China's Spring Festival blockbuster（大片） "Hi, Mom" beat the 2017 American superhero film "Wonder Woman" at 5.39 billion yuan on Tuesday and made Chinese film director Jia Ling overtake Patty Jenkins to be the worlds highest-grossing female director for a single film.
The achievement was made 54 days after its release on February 12, the first day of Chinese New Year. "Hi, Mom" is currently the second highest-grossing film only after the 2017 action-adventure film "Wolf Warrior 2", according to China's movie-ticketing platform. They are the only two domestic-produced films among the top 100 grossing films worldwide.
"Hi, Mom" is the first film directed by Jia Ling, who is a comedian and actress. It stars Jia who was saddened by her mother Li Huanying's accidental death, magically transported back to 1981 to become a friend of her mother and tried her best to delight and planned a better life for her mother.
"Although the film has a strong individual mark, it causes many people's empathy," said professor Tian Huiqun at the School of Arts and Communication of Beijing Normal University. He added that it is hard to copy the film's success since Jia and the film itself cannot be reproduced.
The success of "Hi, Mom" also became a milestone to mark the growth of " She power" in the man-dominated film industry in the last ten years. However, some film critics say that the film's success is just because people are interested in women topics for the time being, and money goes to people's interest.
"Women creating films is still not an easy task," Dong Yige, assistant professor in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at University at Buffalo, "Why not use female audiences' power to push the women creation?"
