Mahjong is everywhere right now. There were 179% more mahjong events in the US in 2024 than in 2023, according to Eventbrite tracking cited in a September AP feature. NPR ran a January piece on the game’s community-building boom and updated it in March. Longreads published an essay on the mahjong appropriation debate last week. Hallmark Channel released a romance called All’s Fair in Love & Mahjong on May 9 that immediately drew criticism for how it handled the game’s Chinese cultural roots. San Francisco club nights, Brooklyn pop-ups, designer tile sets, instructor-certification courses, a multi-billion-dollar projected market. The game is now a thing.
Which means a lot of people are about to want to learn what mahjong actually is. And if you, like me, have ever tried to explain a sport or a game by pointing at a movie that captures it (the way you might explain football with Any Given Sunday or Remember the Titans or Friday Night Lights), you’re going to discover something odd. Mahjong’s footprint in English-language film comes down to two iconic scenes, a Hallmark TV movie that just landed, and a Hong Kong gambling-movie tradition most Americans haven’t encountered. That’s the canon. The most-played four-player tile game in the world has a thinner movie shelf than chess or poker.
First, the fast version of what mahjong actually is, because the game most Americans have heard of and the game most of the world plays aren’t quite the same thing. Mahjong is a Chinese tile game from the mid-1800s, played by four people who draw and discard tiles to build a winning hand, rummy-style, while reading what everyone else picks up and throws away. That’s the whole engine: build your hand, watch the table, one winner per round. The wrinkle is that there isn’t one mahjong. There’s Cantonese, Hong Kong, Japanese riichi, and the American version, codified by the National Mah Jongg League in the late 1930s and historically tied to Jewish-American social play. That’s the version powering a lot of the current US boom, now colliding with younger Asian-American players reclaiming the original Chinese form and a wave of newcomers who just want a good in-person game that isn’t on a phone. A two-century-old game with a genuine cultural tug-of-war baked into it. That should be catnip for filmmakers.
It mostly hasn’t been. The single most important film about mahjong in English-language cinema is The Joy Luck Club. Wayne Wang’s 1993 adaptation of Amy Tan’s novel uses the game as its narrative frame. The mothers of the title club meet weekly to play mahjong, eat food, swap stories about their daughters, and process trauma from before, during, and after emigration from China. The structure of the novel mirrors the four-seat geometry of a mahjong game, with four mother-daughter pairs delivering interlocking vignettes. June (Ming-Na Wen) is called to take her late mother’s seat at the table at the film’s start, and the story closes by sending her to China to meet the daughters her mother had been forced to leave behind. The mahjong table is the structuring conceit of the entire film.
The other essential scene is the climactic confrontation in Crazy Rich Asians (2018). Rachel (Constance Wu) asks Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh) to meet her at a mahjong parlor. They play. They talk about Nick, about family, about money, about sacrifice. Rachel, knowing she has the winning tile, deliberately discards it so Eleanor can win, then walks away. The scene is not in the Kevin Kwan novel. Director Jon M. Chu added it, and it’s been widely written about as a masterclass in using a game to externalize a power dynamic the dialogue can’t quite say out loud. CBS, Vox, and Vice all ran explainers for non-mahjong audiences in the weeks after the film opened. The scene single-handedly did more to bring mahjong into Western mainstream pop culture than any cinematic moment since Joy Luck Club, twenty-five years earlier.
That gap, twenty-five years between meaningful mahjong scenes in major Hollywood movies, is the story. Pick any year between 1970 and 2025 and you can find at least one notable football film. Poker has a continuous run from The Cincinnati Kid (1965) through Rounders (1998) to Molly’s Game (2017). Mahjong didn’t get that. The American film industry mostly skipped it.
What did get made is a parallel Hong Kong tradition that most American viewers haven’t encountered. Wong Jing’s Kung Fu Mahjong (2005), an action-comedy combining mahjong with Stephen Chow-style martial arts, was a hit in Hong Kong (opening at $337,363 in its first week per local box office reporting) and got two sequels in the same calendar year. Wong’s earlier God of Gamblers franchise featured mahjong alongside other betting games as part of a long-running Cantonese-language genre. These are real, watchable, often very funny movies. But they live inside a film tradition that’s culturally specific in ways that translate poorly to American multiplex viewers, and most have never had a wide US theatrical release.
The Criterion Channel has Edward Yang’s Mahjong (1996), which uses the title and the imagery (the four-seat dynamic, the schemes, the tile-shuffling clatter) as a metaphor for capitalist Taipei in the late 1990s economic boom. The film is essentially a crime tragicomedy in which the mahjong of the title is a structural conceit rather than a depicted gameplay focus. If you came to Mahjong to learn mahjong, you’d leave learning about Taiwanese real-estate fraud. It’s a great film. It’s not a great teaching tool.
Which brings us to Hallmark, which decided in 2026 that mahjong was big enough to anchor a romance. All’s Fair in Love & Mahjong premiered May 9 on Hallmark Channel, starring Fiona Gubelmann and Paul Campbell, directed by Jessica Harmon. It drew immediate criticism for what some saw as a disregard for the game’s Chinese cultural elements, with a mostly non-Asian cast and a school-nurse-finds-community-through-tile-game framing that didn’t sit right with parts of the Asian-American community. The movie itself is a Hallmark movie. It does what Hallmark movies do. But it’s notable as the first significant English-language film built around mahjong since the Crazy Rich Asians scene became a meme, and the fact that it landed as a flashpoint rather than a celebration says a lot about where the conversation is.
What the canon shows, taken together, is that mahjong on screen is almost always doing something other than mahjong. Joy Luck Club uses it as a structuring device for generational storytelling. Crazy Rich Asians uses it as a one-scene metaphor for power and sacrifice. Yang’s Mahjong uses it as a metaphor for the rigged game of modern capitalism. Wong Jing’s films use it as a vehicle for slapstick gambling antics. Hallmark uses it as a community-building hook for a romance. None of these is really a movie that teaches you what mahjong feels like to play. There’s no Searching for Bobby Fischer of mahjong, no Rounders, no Queen’s Gambit equivalent that respects the game enough to film it like a real activity with stakes, rhythm, and the slow accumulation of expertise.
That gap is the opening. A game with a 200-year history, hundreds of millions of players globally, a real cultural moment in the US that’s only growing, and almost no English-language films that center the game on its own terms. Someone is going to make that movie. The first person who does, and does it well, is going to define mahjong cinema for a generation. Whether it turns out to be a prestige drama, a Hong Kong-style genre film with American sensibilities, or another Hallmark special is up to whoever picks it up first. The trend is real and the table is set. Your move.
