ON JULY 15, or two days after being released, a domestic film Asura: The City of Madness was withdrawn by its producers from cinemas, who claimed they were maliciously given bad reviews on film rating websites. Gmw.cn comments:

The producers only blamed the websites without explaining why they decided to withdraw the film, but obviously there are financial considerations involved. The producers boasted that Asura cost of 750 million yuan ($112 million) to make, but its ticket sales did not reach even 50 million yuan in three days. More importantly, on more than one rating website, it has been heavily criticized by many viewers who claim that it is "not interesting". Some have even asked whether it was a way to launder money.

When a film is a failure at the box office and gets panned by audiences, one would think that its producers would, first of all, think about the problems with the film. However, the producers of Asura have instead lashed out at the film rating websites, claiming there has been an "organized attack".

However, many film commentators have also said the film is rather bad, pointing out that the story lacks a clear timeline, there is no logic linking different scenes, and the heroine is almost a copy of the "mother of dragons" character in the Game of Thrones. It would be simply impossible to organize so many film commentators to concertedly attack one film in this way.

Moreover, on all the mainstream domestic film rating websites, audiences have given the film bad ratings. It seems to be a consensus among those who have seen the film that it looks good but it lacks a story.

And if the story is not very good, you can't blame the audience for not buying it. It is not a good habit for filmmakers to blame other people for their own bad products.