Pearl Studio gives the Eight Immortals a heist-movie origin in All Wishes Come True!

Before they were immortals, this telling proposes, the Eight Immortals were crooks. All Wishes Come True! opens on that inversion. Two mortals with their eyes on a heavenly vault decide the shortest path to the treasure is to behave as though they already belong upstairs. They forge the bearing of gods, recruit a crew, and set out to rob heaven from the inside.

Written and directed by Mu Zhengyang, the film treats a canonical Chinese legend the way a caper treats a bank, as a floor plan. Rather than restage the familiar picture of the Eight Immortals crossing the sea, it asks who these figures were before the reverence, and answers with hustlers, grifters and street-smart opportunists. The comedy is broad, but the move underneath it is sly: an origin story in which sainthood is a con that got out of hand.

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The casting that matters here is a look. Pearl Studio, the Shanghai house that co-built Kung Fu Panda 3 and the Netflix feature Over the Moon, brings a Hollywood-calibrated surface to a domestic myth: rounded silhouettes, plush volumetric light, physical comedy timed to the frame. The eight leads are drawn as a mismatched gang rather than a pantheon. The schemers Zhongli Quan and Lü Dongbin hold the center, and around them sit an iron-crutched brawler, a sword-carrying woman, an elder on his donkey. They are designed for slapstick first and reverence second, and the order is the argument.

For Pearl Studio the film reads as a position statement. The studio spent its early life as the junior partner supplying craft to American franchises; here it authors its own tentpole from a wholly Chinese source and keeps the finish it learned abroad. The Eight Immortals are among the most legible icons in Chinese folklore, which makes them both a safe commercial bet and a high wire. Reinvent them clumsily and you have not merely made a weak film, you have edited a shared inheritance.

The weight is real. “The Eight Immortals cross the sea, each revealing their powers” is a proverb a billion people can finish without prompting, shorthand for a group in which every member brings a distinct gift. To withhold that image and rewind to the moment before any of them could do anything divine is the film’s central bet: treat the punchline everyone knows as a spoiler, and build the joke backward from it.

The structure almost writes itself from the lore. The myth already hands each of the eight a signature attribute — a sword, a fan, a flute, an iron crutch, a lotus — and a heist only needs specialists, each with one trick the job depends on. The film’s cleverest economy is to let those inherited powers double as the roles a robbery crew requires, so the mythology arrives pre-loaded with a division of labor and the script is spared the work of inventing one.

The design leans lavish where the story leans light. Gilded temple friezes, ink-wash skies pushed into computer-generated volume, opera silhouettes softened into shapes a family audience reads at a glance. The surfaces are asked to carry the mythology while the plot busies itself undercutting it, and when the film works it lets the art direction do the believing so the characters are free to keep lying.

What that polish cannot resolve is the distance to the audience the film now needs. The Eight Immortals carry centuries of association for viewers raised on them and almost none for everyone else. Stripped to a heist ensemble and sent abroad in subtitled Mandarin rather than a dub, the crew risks reading as generic fantasy mascots in markets that do not know the source. Reverse-engineering a myth into a caper is a clever pitch; it does not prove the myth wanted an origin, and the frame can look less like reinvention than like upkeep on a valuable piece of intellectual property.

The voice cast is led by Chen Hao as Zhongli Quan, with Li Shaozhe voicing Lü Dongbin, across an eight-strong ensemble. Mu Zhengyang wrote and directed. The film runs 143 minutes and is produced by Pearl Studio and CMC Pictures with China Film Group. Pearl Studio is the Shanghai house formerly known as Oriental DreamWorks, and it is the commercial apparatus around it that has been turning Chinese animation into an export line rather than a domestic one.

At home the gamble has already paid. The film opened across China on July 18, pulled forward a week from its planned date after strong previews, and took roughly 270 million yuan on its opening weekend, the summer’s clearest animated breakout. CMC Pictures is carrying it outward from there: Australia and New Zealand first, then the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland on August 14, with Belgium and Luxembourg following in early autumn and further European territories still to be dated.

Tags: animation, Comedy, All Wishes Come True!, Chen Hao, Eight Immortals, Mu Zhengyang

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