FILMS HAVE HUGE MARKET AT HOME, BUT MAKE LITTLE IMPACT ABROAD

Long way to go in production management, global influence or box office take

With first-half box office takings up by nearly 18 percent year-on-year, China’s film industry has cemented its place among the world’s leaders.

But its return to the double-digit growth that marked much of the past decade — apart from a lull between mid-2016 and mid-2017 — masks challenges to increasing its global impact, industry insiders say.

Wolf Warrior 2, the military action blockbuster that raked in 5.68 billion yuan ($867 million) domestically last year to become China’s all-time box office champion, did not make much of an impact overseas. Even though it was the world’s sixth-highest-grossing film in 2017, 99.66 percent of its ticket sales came from the Chinese market.

Chinese filmmakers say the country’s film industry needs to embrace “industrialization” — a Hollywoodstyle production line with sufficient talent throughout the process, from script writing to production management and postproduction processing — to boost its performance overseas.

China is now the world’s second-largest film market and is closing the gap on the front-runner, North America, according to the 2018 Research Report on the Chinese Film Industry released by China Film Association on June 19.

Its total ticket revenue in the first half of the year was 32 billion yuan, up by 18 percent from 27.2 billion yuan last year, according to the China Film Administration, the country’s top movie regulator.

According to the administration, China had more than 55,000 screens — 88 percent of them able to show 3D films — in about 10,000 cinemas in urban areas by the end of May, the most in the world.

Last year, the global box office take increased by 3 percent year-on-year to $39.9 billion, with 28 percent ($11.1 billion) generated in North America and 21 percent ($8.53 billion) in China. However, takings were down by 2.3 percent in North America and up by 13.45 percent in China.

“China has become an engine to boost the global film industry,” said Liu Jia, a guest professor with the Beijing Film Academy who led the writing of the China Film Association report.

The country’s box office even beat North America’s for the first time in the first quarter of this year, setting a global record for a single country in one quarter in the process, said Zhang Hong, the association’s vice-chairman. China raked in more than 20 billion yuan ($3.08 billion) compared with North America’s $2.89 billion.

“China’s movie industry is entering a golden era,” he said. “A number of new stars are emerging, and an industrialized system of filmmaking is taking shape.”

But while China has become a market that overseas filmmakers cannot ignore, and its domestic film industry has expanded rapidly, it still has a way to go to catch up with its most powerful rival: Hollywood.

Homegrown rise

When veteran filmmaker Huang Jianxin, known for producing the blockbusters Operation Mekong and The Founding of An Army, began his movie career in the early 1990s, the country had only eight film studios, all State-owned.

With limited output and comparatively low budgets, most of the movies shown in cinemas were less appealing than video tapes or disks of Hong Kong films, the popular entertainment choice in the Chinese mainland at the time.

“I still remember the first time I watched Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master,” Huang said, referring to a 1978 action comedy about a hooligan who becomes a martial arts hero. He said the movie was eyeopening and left him stunned.

Coinciding with the heyday of Hong Kong cinema, Chan’s action movies, Stephen Chow’s comedies and gangster films starring iconic stars such as Chow Yun-fat, Andy Lau and Tony Leung, left their mark on a generation of Chinese filmgoers.

An even bigger challenge to domestic filmmakers came in 1994, when China imported its first foreign film under a revenuesharing quota system. It was The Fugitive, starring Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones.

The quota for imports of foreign blockbusters — with 25 percent of box office takings going to foreign production companies — has risen from 10 in the 1990s to 34 since 2012, ushering in a new era for the Chinese film business.

“James Cameron’s Avatar was a game-changer,” said Jiang Yong, an industry analyst. “It made domestic audiences realize that if you want to see special effectsstudded spectacles, you have to purchase tickets for the big screen. It’s a visual feast that you cannot enjoy anywhere else except in cinemas.”

Sparking nationwide fervor, Avatar set a box office record, earning 1.34 billion yuan in 2010, more than twice the sum raked in by the previous record holder, Roland Emmerich’s sci-fi epic 2012.

It also set off a construction spree to cope with increased demand. When Avatar was released, Chinese filmgoers lined up outside cinemas for hours to buy tickets and even resorted to paying scalpers inflated prices.

Seeing the huge market potential, the number of Chinese cinemas with IMAX screens has expanded from just 11 in 2010 to more than 500. DMAX, a rival Chinese-developed giant screen technology available since 2012, has been installed in nearly 300 theaters.

Amid the unprecedented expansion, Chinese filmmakers figured out a way to compete with Hollywood blockbusters.

Xu Zheng’s directorial debut Lost in Thailand, about an unlikely duo’s adventure in the titular country, became the first homegrown film to surpass the watershed 1 billion yuan mark after its release in December 2012, sparking a boom in homemade comedies.

“Comedy usually features humorous dialogue, which can only be understood by and amuse locals,” Jiang said.

“It’s a hard genre for foreign films to succeed in.”

Half of the 10 highest-grossing films in China have been Chineselanguage comedies, led by Detective Chinatown 2, starring Wang Baoqiang, according to the box office tracking app Maoyan.

But that trend has changed since last year, with militarythemed blockbusters Wolf Warrior 2 and Operation Red Sea raking in 5.68 billion yuan and 3.65 billion yuan respectively to take the top two spots on the all-time Chinese box office chart.

Industry researchers say they resonate with patriotic Chinese audiences and show that a homegrown film industry capable of competing with Hollywood blockbusters is taking shape.

“Wolf Warrior 2 builds the protagonist as a Chinese superhero, something rarely seen in previous titles,” Liu said.

“It appears fresh and makes audiences feel excited.”

Sci-fi challenge

Although Chinese filmmakers have seen budgets and revenue rise rapidly in recent years, most say the impact of the domestic film industry has yet to match its market size.

China produced nearly 1,000 movies last year, including 798 dramas, 32 animated films and 44 documentaries. Chinese people went to cinemas 1.62 billion times in 2017, an 18 percent increase on 2016.

But a shortage of postproduction talent, especially in the visual effects field, has hindered Chinese filmmakers and made sci-fi movies one of the most difficult categories in which to generate made-in-China hits.

Wang Donghui, a British-educated producer, was one of the first Chinese filmmakers to sense the shortcomings. He began to produce The Secret of Immortal Code — a sci-fi horror about a voyage to find medicine near the North Pole — in 2014, when few local production companies financed sci-fi titles.

“We needed to build a futuristic ship for shooting a lot of indoor sequences,” Wang said. “But it was very difficult to find qualified manufacturers, as no one has seen or made such a vehicle before.”

In the end, he had to recruit some designers from the United States and Britain.

Director Guo Fan, now making the sci-fi film The Wandering Earth, adapted from Hugo Awardwinning writer Liu Cixin’s namesake novel, said Hollywood’s mature system is hard to localize in China due to cultural differences.

“Chinese prefer to do things in a less-scheduled yet more flexible way,” making it difficult to replicate Hollywood’s highly industrialized system, Guo said.

Liu Yiguang, director of research and development at the Administration of Digital Film, said the problem can partly be attributed to film industry growth lagging at least a decade behind that of other industrial sectors after the Chinese economy took off in the 1990s.

“Top talent rarely chose to work in the film industry then,” he said. “When I visited a big studio a few years ago, I found most employees in the postproduction department working on visual effects were on low pay, around 3,000 yuan a month.”

Besides, he said, while most Chinese film schools ran acting and directing programs, their training of behind-the-scenes talent — a critical element for improving the quality of Chinese movies — was limited.

Going abroad

Even though 95 films, including imports, earned more than 100 million yuan at the box office in China last year, some ambitious Chinese filmmakers want to expand into a bigger market.

Last year, Chinese films brought in 4.2 billion yuan overseas, less than 7 percent of their domestic receipts.

Miao Xiaotian, general manager of the China Film Co-Production Group, said international coproductions can be a shortcut to help Chinese tales enter overseas markets.

He said China, which has signed film coproduction agreements with more than 20 countries, including India and Russia, screened more than 60 coproductions last year, less than 10 percent of the total output.

“In Europe, around 20 percent of films are coproduced. It indicates China has plenty of room to raise international cooperation,” Miao said, adding that Chinese filmmakers can also learn storytelling and digital technology skills from foreign collaborators.

Lu Chuan, the renowned director of Disneynature’s documentary Born in China, said it is a good time to venture abroad.

“Foreign audiences are curious about China and what Chinese people are thinking,” he said. “We should convey more information than pandas and kung fu.”

But for some critics, the core challenge of filmmaking lies in a decades-old formula: To tell an appealing story that can travel beyond borders.

“The most-shared criteria to judge a movie is if it tells a good story,” said Zuo Heng, a researcher at the China Film Archive.

“Aside from the technology, films that can spark in-depth thoughts about humanity have the most enduring charm.”

He urged China’s film regulators to allow more space for creativity, and for investors to give more respect to directors’ artistic visions.

“Only when China has its own world-renowned masters, like Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa, will the moment come when it can authentically play a lead role in global cinema,” Zuo said.