by Xinhua writer Zhang Yunlong

BEIJING, July 24 (Xinhua) -- At a special Beijing screening of the space drama "The Decisive Moment" ahead of its release, science fiction author Liu Cixin sat in the audience alongside a group of aerospace scientists who had consulted on the film. There were audience members in tears by the time the lights were back on.

For one attendee, a well-followed blogger who writes under the pen name "Chairman Rabbit," the reaction was personal. His last trip to a movie theater, two years earlier, was for a Hollywood sci-fi tentpole so riddled with cliché that it left him doubting he'd bother again. He went into the Beijing screening skeptical. He came out telling everyone he knew that they should see it.

It's a small anecdote, but it captures something bigger playing out across China's multiplexes this summer. The market has posted its strongest run in months, with 13 straight days of daily grosses above 100 million yuan (14.72 million U.S. dollars) as of Thursday, according to analysts with film data platforms Maoyan and Beacon -- momentum that snapped a sluggish first half of the season.

But industry watchers say the more significant story isn't the surge in ticket sales, but what is actually on screens. China's annual admissions have never recovered to their pre-pandemic peak of 1.73 billion in 2019, and industry insiders trace the shortfall in part to formula fatigue: films that leaned on familiar templates to win back audiences whose tastes had already moved on. Yet the titles that keep coming up in conversation this summer aren't necessarily the biggest earners. They're the ones that broke from type.

"The Decisive Moment" is the clearest example. Its script spans China's space program across six decades, from the era of the 1970 Dongfanghong-1 satellite launch, when calculations were largely done by hand-cranked calculators -- with abacuses brought in during urgent tasks -- through to a 2035 vision for the country's space ambitions.

There is no lone hero saving the day, with actor Huang Bo playing a present-day scientist grounded enough so that audiences can see themselves in him, while Wu Lei plays an earlier-generation engineer whose passion and quiet dedication anchor the film's emotional core. The two characters never meet, yet the film links them -- and a third generation still to come -- through the same quiet sense of duty: the idea of work passed down from one generation to the next, so that others might build on what came before.

It's a structure that deliberately sidesteps the disaster-movie, save-the-world formula that has defined many sci-fi blockbusters to date -- a departure Chairman Rabbit, in his widely shared post, credited with giving the film "a spirit distinctly Chinese," rather than an import of Hollywood convention.

A similar impulse shows up in "All Wishes Come True," the animated fantasy-comedy that opened July 18 to strong word-of-mouth acclaim. Unlike most tellings of the legend, in which the eight Taoist immortals appear already divine, director Mou Zhengyang, in an article published in People's Daily, said he set out to show them as ordinary people first: figures with their own trades and flaws, prone to petty scheming and undermining one another, who become immortal only after learning to back each other up when it counts.

"Going it alone is fast. Going together goes further," Mou wrote of the group's arc. The approach seems to have landed well with audiences. Mou cited one viewer's review that read, simply: "I walked out of the theater and decided to become a kinder person."

Historical animation is bending in a similar direction. "Three Kingdoms: The Beginning," from Beijing-based Light Chaser Animation, marks the studio's first stab at Three Kingdoms-era material -- a considerably darker turn from the family-friendly register of its earlier hit "Chang An."

Where the earlier film built its appeal around a widely beloved poet-hero, "Three Kingdoms: The Beginning" centers on Cao Cao, a figure Chinese audiences have historically been trained by classical literature to view as a scheming villain.

The film instead traces him as an idealistic young man who tries to prop up a collapsing dynasty before curdling into disillusionment -- a portrait Ming Jinwei, a popular blogger and commentator, argued may be closer to the historical record than centuries of storytelling have allowed. Director Xie Junwei told Xinhua that the film is the opening chapter of a planned trilogy, with each installment carrying roughly a three-year production cycle. The second is targeted for a summer 2028 release.

The starkest break from formula, though, comes from the one genre least associated with risk-taking: revolutionary war drama. "Crossing," a dramatization of the Red Army's four crossings of the Chishui River during the Long March to break out of encirclement by Kuomintang troops, abandons the genre's traditional "from setback to triumph" arc, according to Beijing Film Academy President Hu Qiang, writing in the Communist Party of China's theoretical journal Qiushi.

Hu argues that the film builds an immersive, ground-level account of a story whose outcome audiences already know, cutting between top-level military strategy and foot soldiers who are not depicted as the superhuman warriors typical of the genre, but as flesh-and-blood people who get hungry, get tired and cry. As Hu put it, the filmmakers walked the historical route themselves: "Our screenplay was walked out, step by step, across the mountains and rivers of Guizhou."

Taken together, the four titles suggest something the industry has been waiting to see for a while: ambition returning to genres that had, in recent years, settled into predictable patterns. Whether that translates into a lasting box-office revival remains to be seen, as a single strong summer won't undo years of admissions decline. But for an industry that has spent those years searching for what audiences actually want, the willingness to experiment may be the most encouraging signal of the summer so far. ■