Chapter 35: The Shallows Premieres! Is That Really Fat Bing?!

Li Wenyu’s interviews for various roles in the new production were progressing smoothly, and the calendar turned to December 22nd.

Driven by viral marketing, various beauty pageant gimmicks, concert tie-ins, and advertisements on CCTV, the long-brewing film *The Shallows* was finally released on a massive scale across mainland China. It wasn’t just the mainland, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan—the film also premiered on this day in South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. Distributors had paid 28 million for the rights in East and Southeast Asia, naturally hoping to capitalize on the marketing frenzy.

Early on the morning of the 22nd, Fan Bing dragged Li Wenyu out. "Hurry up. We aren't going into the cinemas; we’re going to stand outside each theater to see how many people are buying tickets and observe the audience's reactions as they come out."

"Do you think our opening day box office can break one million or one point five million?"

Don't assume a one-million opening is a small figure. The film *Big Shot’s Funeral* only made a little over 500,000 on its first day and took nearly three months to reach a total of 43 million. In the original timeline, *Big Shot’s Funeral* was released on December 21st and hit that milestone by March 2002. However, Li Wenyu had pushed the Asian beauty pageant gimmick so hard, championing Fan Bing as the "Number One Beauty in Asia for 2001."

A beauty chosen by hundreds of millions of registered users!

With the support of stars like Leslie Cheung and Andy Lau, the folks at Huayi weren't stupid; they rescheduled *Big Shot’s Funeral* to the Spring Festival slot. Now, no movie dared to clash with *The Shallows*. Even the Western world was shaken. Such a massive Asian beauty pageant, involving everyone from campus queens to professional contestants with countless netizens voting—regardless of how many fake accounts the bot teams created—was unprecedented. This was 2001; the Western netizens of that era, seeing these raw numbers, were genuinely stunned. After all, this wasn't the era decades later where a random show could rack up billions of views—audiences hadn't yet grown cynical from "terrifyingly exaggerated data."

How many countries in the West even have a total population exceeding 100 million?

The "Number One" and "Number Two" beauties chosen by hundreds of millions of users—just how beautiful were they? This was something the global public, especially men, were immensely curious about!

Li Wenyu said speechlessly, "The opening weekend and the following week won't be bad. Brother Leslie has returned to Hong Kong for his concert; we really should have slept in."

Fan Bing shot him a charming, sideways glance. "You only slept for three hours last night. Isn't that enough?" She was convinced that if things kept going like this, she wouldn't even need to go to the gym to lose weight for her role as an action heroine.

Li Wenyu, "..." Better to let it go; he meant *actual* sleeping!

As they sat in the car and the driver pulled away, Fan Bing quickly made a call. "Sister Hua, help me find out which theaters Yanzi, International Zhang, and Old Xu are at to critique my acting. I want to drop by toward the end of the screening to see the show."

...

Outside a cinema in Beijing, as *The Shallows* was about to begin, Yanzi and her friends Li Yu and her boyfriend Old Wang, International Zhang and his brother, and the "talented woman" of the Beijing Film Academy, Old Xu, and her man, all filed into the private screening. Less than half the seats were filled, yet it was sold out to the public.

Slowly, *The Shallows* began to screen. The whispering in the theater died down quickly; everyone’s ears were practically calloused from the global internet buzz surrounding this blockbuster. They had finally waited long enough.

The film opened with a few subtitles before cutting to a beautiful, serene beach at dawn. Waves rolled in, and a young boy was seen kicking a soccer ball. As he played, he noticed something washed up on the shore. He ran over to pick it up, discovering a waterproof hat with a mini waterproof digital camera strapped to it.

The boy wiped the water off and turned the camera on. The big screen shifted to the perspective of the digital camera. It showed a bright, stunningly beautiful sea, so clear it made one gasp, with someone surfing about a dozen meters away. The surfer was Joey Wong in a swimsuit!

Wearing the hat with the mini camera, the surfer couldn't capture her whole body—mostly just her torso and legs when she looked down—but a cheering voice rang out: Andy Lau. After a few seconds of Joey Wong surfing, the camera cut to Andy Lau looking down at the water, then back to Joey Wong showing off her athletic form.

A ripple of laughter went through the cinema. Many were praising the beauty of the sea and the actors. However, the camera cut back to the boy’s perspective as he watched the digital camera show Andy Lau suddenly falling off his surfboard, struggling in the water, and shouting...

The chaotic underwater sequence lasted less than ten seconds before a terrifying, monstrous shark—its maw wide enough to swallow half of Andy Lau—charged into the frame.

*Boom!*

The theater erupted in screams. Knowing the title and seeing the poster, everyone knew it was about a shark, but no one expected such a visceral start. Was the Heavenly King Andy Lau’s cameo in *The Shallows* really this miserable? He didn't even show his face; he just had a camera strapped to his head to film Joey Wong, only to fall in and get eaten by a shark? That shark's gaping maw was too terrifying.

Amid the screams, the boy on the big screen grabbed the hat and camera and ran, sprinting from the shore toward the island. The screen went dark, and the title *The Shallows* appeared.

The screen lit up again, and the music became light and upbeat. Leslie Cheung was driving a jeep, with Fan Bing in the passenger seat, traveling along a road through the dense jungle of the island. When Fan Bing finally appeared, she was wearing a ponytail and denim, holding a digital camera and flipping through photos.

...

The photos clearly displayed a young woman resembling Fan Bing taking swimsuit photos on the beach, smiling brightly and radiantly, her fit figure on full display. As the photos were enlarged on the big screen, matching Fan Bing’s smile, another murmur rose in the theater. Yanzi pulled her boyfriend aside and whispered, "Why do I feel like her sense of style is much more chic than mine?"

"And this smile... is it a bit complex?"

On the camera screen, Fan Bing’s smile was filled with warmth, dependency, admiration, and deep affection. Then, in the span of a second, tears welled up in her eyes.

On the theater-sized screen, Fan Bing’s face and torso occupied a third of the frame. In a high-definition close-up, her emotional transition over ten seconds rivaled the classic scene from *Comrades: Almost a Love Story* where Maggie Cheung goes from laughing through tears to full-on crying. It was textbook-level acting—at least 80% of her full potential.

The way Fan Bing smiled on that screen, and the way the emotion shifted—not from real crying, but a sudden, deeply moving transition—caught Yanzi off guard. She felt a shiver run through her!

Before Old Wang could say anything, someone in the rows behind exclaimed, "Damn, that’s intense! Is Fan that good?"

Without turning around, Yanzi recognized the voice as Zhou Xun, who had won a Best Actress award at the Paris Film Festival in 2000. When Zhou Xun spoke up, the theater fell silent.

The movie continued. As Fan Bing looked at the photos through different shots, Leslie Cheung, driving the car, asked curiously, "Is that you in the photos?"

Fan Bing quickly wiped her tears and smiled. "No, no, it’s my mother. She came to this beach to take photos when she was pregnant with me. I’ve never been here before, but I just feel like this is our beach."

Her delivery was powerful. Her facial expressions, her smile, and her eyes—when she mentioned her mother, she looked proud and bright, almost glowing with clarity. Yet, with that final line, "our beach," her eyes betrayed an unmaskable sorrow and loss, a sense of longing and reluctance to let go. That desperate attempt to embrace the joy of the beach before her, contrasted with the grief in her eyes—the two conflicting emotions were incredibly infectious.

Zhou Xun gasped again, "Did her mother pass away?"

The film didn't explicitly state her mother was gone, but the smile, the eyes, and the tone of her voice had even rattled Zhou Xun.

With the camera locked on her face, filling a large portion of the screen, the emotion couldn't have been conveyed more clearly. Yanzi and International Zhang were practically falling apart. *Is this really Fan Bing? Who is impersonating her?*

This was the result of Fan Bing honing her acting skills to the 80s range after so much struggle, re-shooting these dramatic scenes. An 80 rating was already formidable; she had once re-shot a single segment over twenty times. In this specific scene, her performance was undoubtedly well above an 85.