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The Hong Kong filmmaker’s follow-up to his 2001 hit “Shaolin Soccer” opened in mainland China on July 11 and follows an underdog side, the Emei team, that folds martial arts into its game to win a fictional tournament called the Supreme Invincible Cup.

One of the rivals it beats is the “Ewha Women’s Soccer Team,” a name Korean critics say points straight at Ewha Womans University, one of Seoul’s most prestigious institutions.

The Ewha players wear heavy makeup and contact lenses during matches and win through fouls and play-acting to fool the referee, according to the Korea Herald. The film carries dialogue in Mandarin, Cantonese, English, Korean, Japanese and Thai, with clumsy Korean lines that critics say play the team for ridicule.

Seo Kyoung-duk, a professor at Sungshin Women’s University and a prominent campaigner on Korean cultural and sovereignty issues, called out the film in a July 16 social media post. He told the Korea Times it was “wrong to repeatedly insult Korean sports” and pressed the producers to fix the scenes before the overseas release in August.

He tied it to a 2022 short-track speed skating film released during the Beijing Winter Olympics that cast Korean athletes as habitual cheats.

The filmmakers have not responded. Chinese viewers defending the movie note that Chow’s comedies exaggerate every antagonist and that no real-world figure is named.

Timed to the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 25th anniversary of “Shaolin Soccer,” the film posted the biggest summer opening in China in five years. It passed 1.2 billion yuan (US$177 million) at the box office by July 18, its eighth day in theaters, after opening to 260 million yuan on July 11, according to ticketing tracker Maoyan, which projects a final domestic total near 2.5 billion yuan.

Its 380 million yuan ($56 million) budget, roughly half of it spent on AI-assisted visual effects, makes it the most expensive film Chow has directed.

The movie comes at a time South Korea is dealing with a major football crisis. The country’s National Assembly is set to hold a hearing on July 22 to address the national team’s failure at the 2026 World Cup, where they were eliminated at the group stage.

South Korean football star Son Heung-min is among 23 people originally summoned to a hearing before the National Assembly to address

Chow, 64, built his fame in the 1990s on Hong Kong’s absurdist “mo lei tau” comedy in films such as “All for the Winner” and “Fight Back to School,” then reached global audiences with “Shaolin Soccer,” “Kung Fu Hustle” and “CJ7.” He stopped acting after “CJ7” in 2008 to focus on directing and producing.