General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Moon Man

Moon Man (独行月球, Dú xíng yuè qiú) is a 2022 Chinese science-fiction comedy directed by Zhang Chiyu (张吃鱼) and starring Shen Teng (沈腾) and Ma Li (马丽), about a maintenance worker accidentally left alone on the moon after an asteroid catastrophe strikes Earth. Adapted from the Korean webtoon Moon You by Cho Seok (赵石) and produced by the comedy studio Mahua FunAge (开心麻花), it earned over 3.1 billion yuan and ranked second among all 2022 releases at the Chinese box office.¹

Key fact	Detail
Original title / release	独行月球; released in China on 29 July 2022²
Director and writers	Directed by Zhang Chiyu; written by Zhang Chiyu, Chenguang Qian, Si'ao Dai, and Yuyue Shen²
Source material	Adaptation of the Korean webtoon Moon You by Cho Seok¹^•³
Stars	Shen Teng as Duguyue, Ma Li as Ma Lanxing, with Chang Yuan, Li Chengru, and Huang Cailun²
Runtime and language	122 minutes; Mandarin²
Box office	$460,237,662 worldwide, the eighth-highest-grossing film of 2022, against an estimated budget of approximately CN¥400 million; over 3.1 billion yuan in China, second for the year²^•¹^•²⁴
Ratings	IMDb 6.4/10 from about 2,300 votes; Douban 6.9/10 as of 5 August 2022⁴^•⁵

Spoilers

Plot and premise

The story is set in 2050, when humanity deploys the "Moon Shield Plan" (月盾计划), a lunar base meant to act as Earth's shield against the asteroid π. A solar storm makes the base's nuclear missile, the "Cosmic Hammer" (宇宙之锤), miss its target, and meteorite fragments rain onto the moon, forcing the staff into an emergency evacuation. Duguyue (独孤月), a maintenance worker at the base, misses the evacuation notice because he is writing a love letter to Ma Lanxing (马蓝星), the mission commander he secretly admires, and is left behind while his 299 colleagues escape.⁶

Believing himself the last human in the universe after Earth is devastated, Duguyue abandons pretense and lives indulgently on the moon, unaware that survivors on Earth are watching everything he does through a global livestream. This watching-and-being-watched structure, compared by commentators to The Truman Show, supplies much of the film's comedy.⁷ His companion is a temperamental kangaroo known as "King Kong Roo" (金刚鼠), nicknamed Gangzi (刚子), brought to the base as a laboratory animal; their fights and eventual partnership form the film's central comic pairing. The kangaroo was played by Mahua FunAge actor Hao Han (郝瀚).⁶ The film ends with Duguyue giving his life to protect Earth, a sacrificial ending one reviewer noted as a recurrent theme in recent Chinese cinema.⁸

Production

Scale and effects. Zhang Chiyu took over the project in February 2018; by the premiere on 24 July 2022 he counted 1,618 days of work.⁹ Shooting lasted 142 days, wrapping in April 2021.¹⁰ The production used 15 soundstages totaling more than 40,000 square meters, laid 200 tons of sand and rock in a 6,000-square-meter stage to simulate lunar dust, and built the lunar base entirely as a practical set. About 95 percent of the shots involve visual effects, much of it by the Chinese company MORE VFX, which had worked on A Writer's Odyssey and The Wandering Earth; a single shot of the kangaroo took nearly a year of effects work.¹⁰^•⁹^•¹¹ Shen Teng performed extensive wire work in a spacesuit weighing some 40 jin (about 20 kg), and for one late scene he insisted on wearing the heavy suit on set to read lines opposite Ma Li even though the camera would not show him.¹⁰^•¹¹ From preparation through release the film took nearly five years, of which three went to effects work.¹²

Science advisors. Moon Man was the first Chinese science-fiction film to give science advisors and scientific support organizations their own screen in the end credits, following a 2020 document in which the National Film Administration and the China Association for Science and Technology called for establishing a science-advisor pool for science-fiction film production. Advisors included Lin Yuzhi (林育智), executive deputy director of the science-and-film integration committee of the China Science Writers Association, and the astronomer Li Ran (李然). The lunar rover was modeled on China's Yutu rover using real chassis and drive data, and advisors' suggestions were adopted, such as giving the rover an electric whine instead of an engine sound and shaping the debris ring around Earth more like Saturn's rings than an accretion disk.¹³^•¹⁴ Director Zhang Chiyu described his design philosophy as "science fiction is the shell": the futuristic bowl holds ordinary rice, and the yellow spacesuit was chosen so that a small warm figure would stand out against the gray lunar surface.¹⁵

Box office

The film opened strongly. By its second day it had earned 620 million yuan, with opening-day screenings of 222,000 setting a record for a domestic Chinese film; it passed 1.7 billion yuan within eight days and 2 billion within ten.¹⁶^•⁵^•¹⁷ It finished first at the summer-season box office, ahead of Lighting Up the Stars, and ranked second among all 2022 Chinese releases at over 3.1 billion yuan.¹⁸^•¹ IMDb records the worldwide gross as $460,237,662 and lists the film as the eighth-highest-grossing film of 2022.²

Reception and awards

Reception was divided between commercial success and mixed reviews. Douban users gave 6.9 out of 10 as of 5 August 2022, with more than half rating three stars or below; the common criticisms were sparse laughs and a "happy head, sad tail" structure.⁵ Western coverage was limited: the film received only a limited United States theatrical release beginning 2 September 2022, and Rotten Tomatoes recorded a 93 percent Tomatometer from just three critics, with reviewers calling it a broad comedy rather than an earnest disaster film.¹⁹ The Moria review judged its lunar effects work as rivaling Hollywood output while finding the kangaroo the least convincing effect.⁸

The film won Best Visual Effects at the 2022 Huading Awards and received nominations at the Hundred Flowers Awards (Best Actor for Shen Teng) and the 35th Golden Rooster Awards in technical categories including sound design and visual effects.²⁰^•²¹ In 2025 it won Outstanding Young Film Creation at the 20th Huabiao Awards.²²

Place in Chinese science-fiction comedy

Commentators placed Moon Man in a lineage of science-fiction comedy stretching back to early shorts such as The Motorist (1906) and China's Men's World (1987), and saw it, following Crazy Alien, as extending the possibility of a Chinese subgenre fusing Western-derived science fiction with local comedy traditions.⁶^•²³ Its commercial scale showed that the Mahua FunAge comedy formula could carry a visual-effects-driven production: the film cost roughly 2.5 times the budget of Hello Mr. Billionaire (2018) and grossed about 25 percent more worldwide, with the escalation driven mainly by the lunar setting's effects requirements.²⁰ Its credits-based science-advisor model also became a reference point as the state science-advisor program expanded.¹³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Science fiction and fantasy films (individual works) › Science fiction and fantasy films of the 2020s › Science fiction films of the 2020s › Titles M to X

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

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