China's Anti-War Blockbuster Rewrites War Cinema Rules

A Wok, a War, and a Record-Breaking Chinese Hit

Beijing, China - When Xu Fu, a Chinese chef, arrives in the fictional Middle Eastern city of Bahata to open a restaurant and repay his family's debts, he has no ambition beyond keeping his wok hot and his tables full. By the time the film ends, his Dragon Restaurant has become a refuge for war orphans, and his story has made cinematic history. Once Upon a Time in the Middle East, written and directed by Wen Muye and starring Shen Teng, crossed CNY 1.2 billion (about US$170 million) at the Chinese box office within ten days of its August 11 release, cementing its place as the country's biggest summer film and igniting a national conversation about how China tells stories about war.

The film's success is not merely commercial. It has scored 8.4 on the review platform Douban and 9.7 on Maoyan, drawing unusually strong word-of-mouth for a summer tentpole. Chinese state media have framed it as a deliberate departure from Hollywood's war-film grammar - one that places a kitchen, rather than a battlefield, at the center of the frame.

A Chef Who Refuses to Become a Hero

Set against the backdrop of a US-led war in an unnamed Middle Eastern country, the film follows Xu Fu from 2002, when his restaurant begins to prosper, through the outbreak of conflict that shatters the city. Rather than handing its protagonist a weapon, the story keeps him at the stove. As shells fall outside, Xu serves meals, shelters local children, and teaches an orphan named Seif to cook.

Wen Muye, best known for the 2018 dark comedy Dying to Survive, has said he drew inspiration from news reports about Chinese migrants who ran restaurants in Iraq during the 2003 invasion. The most famous of them, Chen Xianzhong, kept a Baghdad restaurant open as a sanctuary for journalists, doctors, and refugees. "Food, above all, represents happiness and peace," Wen told domestic media. "Even amid the chaos of war, people still need three meals a day."

From Baghdad Kitchens to a 100,000-Square-Meter Soundstage

The production built a 1:1-scale replica of Bahata at the Qingdao Oriental Movie Metropolis, a set spanning roughly 100,000 square meters constructed over five months. A secondary ruined townscape was created in Ningxia, and select desert scenes were filmed in Egypt. The cast mixes Chinese and Egyptian actors, and the film's dialogue runs across Mandarin, Arabic, and English - a multilingual texture that reviewers have read as an attempt to see the war through local, rather than external, eyes.

Wen has resisted pinning the story to any single historical conflict. "The story is set 20 years ago, but I didn't want to limit it to any particular war," he has said. "Audiences can see it as a story about war and humanity - one that could have happened in the past, or could be happening right now." The deliberate ambiguity has allowed Chinese viewers to project their own anxieties about conflict, humanitarian disaster, and the fate of ordinary people onto the screen.

The Numbers Behind a Summer Phenomenon

The commercial trajectory has been steep. The film earned more than CNY 180 million (about US$26.6 million) on its opening day, crossed CNY 1 billion within eight days, and has now sold more than 35 million tickets. Industry tracker Beacon has projected total earnings as high as CNY 3.5 billion, which would place it among the most successful Chinese releases of the year. Over the August 14-16 weekend alone, it took US$70.3 million, according to Variety, comfortably ahead of Hollywood imports playing in the same window, including Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.

That performance matters beyond the box-office charts. It signals that Chinese audiences will turn out in force for a domestic film that tackles serious subject matter with emotional restraint - a useful data point for studios weighing how much risk to take on non-franchise material in the world's second-largest film market.

A Different Grammar of War

Critics have zeroed in on what the film does not do. There is no war room, no command center, no heroic charge. Power cuts, food shortages, and the smell of cooking replace military briefings. Beijing-based commentator Xu Ying, writing for CGTN, argued that the film represents "an increasingly conscious attempt by Chinese cinema to establish its own vocabulary on the global cultural stage." The kitchen, in her reading, becomes a counterpoint to artillery: cooking requires time and patience, while war demands rapid obedience. "The cook tries to preserve the flavor of every dish, while war strips ordinary life of its most basic order."

The choice is not purely aesthetic. For decades, Hollywood's war films have dominated the global visual imagination of conflict - generals strategizing, soldiers charging, exceptional individuals saving the day. Once Upon a Time in the Middle East offers a more modest proposition: that history may be too vast to repair from a kitchen, but a kitchen can still protect a small patch of humanity from being crushed by it.

Japan's Parallel Tradition of Anti-War Storytelling

For Japanese audiences, the film's approach resonates with a deep domestic tradition of anti-war cinema. Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies (1988) and the Barefoot Gen adaptations built their power not on battlefield spectacle but on the everyday struggle of civilians - a girl and her brother surviving air raids, a family enduring the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Japan's postwar canon repeatedly told war from the perspective of ordinary people trying to keep living, much as Wen's chef keeps cooking.

The comparison also highlights a divergence. Japanese anti-war cinema emerged from the country's own experience of destruction and its postwar pacifist constitution, often dwelling on loss and moral reckoning. The Chinese film, by contrast, arrives at a moment when Beijing is projecting cultural confidence abroad, and its message is more forward-looking: that peace is not an abstract diplomatic formula but the simple fact that someone can cook, someone can eat, and someone can put a child to bed without gunfire outside. As the film travels to overseas markets, that distinction - and the shared humanism beneath it - will likely shape how Asian audiences receive it.

What to Watch For

Several questions will define the film's next chapter. First, how far its box-office run extends: a CNY 3.5 billion finish would make it one of the highest-grossing Chinese films ever, and overseas release plans in Southeast Asia and beyond will test whether its anti-war humanism travels beyond mainland audiences. Second, whether the momentum translates into awards-season recognition at home and at international festivals, where a Chinese war film told from a kitchen window would be an unusual contender. Third, and most consequentially for the industry, whether other Chinese studios read the film's success as a license to experiment with serious, socially conscious material - or retreat to the safe formulas that dominated the summer slate.

For now, Once Upon a Time in the Middle East has done something rare: it has made a blockbuster out of restraint. In a season crowded with spectacle, Chinese audiences chose a film about a man who feeds people. That choice says as much about the mood of the country as it does about the state of its cinema - and it gives Japan's filmmakers a thought-provoking mirror of their own enduring fascination with how ordinary life survives extraordinary violence.

By Kenji Tanaka, Staff Writer

This article was produced with AI-assisted research and editorial support. Sources: CGTN, Sixth Tone, Variety, Reuters.