General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Pegasus (飞驰人生) (2019 film)

Pegasus (飞驰人生) is a 2019 Chinese sports comedy film directed and written by Han Han, starring Shen Teng as Zhang Chi, a once-dominant rally driver who returns to racing after a five-year ban. It was released in mainland China on February 5, 2019, the first day of the Spring Festival holiday, ranked No. 3 at the box office during the Chinese New Year period, and finished with a mainland total of 1.728 billion yuan.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director / screenwriter	Han Han, his third feature film¹^•⁴
Lead cast	Shen Teng (Zhang Chi), Huang Jingyu (Lin Zhendong), Yin Zheng (Sun Yuqiang), Zhang Benyu (Ji Xing), Yin Fang (Hong Kuo)¹
Release	February 5, 2019 (mainland China), day one of the Spring Festival holiday¹
Runtime / genre	98 minutes; comedy, classified by The Numbers as a sports comedy with an original screenplay¹^•⁵
Box office	Mainland total 1.728 billion yuan; The Numbers records $256,070,000 in China and $256,392,122 worldwide²^•⁵
Reception	Douban rating around 7; the only 2019 Spring Festival release besides The Wandering Earth to score above 7 on Douban⁴^•⁶
Franchise	Followed by Pegasus 2 (2024, 3.361 billion yuan) and Pegasus 3 (2026)²

Spoilers

Plot

Zhang Chi (沈腾, Shen Teng) once dominated Chinese rally racing, holding five championships in the sport's top events, until a ban for unauthorized racing removed him from the sport for five years. By the time the ban ends he runs a fried-rice food stall, has no money, no car, and no team, and must even retake his driver's license. He reunites with his former co-driver Sun Yuqiang (尹正, Yin Zheng) and mechanic Ji Xing (张本煜, Zhang Benyu) to enter the Bayinbuluke Rally, scraping together sponsorship and a rebuilt car along the way. At the race he faces Lin Zhendong (黄景瑜, Huang Jingyu), a rising talent of the generation that matured during his ban.¹^•⁷

The film has no conventional villain. A Wenhui Bao review noted that the former runner-up who now heads the arbitration committee does not use his position to block Zhang Chi's return, and that Lin Zhendong at one point saves Zhang Chi from withdrawing, framing the rivalry around respect and fair competition.⁸

Production

Han Han's third feature followed two earlier films as director,⁹ and he came to the subject as a professional rally driver, saying that racing was his specialty and it would be embarrassing to shoot it badly.⁶^•¹⁰ The production began shooting in July 2018 in Xinjiang, after location scouting across much of China led the crew to an undeveloped course at Bayinbuluke.⁷^•¹¹ The shoot in Xinjiang lasted about two months, and the film reached theaters roughly seven months after the start of filming.¹⁰^•¹¹

Racing resources. The production used a dozen or more professional rally cars, with driving shots performed at real racing speeds; modifying the cars cost 30 to 40 million yuan, and Han Han said the production had gathered roughly half of Asia's parts suppliers and half of China's race technicians.¹²^•¹⁰ In total the film used 200 race cars, more than half of which needed modification, and the exterior design of Shen Teng's car went through more than 80 versions.⁷^•¹³ To bring cameras up to race speed, the crew modified drones and used racing FPV drones, and the two tracking cars together produced 1,000 horsepower, driven by champion-level drivers.⁷ Han Han took on the dangerous driving scenes himself, and he rented a plateau helicopter as an on-set medical rescue option, saying it would save 7 to 8 hours over an ambulance; he also donated six ambulances to parts of Xinjiang with poor medical provision.¹³^•¹²

Release and box office

The film opened in mainland China on February 5, 2019, and was released simultaneously in more than a dozen countries and regions including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands, covering nearly a hundred cities, the widest simultaneous overseas release of the 2019 Spring Festival slate.¹^•¹⁴ Maoyan Entertainment, the lead distributor, reported that Pegasus ranked No. 3 at the box office during the Chinese New Year period and that its lead-distributed films grossed RMB 4.1 billion in the first half of 2019.³

The film passed 1.1 billion yuan within a week of release, a personal box-office record for Han Han at the time.⁸^•¹⁰ Its final mainland total was 1.728 billion yuan.² The Numbers, which lists the China release date as February 8, 2019, records $256,070,000 for China and $256,392,122 worldwide, with additional totals in Australia ($226,325, from a February 1 wide release) and the United Kingdom ($95,797).⁵

Reception

On Douban the film settled around 7 out of 10, close to the scores of Han Han's first two features, and it was the only 2019 Spring Festival release besides The Wandering Earth to score above 7 on that platform, ahead of Stephen Chow's The New King of Comedy and Ning Hao's Crazy Alien.⁴^•⁶ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 75% Tomatometer from three critic reviews. Cath Clarke of The Guardian gave it 3 of 5 stars, calling it a likable, unchallenging Chinese sports movie; Panos Kotzathanasis of Asian Movie Pulse wrote that it is not a great film but is fast, good-looking, and funny; and Anthony Kao of Cinema Escapist wrote that while it does not excel at storytelling it has considerable genre appeal.¹⁵

Chinese critics were divided along a similar line. The Wenhui Bao review found that the first 70 of the film's 98 minutes assemble sketches of small-scale humiliation and faded glory without fully knitting them into story, while the racing sequences and the sports-spirit framing earned wider praise; Rao Shuguang, president of the China Film Critics Society, called it a rare family-friendly film.⁸ A Jiemian review judged the story split between a weak first half and a final thirty minutes it found excellent, with the rally sequences' visuals and sound design singled out.⁴ Coverage carried by People's Daily Online highlighted the Bayinbuluke rally climax, crediting Han Han's own rally experience with conveying the sport's danger and appeal to audiences unfamiliar with rally racing.⁶

Legacy

The film established a franchise. Pegasus 2 (2024) grossed 3.361 billion yuan, and Pegasus 3 (2026) passed 2.9 billion yuan during the 2026 Spring Festival period; the first two installments' combined 5 billion yuan was credited with building the audience trust that carried the third.² The same source noted that by the third film's release Shen Teng had become the first actor in Chinese film history whose total box office surpassed 40 billion yuan.²

References

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