China has a message for Hollywood: The door to the fastest-growing film market is not wide open.
Chinese film regulators say they are cracking down on China-U.S. co-productions as several upcoming films have exploited existing co-production rules to gain easy entry into the Chinese film market, according to a report from the state-owned China Daily.
Some film companies are doing the absolute minimum, such as adding a Chinese actor to a film in a supporting role, to slide their movies under a classification that was meant to benefit both markets, the report cited the deputy head of China’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, Zhang Pimin, as saying.
“[They’ve created] a complete American story with a small Chinese element and a Chinese actor, and they call it a co-production,” Mr. Zhang was quoted in the report as saying.
The China Daily report and a separate story in the state-owned People’s Daily (in Chinese) say the criticism is directed at a string of co-productions, including time-travel action film “Looper” and big budget epic “Cloud Atlas,” that are slated to hit Chinese screens.
“Looper,” set for release in China in late September, stars Hollywood actor Bruce Willis and was produced by U.S. company Endgame Entertainment and Chinese partner DMG Entertainment. The film features one Chinese actress, Xu Qing, and several scenes shot in Shanghai. Those scenes, however, will only make it into the Chinese versions of the film, according to a report from the Los Angeles Times, which said the scenes didn’t test well with U.S. viewers and so were cut from the Western release.
Warner Bros. Pictures’ “Cloud Atlas,” based on the book by David Mitchell, boasts a predominantly Western cast, including heavy hitters like Tom Hanks and Susan Sarandon, but also features Chinese actress Zhou Xun in her first role in a major film outside Asia. It was partially funded by Beijing company Dreams of Dragon Pictures Co.
Spokesmen for “Looper” and “Cloud Atlas” could not be reached Monday.
Co-productions require a foreign film company and a Chinese film company to share copyright, risks and profits in creating a story that involves China in the plot. For the past several years, co-production system has functioned as a gateway for foreign film makers to get their movies into China’s tightly closed off film market, which limits the number of foreign films the country can show at its theaters each year. Chinese leaders had hoped that, by pairing with big budget Hollywood directors, Chinese film companies would learn to duplicate the success of movies typically filmed beyond China’s borders and create big hits capable of propelling Chinese culture overseas.
Yet co-productions haven’t exactly taken off so far. The 2008 co-production “Red Cliff,” an epic based on the classic Chinese novel “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” and directed by Hollywood-tested Taiwanese director Ang Lee, saw box office sales of $92 million in China and $627,000 in the U.S. Box office sales for the 2010 release of “Karate Kid,” a co-production featuring martial arts star Jackie Chan and the son of superstar actor Will Smith, hit $176.6 million in the U.S. but only $7.9 million in China.
Film companies have been looking for the winning recipe to reach both markets. According to the China Daily report, China’s regulators think they’ve just resorted to falling back on Hollywood storylines and have conveniently left out the Chinese part of the deal, which would give them a soft power boost.
Industry insiders say upcoming co-productions are being referred to as tiehe, a phrase that literally means “stick-on,” implying that they are attempting to glom onto China’s booming film market, where box office ticket revenue last year reached $2.1 billion, up 29% from 2010.
China’s regulators have been particularly weary of Hollywood recently, noting that the country’s box-office revenue in the first half of this year surged 42% from a year earlier to 8.07 billion yuan ($1.28 billion) on the strength of foreign flicks.
The government-controlled China Film Group, which distributes most films in the country, has been trying to thwart foreign domination and imposed a Hollywood hiatus this summer, delaying the release of several U.S. blockbusters in order to protect domestic films.
China Film Group also arranged the release dates of several 3-D Hollywood movies so that they would be pitted against one another, potentially taking in fewer tickets at the box office. Warner Bros.’ latest Batman chapter, “The Dark Knight Rises,” and Sony Pictures’ “The Amazing Spider-Man” both opened Aug. 30 in China, a month after the U.S. premiere. “Ice Age: Continental Drift,” from 20th Century Fox, and Universal Pictures’ “The Lorax” both premiered on July 27 on Chinese screens.