[LINK] "China’s Film Industry Is Gaining on Hollywood"

[rfmcdonald]

Bilge Ebiri's Bloomberg Businessweek article testifies to the potential for Chinese soft power to grow markedly.

Since mid-July, the biggest movie outside the U.S. hasn’t featured a Marvel superhero or dinosaurs from a revamped franchise or even an American action star. It hasn’t been an American film at all, but a Chinese animation/live-action fantasy, Monster Hunt, about a baby monster smuggled through ancient China. Directed by Raman Hui, a director of DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek the Third, Monster Hunt opened in China on July 16 and immediately broke records: Its Saturday, July 18, tally of $29.8 million stands as the biggest single-day gross for a Chinese film and tops the opening day take of many Western hits, including 2014’s Transformers: Age of Extinction, which grossed $27 million on its first day. Ticket sales have reached $211 million, making Monster Hunt the highest-grossing Chinese movie ever and, with a $40 million budget, profitable, too.

Monster Hunt, produced by Hong Kong studio Edko Films, isn’t the only domestic hit lighting up Chinese box offices. Superhero parody Pancake Man, directed by and starring popular online comedian Da Peng, has brought in $132 million since opening on July 17—its budget was $13 million. The movie was released by privately owned Wanda Media, the film and TV production arm of Wanda Group, one of the country’s biggest conglomerates. The two movies’ success reflects both the growth of Chinese audiences and the maturing of the nation’s film industry. On July 18 the Chinese box office hit $70.2 million in one day, almost all from local films. “You’re seeing Chinese filmmakers getting better at their craft,” says Rance Pow, head of the film industry consulting firm Artisan Gateway.

With its mix of government-controlled enterprises and independent companies, the Chinese system looks very little like Hollywood. Longtime Hong Kong producers such as Edko regularly collaborate and compete with mainland giants Wanda, Huayi Brothers Media, and Bona Film Group, as well as the powerful state-owned entities such as China Film Group, which controls the importing and distribution of foreign films and produces its own. Internet companies Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and others are getting in on the action as producers and distributors.

All this investment and integration has led to improved scripts and greater diversity in an industry known for martial arts films and period spectacles. Today, feel-good fantasies such as Monster Hunt, which one Hollywood Reporter critic dubbed “a sentimental dollop of easily digestible moral storytelling,” succeed alongside comedies like Pancake Man, with Jean-Claude Van Damme as a villain. “There’s a growing commercial value and slickness to the Chinese films,” Pow says.