Minister apologizes for uninspiring kung fu
"Wasteful, embarrassing to the administration, and upsetting to the voters," said an official.
Nvidia is the world's largest company that famously produces a Tom Ford-coated, corn-loving pen that signs autographs on banknotes, baseballs, MacBooks, and a woman's top, and turns them into expensive collectors' items.
The nearly US$5t company is also partially responsible for Kung Fu.
Kung Fu is a Taiwanese film directed by a novelist who wrote Sour Underpants, Penis and Penile Forest. The production company behind the title is run by Jeffery Huang, a rapper who composed Dick and reportedly funded a porn site that was raided by police.
This level of immersion in the martial arts of human reproduction didn’t really help Kung Fu get very far, given the lack of a niche contemporary art called “financial discipline.”
Famous for saying “I never lose. I always win or get liquidated,” Huang bought many Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs starting in 2021 and sold one at a 90% loss this June. Huang publicly cursed “#fuckCitibank #fuckDeutschebank” after spending US$3.55m on paperwork for a company to go public and ringing the bell at the NYSE in 2018, but quickly realized the IPO had fallen through. This March, a cryptocurrency price crash cost Huang US$30.22m.
Another spender who proved martial arts couldn't translate to contemporary art was the Taiwanese government dubbed the Republic of China. Once the title holder of "the longest imposition of martial law in the world," the government paid for 58% of Kung Fu's NT$265m budget, according to numbers published by Storm Media, an online news site (which owns a legendary publication that once cited a Taiwanese VP as saying, "In an extremely calm yet mysterious tone over the phone, they slowly uttered: 'A scandal in the Presidential Office... Heh. Heh. Heh.'" and got sued in 2000).
A fluff piece for the film gives us an insider’s look at the spending philosophy of Kung Fu’s crew. According to the piece, the Penile Forest author/Kung Fu director rejected market analysis and felt their own "little joys in life" were more important than filmgoers' tastes. The little joys include the expansion of the FX company behind it from 20-ish to 80 employees, "lavish spending" (豪放) on FX previsualization at all costs (不計成本), and purchases of "many" Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards, with a price tag of up to US$4329.99 per card according to Nvidia's website. The fluff piece describes the director’s filming experience as "an absolute luxury and an absolute blast."
The film, released in the lucrative Lunar New Year period, generated NT$46.9m at the box office, according to Storm Media. That's roughly 17.7% of its NT$265m budget. The culture minister, a figure in Taiwan's New Wave Movie Movement that nurtured international god-tier directors like Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, admitted the flop was "eye-rollingly stupid" (傻眼) and apologized to taxpayers over the "disastrous loss" (慘賠).
Taiwan is not short of acclaimed movies on tight budgets. Edward Yang's Yi Yi (2000) is the BBC's pick as the 8th greatest film of the 21st century. But the production was so scrappy that "Yang's budget ... ran out before he finished getting the music. So he looked across the kitchen table and asked his wife to give him hers," according to a 2001 report by SFGate, meaning Yang didn't have to pay for music.
Yi Yi is not an outlier. Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee's Taiwanese-American movie The Wedding Banquet (1994), with a budget of US$1m (about US$2.2m adjusted for inflation, which is 32% of Kung Fu's budget), generated a 2360% return, according to Variety. Marry My Dead Body (2023), a ghost-themed, camp-coded comedy, with a budget of NT$60m (23% of Kung Fu's), made NT$363m in Taiwan alone (a 605% return). It was adapted into a Thai version, and a Korean version is reportedly in the making.
Taiwan's Ministry of Culture granted Marry My Dead Body NT$10m, which is around 7% of the money it invested in Kung Fu. Marry My Dead Body was eventually Taiwan’s Oscar submission. We hope Kung Fu won't be another one.
BobaChair did not try to reach the Penile Forest author/Kung Fu director for comment.
Researched, handwritten, fact-checked, and finalized by a real human who was born and raised in Asia. Grammatically edited by ChatGPT 5.5 Medium, which is probably run on expensive Nvidia chips.
