China will overtake North America within three years to become the world’s largest film audience – which is great news for fans of Transformers and endless Terminator sequels.
It’s been 15 years since a China-set movie, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, broke the 100m USD mark at the North American box office. And yet Hollywood could be about to change forever due to cinema going habits in the world’s most populous nation.
Earlier this week the Hollywood Reporter predicted that the Chinese box office, already the second largest globally, will now overtake North America in 2018 – a full two years earlier than expected. Studios have moved mountains in recent years to cater to the ever-expanding passion for cinema in the region, setting up co-production deals on fantasy blockbusters such as Iron Man 3 and Transformers: Age of Extinction to bypass Beijing’s strict 34 foreign movies-per-year quota system for multiplexes. Chinese stars such as Fan Bingbing have been parachuted into roles in Hollywood movies in order to keep local audiences happy, then edited out again for western viewers (much to the chagrin of some fans). Dreamworks even launched a China-based studio in 2012, partnering with local companies, which will oversee the release of animated sequel Kung Fu Panda 3. Warner Bros recently announced plans to team with the state-backed China Media Capital firm to make Chinese-language films aimed at the domestic market.
It’s too soon to say if these partnerships will produce high-quality Chinese-language movies that could help diversify and improve the overall standards of world cinema. And there are definite negatives to the new dynamic.
Hollywood has already become reliant on Chinese cinemagoers to save its failing big-budget productions, and the bigger the local box office grows, the more studios will be forced to cater to local tastes and avoid upsetting the Chinese political establishment. According to the movies that have done well at the Chinese box office over the past few years, this means special-effects-heavy science fiction and fantasy productions with little or no racy content or politically motivated architecture which might upset the famously prudish state censors.
