century, never really got its own nostalgia moment.
Part of that is timing, as many of the stars who defined the form have aged out of performing them. Another part is that the best entries were often so tied to a singular comic voice that a follow-up without that voice felt pointless. That is why the return of the one filmmaker who could credibly pull it off after 25 years, with a spin-off of arguably his most beloved film, has become a box office event. What few people predicted, though, was a second weekend bigger than the first. Kung Fu Soccer, Stephen Chow's long-awaited follow-up to Shaolin Soccer (2001), is holding in Chinese theaters in a way that big films rarely do. It brought in another $73.7 million between July 17 and 19, slightly more than the $73.6 million it made on opening weekend, and its nine-day total now stands at $214.3 million.
The caveat worth noting is that the opening weekend covered only two days, while the second weekend had three. It is still the kind of result very few films of this scale manage. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Maoyan, a major Chinese box office tracking service, initially projected the film to finish at RMB 2.5 billion but has since raised that estimate to RMB 3 billion, or roughly $441 million. That figure would put Chow close to, though likely still short of, the RMB 3.39 billion earned by his fantasy comedy The Mermaid a decade ago, which remains the biggest hit of his career. Chow, 64, wrote and directed the film but does not appear in it, extending an acting retirement that quietly began after CJ7 (2008).
It is also his first directing effort since The New King of Comedy in 2019. The premise carries over the original film's central joke, that kung fu and soccer were always meant for each other, and builds it around a women's team making an unlikely run through a tournament called the Supreme Invincible Cup. The original film became Hong Kong's biggest homegrown hit of its era and helped turn Chow from a regional comedy star into a global cult figure. He has spent much of his career making the case that martial arts belong almost anywhere except in a conventional martial arts movie. He put kung fu into a cooking contest in The God of Cookery and into a Shanghai slum in Kung Fu Hustle.
The Film Has Pulled China's Summer Season Out Of A Slump
2026 has been rough for Chinese theaters, running roughly 40% behind last year through June (via The Deadline). On Kung Fu Soccer's first day, the market cleared RMB 300 million for the first time in more than four months. According to the Global Times, Chow's film alone accounted for about 80% of that day’s business. Cinemas gave it more than 226,000 showtimes on opening day, the most any title has received in a Chinese summer season. Since then, summer grosses have reached about $654 million through seven weeks. That's ahead of the same stretch last year, with weekly business jumping more than 70% once Chow's film arrived.
Whether that signals a real turnaround or just a temporary spike depends on what comes next, and the release calendar at least offers a few contenders. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, the only film that outgrossed Kung Fu Soccer worldwide this past weekend, opens in China on August 15. The local animated fantasy All Wishes Come True has already debuted strongly enough to claim a meaningful share of screens.
