Crazy Rich Asians: reviews, news, and analysis of the huge Hollywood milestone

Nora Lum, a.k.a. Awkwafina — the YouTube viral sensation turned star in this year’s Ocean’s 8 and Crazy Rich Asians and this week’s Saturday Night Live host — is having a very good 2018.

Her movies are doing well: Crazy Rich Asians is on track to be one of the biggest success stories of 2018; Oceans 8 has outearned all the other Oceans movies. And Awkwafina herself is being hailed as part of an immensely likable ensemble in Oceans 8, and as the breakout star of Crazy Rich Asians.

If you went to a screening of Crazy Rich Asians this week, there’s a good chance you heard some squeals of glee in your audience over a brief mid-credits scene. But while it is indeed very brief — and dialogue-free, for that matter — that scene actually tells us a whole lot about Crazy Rich Asians.

Specifically, it tells us that a certain secondary character isn’t so secondary after all; that this film is even more indebted to Jane Austen than you may have thought; and that the producers of Crazy Rich Asians are already betting on at least one sequel — and possibly two.

One of the most beautiful things about Crazy Rich Asians is how it refuses to explain many of its most intrinsically Asian elements. That lack of training wheels is intentional: As director Jon M. Chu told me, “We didn’t want to give people an excuse to think of this world as some kind of obscure, exotic fantasyland — this is a real place, with real culture, history and tradition, and instead of just giving them answers to their questions, we want them to have conversations.”

The movie’s Singapore-specific local color and broadly Asian cultural nuances are indeed fairly Google-able, and can readily be contextualized through polite discussions with actual Asian people. But there’s one scene in particular that has been resiliently enigmatic to audiences of many backgrounds, both Asian and non-Asian … and it’s a pivotal one: the mahjong scene.

Crazy Rich Asians isn’t going anywhere. Over the weekend, the hit rom-com brought in an estimated $25 million at the domestic box office, taking the top spot and dropping less than 6 percent from its opening weekend.

That small week-over-week decline is considered a good sign that the movie has legs. Movies often have huge drops from their first to second weekend, especially mega-hyped blockbusters that have huge openings. Case in point: Warner Bros., the studio behind Crazy Rich Asians, saw Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice drop 69 percent from its first to second weekend, and Suicide Squad had a decrease of about 67 percent. Wonder Woman was considered a success because it only dropped 45 percent in its second week. And CNN points out that Disney’s Incredibles 2 dipped about 56 percent between its first and second weekend earlier this summer.

It’s a small moment: Rachel Chu is in bed, admiring her boyfriend, the extremely handsome Nick Young. She pulls her glasses away from her face in a cartoonish gesture. “Hubba hubba,” she says.

This scene in Crazy Rich Asians, fleeting though it is, captures something crucial about the film: its celebration of the female gaze.

I’m not sure any Hollywood romantic comedy has hit the big screen bearing more expectations than Crazy Rich Asians. It’s the first contemporary English-language Hollywood movie with an almost all-Asian cast in a quarter-century (the last was 1993’s The Joy Luck Club). And in risk-averse Hollywood, that means the film’s reception has huge implications for Asian and Asian-American actors and filmmakers in all kinds of genres.

That’s a lot of pressure for any film, but especially a romantic comedy — a genre that’s been sidelined for the past decade and is still considered less artistically important than prestige dramas or big-budget action movies.

Crazy Rich Asians is just getting started.

On Wednesday, one week after the film’s theatrical debut, the Hollywood Reporter reported that a sequel to the romantic comedy is already in the works, and that Crazy Rich Asians director Jon M. Chu, as well as the creative team from the first movie, will return. Warner Bros. has not officially greenlit the sequel but is “moving forward with development.”

Late last month, Variety reported that Crazy Rich Asians was tracking for an $18 million opening, which would be considered a “solid” debut for the first studio movie in 25 years with an all Asian and Asian-American cast. So it can now safely be said that Crazy Rich Asians has defied expectations, soaring to the top of the box office this weekend with a $34 million domestic haul over five days and handily earning back its $30 million production budget. Estimates are projecting an eventual domestic take of more than $100 million.

Crazy Rich Asians’ big debut is notable for a number of reasons, but the biggest one is that it’s a win for representation: Because Hollywood doesn’t feature many Asian and Asian-American characters period, let alone as leads in major studio films, Crazy Rich Asians carried the (unfair) burden of proving that people will go see movies about Asian characters that star actors of Asian descent. It’s not unlike the burden placed on Wonder Woman, a fellow Warner Bros. project, to prove that people would go see a female superhero movie. (They would. They really, really would.)

When my sister and I were younger, we found out that my father, a resoundingly heterosexual man who occasionally patronized gentlemen’s clubs and held torches for both Michelle Pfeiffer and Nicole Kidman, had a crush on Heath Ledger.

“He’s handsome,” I remember him telling my sister, while watching 10 Things I Hate About You, seeking some sort of assurance.

In his 2013 novel Crazy Rich Asians, author Kevin Kwan builds the world of ultra-wealthy Singaporean society by cheekily (and sometimes bitingly) name-checking every high-end fashion designer and luxury brand under the sun. On the big screen, that lavish sensibility finds a happy home. The movie adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians, out this Wednesday, is “a cinematic jewel box, each compartment brimming with jaw-dropping opulence and brilliant luster,” writes Vox culture reporter Alex Abad-Santos.

In a sea of Armani and Dior, one dress stands out: an ethereal, pale blue Marchesa gown worn by Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), the film’s Chinese-American heroine.

Crazy Rich Asians is a textbook case of a movie’s title betraying its substance.

Sure, the upcoming film features crazy Asians, rich Asians, Asians who are crazy rich, and Asians who are crazy and rich. I suppose that’s a draw for some people who want to literally see crazy rich Asians.

On Tuesday night, the cast of Crazy Rich Asians attended the film’s premiere in Los Angeles. As is standard for Hollywood premieres of big movies, they were dressed in gowns and tuxedos and suits, all coiffed and made up to look their best on the red carpet.

But what made the scene look different from the typical red-carpet premiere was that the actors and actresses of Crazy Rich Asians were all of Asian descent. That’s because the movie is the first major studio film in more than two decades to feature an all Asian and Asian-American primary cast.