For a quarter-century, Stephen Chow’s name has been shorthand for a very specific export: Cantonese slapstick welded to wire-fu spectacle and underdog sports fable, a formula that turned Shaolin Soccer into one of Asian cinema’s most durable crossover hits. The open question was whether that brand still carried weight in a Chinese market now dominated by patriotic tentpoles and streaming — and whether a 64-year-old director, seven years removed from a camera, could still command it. A single weekend supplied the answer.

Kung Fu Soccer, which Chow wrote and directed but does not appear in, opened to roughly $74 million across its first two days, with the opening day alone accounting for $38.3 million. As The Hollywood Reporter detailed, the film drew a 9.4 user score on ticketing giant Maoyan and is now tracking toward a domestic total north of $350 million — the kind of figure that reframes a comeback as a coronation.

The reinvention is baked into the title. Where the original sent a ragtag men’s side onto the pitch, the new film — literally ‘Kung Fu Women’s Soccer’ in Mandarin — hands the martial-arts heroics to women. Zhang Xiaofei captains the squad, Dilraba Dilmurat plays its star striker and Lay Zhang turns up as a kung-fu coach, with Carina Lau, Takeru Satoh and Jimmy O. Yang rounding out an ensemble pitched squarely at a pan-Asian audience. It is Chow rewiring his own myth for a moment when a women’s team can carry a blockbuster.

For Chow, the stakes are personal as much as commercial. This is his first directing credit since 2019’s The New King of Comedy, and he has not appeared onscreen since 2008’s CJ7, having spent the intervening years as a filmmaker rather than a face. Reviving Shaolin Soccer — a Hong Kong–China co-production timed to the original’s 25th anniversary and dropped into World Cup season — is a calculated bet that nostalgia plus event-timing can still fill theatres in a way originals increasingly cannot.

The commercial scaffolding is already going up. Maoyan Entertainment is handling the China rollout, which began July 12, while Singapore’s Encore Films snapped up international rights last month; a U.S. release date remains unset, leaving Chow’s American reintroduction as the last piece in play.

A filmmaker who once made a monk’s bicycle kick into a global punchline is now betting the joke lands harder when the boots belong to women — and for one opening weekend, China has already bought every ticket in the house.

Tags: ip-strategy, box-office, Dilraba Dilmurat, Kung Fu Soccer, Shaolin Soccer, Stephen Chow