What happens when you take the consistently acclaimed director of several classics, hand them a $150 million budget, a cast full of recognizable stars, and a high concept so insane the potential is almost limitless? Well, in the case of The Great Wall, the end result was a full-blown disaster.
Hero and House of Flying Daggers helmer Zhang Yimou did at least deliver some eye-popping visuals, but a 35 percent Rotten Tomatoes score underlined how badly he’d bungled a stellar premise that stated the reason the titular structure was built was for the sole purpose of stopping an army of monsters from decimating China.
Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, and Willem Dafoe were along for the ride – which inevitably led to accusations of whitewashing and perpetuating the white savior trope – but it’s not as if paying customers cared. The Great Wall may have brought in a decent-sounding $334 million at the box office, but by the time the numbers were crunched, it was estimated to be at least $75 million in the red.
Things got so bad that the Communist Party’s official media outlet criticized local aggregation sites Douban and Maoyan for publishing negative reviews of the film, which could theoretically do damage to the Chinese industry’s worldwide reputation. Suspiciously, then, The Great Wall‘s review average of 4.9 disappeared, although its 8.4 audience approval rating miraculously remained intact.
You can’t polish a turd, so trying to bury it altogether was never going to work, even if The Great Wall has shrugged off its reputation to conquer the Netflix viewership charts this week. Per FlixPatrol, it’s come out of nowhere to emerge as a Top 10 hit in 61 countries, securing a status as the third top-viewed feature on the entire platform, so it’s clearly got some supporters out there.
