CHINA: Hollywood eyes booming film industry
Updated
The film business, like everything else in China is booming. The Chinese domestic box office grew 26 per cent last year and local films were among the biggest earners of 2007. You could say the potentially huge market has Hollywood lusting after the Chinese market, while Chinese authorities maintain their cautious approach.
Presenter: Bill Bainbridge
Speakers: Patrick Frater, Variety's Asia Editor; Dr Shuyu Kong Lecturer in Chinese Studies, The University of Sydney.
BAINBRIDGE: China is rapidly falling in love with a night at the movies. Last year receipts hit $455 million.
Patrick Frater is Asia Editor for film industry trade paper Variety. He says the rapid growth of box office receipts is not unexpected but, in international terms, the market is still small.
FRATER: We've seen the Chinese box office grow by that kind of figure for the last two to three years, and what should be remembered is that it's growing from an extremely low base given the population. I remember going into a presentation a couple of years back by a Hong Kong exhibition company which maps out the various sizes of the markets throughout Asia, and four years ago the mainland Chinese market in cash terms was exactly the same size as the Hong Kong market.
BAINBRIDGE: The Hollywood action blockbuster "Transformers" took in more than $38 million to top last year's box office receipts. But following close behind were two Chinese films: the Jet Li, Andy Lau big-budget historical epic "The Warlords" and The Assembly, a war drama likened to Saving Private Ryan. They beat big US franchise films including the latest Spiderman, Harry Potter and James Bond.
But US distributors complain that China is not a level playing field with a range of restrictions that keep Hollywood product out of the cinemas.
FRATER: Hats off to the ones that are succeeding because they're doing very well, but they too are aided by technical factors like black-out periods when the Chinese authorities actually prevent foreign language films being released in China. There are literally two, three or four times a year when foreign films are not allowed to go into the cinemas.
BAINBRIDGE: And while the domestic audience is growing so is the international audience, helped along by films like Lust, Caution from Hollywood heavyweight director Ang Lee.
Dr Shuyu Kong is Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney. She says China is looking to the growth of the South Korean industry as a model to develop a future export industry and as a way of projecting "soft power" to the region and the world.
KONG: We can see the commercialisation that's going on in the Chinese film industry in terms of production and distribution activation. But of course it doesn't still … they still control what's going on, but obviously they are more and more relaxed and even the government, both the government and the private production companies they try to say develop this national film industry.
BAINBRIDGE: Dr Kong says China wants to go beyond "Made in China" to embrace the notion of "Created in China". To that end they have freed up small producers to create films outside the state system. That's led to a record 402 films being produced in China last year.
But Patrick Frater warns that volume and quality are not the same thing. He says the vast majority of films produced in China are unwatchable and never make it to the cinema. And he says censorship is restricting the range of films available.
FRATER: The censorship issues in China are a restriction clearly for Chinese films as well as the foreign films, and my big worry about the Chinese film industry is that there's not enough diversity within it. And censorship and regulatory process seems to be there to protect the Chinese public from anything that could be seen as inflammatory, whether that's political, sexual, religious, whatever, and unfortunately that does seem to limit the number of genres that people are making. I will worry that audiences will become very bored if all they ever see is sword and sandals or variations on martial arts films. You need to have more diversity.
