What makes a Lunar New Year film? Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan may be global stars, but Hong Kong still loves holiday classics All’s Well, End’s Well and My Lucky Star

Feb 1 , 2021

Lydia Shum (left) and Bill Tung in the Lunar New Year film It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World. Photo: D&B Films Co., Ltd

Hong Kong cinema is synonymous with action films starring Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee – but why haven’t its Lunar New Year movies made it bigger abroad?

Hits like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World released during the annual festival aren’t well known globally but remain festive family favourites in the city

If you were to ask a film buff in the West what the most popular Hong Kong films are, you’d most likely hear a long list of action classics. They would probably suggest one of John Woo’s genre-defining action flicks, like A Better Tomorrow or Hard Boiled, or a Bruce Lee film, or one of those kung fu stunt movies like Police Story or Project A that put Jackie Chan on the path to international fame.

If they have more highbrow tastes, they might propose one of Wong Kar-wai’s seminal works which, despite always containing a bevy of famous stars like Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Maggie Cheung, never set the box office alight.

The chances that they’d mention something like the Lunar New Year film All’s Well, Ends Well – which grossed twice as much as Hard Boiled and has spawned eight sequels – is low.

One of the ironies of Hong Kong cinema’s worldwide popularity is that many of its most cherished films are not well-known outside the city. Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-fat and Jet Li are global stars. Certainly all were, or still are, tremendously popular in their hometown but rarely were they actually No 1.

That honour often went to a Lunar New Year film. Yet despite these holiday films being massively successful in Hong Kong, they are still relatively unknown abroad.

Stephen Chow (left) as Foon and Maggie Cheung as Holli-yuk in the classic Lunar New Year movie All’s Well, Ends Well. Photo: Regal Films

But that’s not surprising. The very definition of a “Lunar New Year film” can be hazy. Romantic comedy The Eighth Happiness, wuxia parody The Eagle Shooting Heroes and gambling drama God of Gamblers were all released during the annual festival, so do they all qualify as a “Lunar New Year film”? To do so can be a little like claiming Jaws, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and The Dark Knight are all the same genre since they are “summer blockbusters”.

“I think it’s very tricky to talk about Chinese New Year films because it’s all about marketing and branding and how a film was labelled when first shown to the public,” explains Dr Fiona Law, of the University of Hong Kong, whose PhD focused on the “Chinese New Year” movie genre.

Despite this fuzziness there are certain key characteristics inherent to most of these films. They are generally lighthearted comic affairs with a focus on wealth or, more generally, good fortune, being the most important theme of all.

This trend dates back to the very origins of the genre. The first documented Lunar New Year film is Tang Xiaodan’s Hong Kong film Bloom and Prosper. Although the production is now lost, surviving details reveal that its story centred on winning the lottery and that it was actively promoted as a “Chinese New Year film”.