General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Just Another Pandora's Box (越光宝盒)

Just Another Pandora's Box (越光宝盒; also released as Once Upon a Chinese Classic) is a 2010 Hong Kong-mainland comedy-fantasy film directed and written by Jeffrey Lau (刘镇伟), in which a modern thief and a fairy are transported through a magical box to the era of the Battle of Red Cliffs in the Three Kingdoms period.¹^•² It was released in mainland China and Hong Kong on 18 March 2010.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Jeffrey Lau (刘镇伟), who also appears on screen as Grandpa Buddha (菩提老祖)¹^•³
Release	18 March 2010, mainland China and Hong Kong; Hong Kong premiere 15 March 2010¹^•⁴
Leads	Ronald Cheng (郑中基) as the thief Qing Yise (清一色); Sun Li (孙俪) as the Rose Fairy (玫瑰仙子)⁴
Cast size	About 58 Chinese-language stars, including Eric Tsang, Huang Bo, Guo Degang, Yuen Biao, Athena Chu, Gigi Leung, and Gillian Chung⁵
Mainland box office	Over 60 million RMB in the first four days; over 100 million RMB within 11 days; about 130 million RMB by late April 2010⁶^•⁷
Douban rating	5.4/10 from 168,075 users, better than 53% of comedies on the site¹
Hong Kong rating	Category IIB (Hong Kong)⁴

Spoilers

Plot

The thief Qing Yise (Ronald Cheng) saves a girl, the Rose Fairy (Sun Li), from drowning and then tries to steal her belongings. When she revives, she takes him for the destined one she has been seeking, because he has just drawn the Purple Sword of Heaven she carries from its sheath. The two activate a magical box and are transported back in time to the Battle of Red Cliffs in the third century, where rival armies catch them and one of the generals confiscates the box they need to return.³

During the time travel, the Rose Fairy pursues Qing Yise romantically, while he, intent on returning to his own time, only flatters her. After using her help to take the box back from Cao Cao (Guo Degang), he abandons her and returns alone.²

Relationship to A Chinese Odyssey

The film reworks material from Lau's A Chinese Odyssey films of the mid-1990s. It reuses the Moonlight Box (月光宝盒) device from those films, and Athena Chu returns as a version of her Zixia Fairy character, here named Qingxia (青霞). Lau said he telephoned Chu personally to invite her, the only actor he recruited that way, and that he ultimately decided not to shoot a scene he had written for her on the city wall familiar from A Chinese Odyssey, fearing it would pain her to revisit it.⁸^•⁹

Lau described the film as a "Red Cliff version of The Eagle Shooting Heroes", a large-scale farce in which love is not the only element.¹⁰ Characters drawn from other films, including the Landlord and Landlady and the Fire Cloud Devil from Kung Fu Hustle, the child Dicky played by Xu Jiao, and roles associated with Crazy Stone, are all pulled through the box into the Red Cliffs setting.¹⁰ The opening credits joke that Jackie Chan, Stephen Chow, Jet Li, Chow Yun-fat, Maggie Cheung, Zhang Ziyi, and Angelina Jolie all refused to appear in the movie.¹¹

Production and co-production context

The film was produced by Pearl River Film Co., Beijing Galloping Horse Film & TV Production, and Bona companies, with Mei Ah Entertainment handling distribution in Hong Kong.⁴ A scholarly account of Hong Kong-mainland co-production identifies Just Another Pandora's Box, released in 2010, as an example of the shift in which mainland companies moved from providing labor, services, and locations to becoming the primary funding source, a change also reflected in casting.¹² Part of the Red Cliffs battle footage was shot in Yinchuan, and the film wrapped at the end of August 2009.¹⁰

Box office

The film opened in a quiet March market rather than the crowded Lunar New Year season its promoters had originally considered.¹³ Its first day took about 9.8 million RMB, and by 21 March, four days in, the total had passed 60 million RMB.¹⁴ Eleven days after release the film held a celebration for passing 100 million RMB.⁶ A mid-year industry roundup credited it with about 130 million RMB earned in the slow season, and a Baidu Baike summary puts the cumulative total at nearly 140 million RMB by 30 April 2010.⁷^•¹⁵

Outside the mainland, Box Office Mojo records a Hong Kong gross of $487,079 and a worldwide total of $1,616,705, with releases in Malaysia and Singapore on the same March 2010 date and in New Zealand that April.¹⁶ In Hong Kong the opening day took about HK$330,000, and the film ranked fifth in its second week with a cumulative HK$3,337,329.¹⁷^•¹⁸

Reception

Audience and critical responses diverged sharply. On Douban the film holds 5.4/10 from 168,075 users, with 39.3% of ratings at three stars.¹ Within four days of release, more than 12,900 Sina Weibo posts about the film had accumulated, and many viewers who had seen it reported the story boring and hard to laugh at.¹⁹ A Sohu feature later placed it first on a 2010 list of commercially successful "bad films", with a mainland gross of 128.8 million RMB as of 15 August 2010.²⁰

Positive commentary emphasized the density of gags and Lau's signature style. A Sina review aggregation gave the film four stars out of five, calling it a "postmodern aesthetic" farce whose joke density exceeded Lau's earlier work, and singled out Guo Degang's Cao Cao and Gillian Chung as surprises.²¹ The trade paper-style account in the Hunan Daily described it as following the established Hong Kong entertainment-comedy route, with Lau extracting the concept from A Chinese Odyssey for a new time-travel narrative.²²

English-language reviews were cooler. Far East Films rated it 2.5/5, describing 100 minutes of referential comedy that spoofs Titanic, Kung Fu Hustle, and Red Cliff, and calling Ronald Cheng good as the dopey thief while finding the whole frustrating outside its target Cantonese audience.²³ Moria gave it two stars out of four.³ Rotten Tomatoes lists no reviews on its Tomatometer and fewer than 50 audience ratings.²⁴

Versions and runtime

Reported runtimes differ across databases: Douban lists 86 minutes, Rotten Tomatoes 1 hour 29 minutes, and IMDb 92 minutes.¹^•²⁴^•¹¹ The film was shot in Mandarin and Cantonese, and the Hong Kong listing records Cantonese as its language.¹^•⁴ It later circulated on Chinese television and streaming: CCTV-6's movie channel broadcast it on 6 January 2019, and it is available on Tencent Video, where Baidu Baike records a user score of 8.3/10 from 27,000 people.¹⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 2009 to 2010 › Released in 2010

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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