Stephen Chow's 2016 3D-fantasy extravaganza The Mermaid (Meirenyu) has reaffirmed the fact that Mainland Chinese-Hong Kong co-productions can continue to generate the kind of box-office largesse investors have been targeting. Outstripping director Raman Hui's mega-hit Monster Hunt (Zhuoyao ji, 2015), Chow's film crossed the US$419 million mark for Chinese ticket sales by 21 February 2016, two weeks after its Chinese New Year release date (Ehrlich 2016). The Internet Movie Database records its current global receipt at a staggering $553,810,228. If the accuracy of the numbers is anything to go by, the film is obviously doing right by Chinese audiences, since only one fifth of the box-office earnings seems to reflect international sales. However, it is probably not inaccurate to surmise that, like any major motion picture enterprise of this scale, The Mermaid must have had global aspirations, especially since Chow has chosen to rework a transnational fantasy subgenre, the mermaid film, which already occupies a prominent place in Hollywood history. One could potentially argue, as critics and scholars have done, that Chow's remake is, in part, a contemporary reimagining of the romantic comedy Splash (Ron Howard, 1983) and Disney's animated fantasy The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements and John Musker, 1989). This postulation raises the question as to why the film's international theatrical run was less successful than its outsized Chinese reception. My brief attempt at answers, here in this chapter's introduction, is unscientific and speculative at best, but it does gesture toward an interpretive experiment on how to read this uneven reception of The Mermaid, which I see as an entertainingly quirky remake of aesthetic, intellectual and political significance.

Critical reviews of the film in mostly US newspapers and popular magazines may not be the perfect barometers of public sentiment, but they collectively provide a functional index of possible reasons for the film's uphill attempts at audience appeal in certain global markets, especially those in the West. While the US-based critics I have read were generally positive in their reception, it is how they express their appreciation that is symptomatic of the challenges at hand. First, a couple of reviewers lament the botching of the film's release in the US market, placing the onus on the Sony Corporation for not ‘expect[ing] it to interest many people, outside of Chinese or Chinese-American film fans’ (Abrams 2016).