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Jan 6, 2012
Mainland cinema box-office revenue is expected to have surged nearly 30 per cent to 13 billion yuan (HK$16 billion) last year, with China becoming the third-largest film market in the world.
But the top 10 list was still dominated by Hollywood blockbusters, a consultancy says.
The Chinese film market is likely to now only trail the US and Japan, according to statistics from EntGroup, a Beijing-based research firm that specialises in the entertainment industry. The Chinese market ranked sixth with 10.17 billion yuan in revenue in 2010, up 65 per cent on 2009.
The top two films last year were Hollywood blockbusters Transformers 3, which raked in 1.1 billion yuan, and Kung Fu Panda 2 (617 million yuan), followed by Zhang Yimou's The Flowers of War, the first Chinese film to feature an A-list Hollywood star, Christian Bale, which took 488 million yuan, EntGroup said.
Other Hollywood films in the top 10 were Pirates of the Caribbean 4, Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows 2, Smurfs and Fast and Furious 5. They were joined by Hong Kong director Tsui Hark's The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate (433 million yuan), Han Sanping and Huang Jianxin's Beginning of the Great Revival (412 million yuan) and Teng Huatao's Love is not Blind (352 million yuan).
Two domestic movies, Aftershock and Let the Bullets Fly, ranked second and third in 2010, behind the Hollywood smash hit Avatar.
Analysts said the mainland film market was seeing the fastest growth in the world, backed by more investment and a growing number of screens, with about 3,000 added last year, taking the total to more than 9,000. However, the growth was largely driven by Hollywood blockbusters despite government efforts to promote local productions.
Professor Zhu Dake, of Shanghai's Tongji University, said the import quota for Hollywood and other foreign films, which was designed to protect domestic products, had not really worked.
Professor Zhou Xing, from Beijing Normal University's college of art and communication, said the dominance of Hollywood films had shed light on serious issues in domestic filmmaking, with the audience losing passion for local films.
"It has certainly alerted filmmakers to the fact that there is a long way to go for domestic movies to compete with Hollywood movies," he said. "Many domestic movies lack historical and cultural elements and the storytelling is distant from ordinary people's lives.
"Some movies are distracted by hi-tech gimmicks ... or solely rely on big stars. There is a neglect of human or cultural elements."
Despite calls by directors for a loosening of censorship, Beijing has tightened its control over cultural products by calling for the censoring of more types of content in films made and screened on the mainland in a draft law released last month.
"With economic development, the censorship should gradually loosen up," Zhou said.
priscilla.jiao@scmp.com Copyright (c) 2012. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.