China's Screens Are Full of Stories — And One Big Goodbye
China’s entertainment world had a heavy and busy week. On September 24, the actor You Benchang died in his sleep in Beijing at the age of 93, according to his family. For hundreds of millions of Chinese viewers, he was the face of Ji Gong, a scruffy, half-drunk monk with a magic fan who became a television hero in 1985. You was 52 when he first played a leading role, and he kept working for decades afterward, becoming one of the country’s most respected stage and screen performers.
His death arrived as cinemas were packed with new titles. Douban’s currently-showing list is a mix of mainland productions and imported films. Among the Chinese entries are Dunhuang Heroes, a period adventure directed by Cao Dun and starring Zhang Yu and Dou Xiao; Old Jianghu, a crime drama with Yu Qian and Hong Kong veteran Tony Leung Ka-fai; and Empty Gun, a 160-minute thriller from director Han Yan, also featuring Leung Ka-fai alongside Zhu Yilong and Tan Jianci. Welcome to Dragon Restaurant, a comedy from director Wen Muye starring Shen Teng, has drawn strong early word of mouth.
The international slate is just as crowded. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, a 173-minute epic shot across several countries and starring Matt Damon, Tom Holland and Anne Hathaway, is in Chinese theaters. Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, the long-cut version of his revenge saga, is playing at 276 minutes. And Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption, now over three decades old, remains on the big screen with a near-perfect 9.7 rating on Douban.
That mix says something about Chinese moviegoing. Audiences still turn out for Hollywood spectacles and for local stories with familiar faces. Nostalgia sells: a 1994 prison drama and a 2003 martial-arts revenge film can share a release calendar with brand-new Chinese thrillers, and none of them looks out of place.
Online, the conversation has shifted to what happens after theaters. A widely shared analysis on Huxiu looked at the reputation turnaround for Feng Xiaogang’s new spy film Zhua Te Wu, which earned only about 119 million yuan in theaters against a reported budget of 165 million yuan, then surged in popularity once it hit Tencent Video. The piece argues that Feng, one of China’s best-known commercial directors, has repeatedly been reassessed by viewers years after his films leave cinemas.
Another Huxiu essay asked why Chinese situation comedies have become so rare. It traced the format back to I Love My Family, which premiered in 1993 after director Ying Da brought the American sitcom model home, and noted that later hits like iPartment still circulate endlessly as memes. The genre’s decline, the piece suggests, is less about taste than about how Chinese television and streaming now make and pay for comedy.
The newest disruptor is AI-generated animation. According to figures cited in another Huxiu piece, more than 380,000 AI animated shorts went online in China in the first eight months of 2026 alone. Supply has exploded while platform payouts have fallen, and many small studios have already shut down. The article compares the moment to the early decades of Japanese animation, when a young industry had to invent business models before it could grow up.
Meanwhile, music has gone retro. Spotify reported that roughly a third of its plays this year came from songs released more than a decade ago, and the platform called 2026 its most nostalgic year yet. Chinese listeners appear to be following the same pattern, revisiting old favorites as new releases struggle to break through. Whether on a cinema screen or a phone, Chinese audiences are spending 2026 looking both forward and back.