As with every other industry, it seems China is set to become the world leader in Film. The business section of The Guardian ran an interesting article yesterday about Dennis Wang Zhongjun, the founder of Huayi Brother – the production company behind such movies as The Forbidden Kingdom and Kung Fu Hustle – which is about to undergo an initial public offering. You can read the full article here, but essentially Wang is arguing that despite two consecutive record-breaking summers in the US, the cinema-going audience in the west is already fully developed, with every film-related business fighting for a piece of the pie. Whereas in China, the market is only just starting to grow:
“About 100 million people go to cinemas, though we have 1.3 billion people,” Wang said. “The number could be 300 million or even 500 million in the coming five years.”
China’s domestic box office in 2007 was 3.3 billion yuan, as opposed to 2.6 billion in 2006 and 2 billion in 2005. That’s about a 30% increase each year. 3.3 billion yuan is only $500 million, which is small when compared to the US’s $10 billion domestic, but if this growth trend continues, as Wang predicts, then western companies would do well to make more movies that also appeal to the Chinese terretory. Dreamworks’ recent Kung Fu Panda is a good example. Another wise move would be more co-productions along the lines of Casey Silver Productions, Relativity Media and Huayi Brother’s The Forbidden Kingdom.
If you want my advice, buy shares in Huayi Brother now.*
*The value of your investment may go down as well as up. Past performance is not a guarantee of future success.
source – The Guardian
3 Comments
Works for me. More chinese movies imported into the U.S. More of a chance for me to have easier access to see Stephen Chow’s upcoming space movie.
Every few years we hear the same fear-mongering from people who I guess can’t get through their day without pissing their pants over SOMETHING!
This kind of article sounds like someone who gets their panties in a bunch because they look at the supremacy of the US movie industry and they think it’s not fair, so they start imagining a dream world where the US suddenly needs to start catering to the rest of the world “if they want to stay Number One!”
When will these fools learn that “population means NOTHING to Us businesses. It’s disposable income per capita that does! China has some mega0rich folks at the top, a few moderately prosperous people in the middle (though closer to the top) and the rest are largely indigent. That’s no “market.”
America doesn’t need to “beware China” because China doesn’t have the two things the US has used to dominate the film industry: innovation and superior storytelling.
And before some dumbass who doesn’t like my reply wastes time objecting, please go back and re-read what I wrote. I didn’t say superior STORIES, I said superior storyTELLING!
The British may write better stories, the Chinese may excel at emotion, but the US dominates where it truly counts: pacing, structure and production values. In other words, storytelling. When you have something to say and a superior way of saying it the best the rest of the world can do is nip at your heels.
The Chinese people are NOT an entertainment-centric culture like the US. This story sounds like a Chinese distributor (who most likely gave the Guardian some payola if they’d treat his sale pitch as “news worthy”) trying to magnify his importance.
I guess the columnist is too young to know this, but during the fifties and sixties when the European filmakers were setting the world on fire (namely Truffaut, Bergman and Fellini) America was told it better get ready for the Europeans to take over cinema. European audiences were rich, hungry for movies catered to them, and were tired of the US acting like America was the end-all-and-be-all. Or so we were told!
Well the US studios didn’t change a damn thing and today the Europeans buy more US-centered movies than ever before.
There will be some “partnerships” with China to be sure, but as anyone who knows jack about Hollywood knows, when the guys from Burbank come calling it’s an acquisition play. I guess Dreamworks announcing a “partnership” with India has gotten some people excited. To them it’s a tacit admission by the US that it’s losing it’s dominance. But the Dreamworks deal is hardly a recognition of Asia’s “importance,” which only exists in the minds of naive columnists. Say, remind me how much money has Dreamworks LOST again?
The Europeans and Japanese found out the hard way why the Us dominates the film industry.
Looks like it’s China’s turn.
You say, JaySmack, that: ” the US studios didn’t change a damn thing”. Not so my friend: the 70s saw the Hollywood co-opt arthouse influence and foreign standards whilst also reforming from within as the Hays code and studio system collapsed. The blockbuster boom took American film-proiduction into the New Hollywood in the late 1970s which has dominated film production since because it revitalised and reassured Hollywood production as the dominant format.
From the other side of things, American cultural imperialism and globalisation has served Hollywood well, whereas efforts from outside have generally struggled to make the required cultural assimilation and accesibility (beyond niche audiences and cineastes). The ‘Tiger Economies’; will take off though and enable more of the Chinese population, as one specific case study here, access and adequate funds to wath movies. It’s up to American film-producers to target these new markets – on the other side it’s going to take a lot of money, cultural and commerical nouse and creativity from non-Hollywood sources to crack the Beverly Hills behemoth.