Monkey King: Hero is Back

Oct 25, 2025 CFM Case Study, Daily, Industry 0

---

It is the first time that a Chinese animation film has earned this much at the box office: 150.67 million USD in 59 days. People were amazed by its craft and story telling, two things most local animation films were unable to guarantee. With this success, Chinese production companies shall be less reluctant accepting animation film scripts. More confidence can be built among investors, viewers and studio executives regarding local animation films.

Crowd-funding - One of innovative things MONKEY KING: HERO IS BACK did was crowd-funding. Producer Lu Wei used to be in the finance business and noticed the difficulty of raising a decent budget for an animation film. So he tried crowd funding within his friend circle and raised 5 million RMB within 5 hours. By the end of that week, he’d got 780 million RMB in this way – some would contribute 10,000; others, 100,000. Altogether, there were over a hundred contributors, who then became this film’s best advocators, marketers and box office boomers – they even rent over two hundred cinemas to invite their friends and family to see the film.

Marketing – Marketing has never been more important in promoting a film’s box office. And this film played its ace – or rather, did the fundamental work to clarify its core audience. The film also went to extremes to create a number of really cool and proud posters, instead of the regular cute sweet ones. These posters cost a budget of 850,000 RMB, an unprecedented amount of money for a local animation film’s poster budget. To attract the ACG fans in China, it is important to bridge their fascination with real box office purchase, and big data helped to locate the fans of Chinese comics and JOURNEY TO THE WEST - the potential viewers of this film. All its posters, theme song, music video and logline spread via social platforms and a website called bilibili. These images really stood out and proved popular on Weibo and WeChat in less than a week.

Merchandising – In fact, the film’s production and distribution team did not expect the film to be so popular throughout this summer – they only anticipated it to win about 200 million RMB (31.56 million USD) at the box office, so there was not much planning for the merchandising. To promote film, 60,000 little Monkey King stuffed toys were given out for free. But then one day, they started to sell these toys on Taobao, about 12 million RMB worth of toys were sold in a few hours. One can imagine how much could be earned if the production company had authorized more rights to develop such toys. Still, there are no regrets. The film is set to be a franchise, and the company plans to build more lines of merchandising during the development of its second edition. For the next round, there is a lot more time to think things through.

The future – It is not exaggerating to say that MONKEY KING: HERO IS BACK has ushered the Chinese animation film to another stage. In a market growing this fast, the sky is the limit. It is true that foreign animation films have their exotic stories and wonders, but the Chinese animation films are catching up – at least MONKEY KING: HERO IS BACK has set an example that things can be done, with an efficient team, a decent budget and the right resources, in a different way. It is, after all, a good story well told with animation.

---