MCLC: films with universal appeal

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: films with universal appeal
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (11/6/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/business/media/china-wants-its-movies-to-
be-big-in-the-us-too.html

China Wants Its Movies to Be Big in the U.S., Too
By MICHAEL CIEPLY

LOS ANGELES — Investment capital? They’re loaded.

Film studios? They are promising to build the world’s fanciest.

As for movie stars, few are more dazzling than Li Bingbing, who was an
honored guest here on Tuesday at the annual U.S.-China Film Summit.

But China’s ambitious new film entrepreneurs, dozens of whom gathered in
the Los Angeles area this week for the summit meeting, the American Film
Market and other events, are still searching for something that has
largely eluded them: a homemade global hit.

“We have 5,000 years of history. We have lots of stories,” said Yang
Buting, the chairman of the China Film Distribution and Exhibition
Association, who spoke on a panel at the gathering on Tuesday.

But, Mr. Yang added, “to create movies that are universally appealing,
that is an issue for us.”

China’s domestic box office is now the world’s second-largest, behind the
United States, with an expected $3.5 billion in sales this year. That
growing market has been pursued aggressively, and with considerable
success, by Hollywood, whose studios — to capture a mainland audience for
films like “Iron Man 3” or “Pacific Rim”— have worked with Chinese
partners, added Chinese subplots and bent over backward to satisfy China’s
watchful censors.

But a perhaps tougher struggle confronts Chinese film executives who dream
of making movies that will be seen not just at home, but also by a
measurable number of viewers in the United States and elsewhere.

“We lack international experience, in general,” said Yu Dong, the chief
executive of China’s Bona Film Group, which is about 20 percent owned by
21st Century Fox.

Mr. Yu, who spoke over coffee at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills this
week, referred to a growing group of film companies that are smaller than
the giant state-owned China Film Group, but share ambitions to play on the
world stage.

“Every producer I’ve met has told me they want to reach the world
audience,” said Rob Cain, a film consultant who is working with Chinese
companies that hope to crack the global market, despite robust growth at
home.

At home, ticket sales have been rising about 35 percent annually. And they
show no sign of letting up, as the number of movie screens, which has been
rising at a similar rate and promises to reach about 18,000 this year,
continues its expansion into smaller markets. Also, China’s domestic box
office has recently tilted toward Chinese films rather than foreign
imports.

But the urge to export movies, Mr. Cain said, has much to do with the
Chinese government’s promotion of what is often called “soft power”— the
ability to project influence through nonmilitary means, including, of
course, the film business.

“If you’re trying to score points with the Communist Party and the central
government, you want to support their soft-power agenda, to help spread
the culture,” he said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

Wang Jianlin, chairman of the Dalian Wanda Group, staged a remarkable show
of such strength in September, when he hosted Nicole Kidman, Leonardo
DiCaprio, Harvey Weinstein and other Hollywood luminaries at his company’s
celebration of a planned studio and entertainment complex in the beach
city of Qingdao.

Styled the “Qingdao Oriental Movie Metropolis,” Wanda’s proposed
development is projected to cost as much as $8.2 billion, and would match
or surpass the capacity of studios in the United States.

But nothing would speak louder than a globe-spanning hit.

In the United States, the best-selling Chinese-language film to date
remains “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” which had about $128 million in
North American ticket sales after its release by Sony Pictures Classics in
2000. Since then, some international blockbusters have had Chinese
backers, co-stars and settings; but they mostly have been Hollywood
products with a Chinese veneer.

In a next wave, China’s emerging film companies are proposing to reverse
the equation, by finding Chinese stories with global appeal and just
enough American content or backing to attract viewers who have grown
comfortable with Hollywood-style movies.

As Mr. Yu puts it, any Chinese film with international ambitions must be
rooted what he called “an American way of looking at China.”

His own company’s best bet, Mr. Yu said, is a planned action thriller,
called “Moscow Mission,” about six Chinese police officers who tackle
crime on the Beijing-to-Moscow train. “There will be a lot of English
dialogue, but with a Chinese story,” he said of the film, which is still
in the script stage.

Still, the difficulty of marketing such hybrids was underscored last
weekend by the modest performance of “Man of Tai Chi,” a Chinese-American
co-production that starred Keanu Reeves.

The film, which has dialogue in English, Mandarin and Cantonese, sold few
tickets when it was released on a handful of screens in the United States
by Radius-TWC. It was nonetheless featured as a model Chinese-American
co-production in a Monday night presentation at Universal Studios by
Chinese officials and filmmakers, as well as Christopher J. Dodd, the
chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America.

An enduring challenge for Chinese filmmakers who want to go global is
their own government’s insistence on tight control of film content through
a still-rigorous censorship apparatus.

“We want to see positive Chinese images,” Zhang Xun, president of the
China Film Co-Production Corporation, told those assembled at the film
conference on Tuesday. To underscore her point, Ms. Zhang ticked off “hot
spots” to be avoided, including excessive violence and horror, scenes that
might offend third countries and potentially volatile religious references.

Some executives have concluded that the fantasy or historical adventure
genres, which largely sidestep those concerns, are likely to spawn the
next real Chinese global blockbuster.

Zhang Zhao, the chief executive of Le Vision Pictures, for instance, said
in a Tuesday interview that his company was developing what it hoped would
be a universal hit, based on the classic Chinese novel “Water Margin,”
about outlaws and spirits during the Song Dynasty, a thousand years ago.

Mr. Zhang said he believed the global breakthrough for China would come
“very soon,” though, earlier in the day, he sounded a cautious note on the
subject.

“I don’t think Chinese films can travel the world all that well,” he
warned peers during a panel discussion.

But, Mr. Yu, of the Bona Film Group, contended that to conquer the movie
universe, it is really only necessary to prevail in two places, the United
States and China.

“If we are able to play a part in these two markets, we pretty much
control a majority of the world,” he said.