China's consumer class is always looking for the latest, most cutting-edge smartphone app or the most talked-about viral video.
Who would have predicted, then, that a 21-year-old movie would take Chinese cinema by storm over the past few weeks? What's incredible is that The Legend of 1900 was hardly a classic in the first place.
Revolving around a piano prodigy, played by Tim Roth, who had spent his entire life on board an ocean liner, the movie received mixed reviews on its release in 1998, with disapproving critics lambasting it as "fragile" (Variety), "overwrought" (San Francisco Chronicle), schmaltz that "drowns in its own treacle" (Salon.com).
The first English-language feature by Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore faded fast into obscur-ity, never reaching the heights of his revered Cinema Paradiso (1988). And then Chinese audiences came to its rescue.
Having never been released in China, Legend finally unspooled in main-land cinemas on November 15, along-side local romantic drama Somewhere Winter and Hollywood's latest reboot, Charlie's Angels.
Rather than becoming a sideshow to these two headlining block-busters, the film broke out of the art house scene and crossed over to the mainstream: its opening weekend gross of 63.1 million yuan ($8.9 million) topped that of Angels.
Two weeks into its run, Legend had generated more than $18.5 million, eclipsing its total takings of the past two decades. To put this into context, the film took in $167,435 during its month-long release in the United States, in 1999.
Adjusted for inflation, this figure would be about $258,635 today, or 1.8 million yuan " that's just 1.3% of its gross during the first two weeks of its China run.
And it's not just tills that are ringing: the rave online reviews must be music to Tornatore's ears.
On douban.com, China's equivalent to Internet Movie Database, Legend secured an average rating of 9.3, far above those of current imports such as Knives Out (8.5), Frozen II (7.3) and Midway (7.7), local blockbusters such as Better Days (8.4) or any of the flag-waving tub-thumpers that dominated Chinese cineplexes for weeks before and after National Day.
So the question is: why? One advantage Legend has over its box-office rivals is that it is a state-of-the-art 4K restoration of the original film.
Chinese audiences have long been susceptible to enhanced editions of films: the 3D version of Titanic sailed into the record books with total takings of $134 million during its two-month run in the country from April to June 2012.
The success of Legend could in part be attributed to young mainlanders' pursuit of novelty: China is one of the few markets where 3D films, complete with their marked-up ticket prices, remain popular.
Chinese audiences have also embraced old films like never before, flocking to movies they could only hear or read about, or watch on pirated discs while the country lagged behind the rest of the world in the number of screens and foreign titles that could be shown on them.
There has also been a surge of interest in re-evaluating film heritage with festivals placing emphasis on introducing pains-takingly restored films to viewers. In October, for example, the Pingyao Inter-national Film Festival hosted a programme of rarely seen titles from India's socially conscious Parallel Cinema movement.
The recent Hainan International Film Festival presented a more diverse offering, including classics such as Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush (1925), AgnEs Varda's La Pointe Courte (1955) and Marc Webb's (500) Days of Summer (2009).
It is in such programs that legends are made, and the old becomes the new.
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