There is no such thing as bad publicity.

That adage has rung true with the widely mocked Chinese film Niu Lai (The Bull Comes), which has been hate-watched all the way to blockbuster status at China’s box office since opening on Aug 5.

The 86-minute animated film initially received scathing reviews over its baffling plot and low-quality computer-generated imagery.

It tells the coming-of-age story of a newborn calf named Niu Lai who befriends a young orphaned leopard and faces challenges such as having to cross a desert and fight against a pack of wolves.

The film, reportedly made on a microbudget of a few thousand yuan by a 34-year-old landscape artist and his mother over five years, quickly went viral and earned a cult following for being “so bad, it’s good”. It began attracting curious young moviegoers eager to laugh at its crude visuals, awkward dialogue and stiff character design.

Despite flopping with just over 7,000 yuan (S$1,300) in earnings in its opening week, Niu Lai has grossed more than 59 million yuan at the domestic box office, making it the most profitable film of all time based on return-on-investment ratio, dethroning the 2025 American horror indie Obsession.

Caelan Moriarty, a 25-year-old American musician working in China, was quoted by AFP as saying “there’s some heart (put) into it, so you can’t hate that”. Artificial intelligence could make the movie in “10 seconds or even faster”, but “the fact that they didn’t use AI, they took time”, was impressive.

At cinemas in Beijing, hand-drawn banners of human-like cows with eyebrows stood in stark contrast to the glossy posters promoting Christopher Nolan’s Hollywood blockbuster The Odyssey (2026).