Jennifer Rankin, and Jonathan Kaiman in Beijing 

Hollywood zooms in on China’s film market

As Transformers becomes China's biggest ever box office smash the US film studios are aiming to reel in Chinese audiences in their millions
  
  

Transformers Age Of Extinction in Wuhan
Chinese film-goers attend the premiere of Transformers: Age of Exctinction in Wuhan. Photograph: Chinafotopress/ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images Photograph: Chinafotopress/ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images

Throughout Beijing, images of Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, and other protagonists in the latest Transformers film stare from bus station billboards, shopfront windows and even a statue near Tiananmen Square. As US film studios look further afield for profits, the Hollywood sign now looms over China.

On a Thursday afternoon at the Polybona Cinema in the city's east, a few dozen Chinese movie-goers pay about £13 – the price of about 30 bottles of local beer – to watch Transformers: Age of Extinction in 3D.

During the screening, the overtures to Chinese cinemagoers are as clunky as the film itself. The small crowd laughs sporadically at the Chinese product placements – a China Construction Bank debit card, a can of Chinese Red Bull – scattered throughout the blockbuster's first half, mostly set in rural Texas.

Nonetheless, this approach has worked: the film has become China's biggest ever box-office success, generating ticket sales of more than $222m (£130m) in less than a fortnight.

Yang Yunfan, 33, an advertising professional, says he enjoyed the film more than the prior entry in the long-running franchise, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which also set box office records in China. "You know Transformers, the animated series, was really big in China in the late 1980s and early 90s, when I was in middle school," he says. "So many things in these movies pull directly from the cartoon – that's something they've done really well.

"But there were really too many advertisements. When Hollywood studios started adding Chinese elements to their films about three or four years ago, it made us feel great – we thought: 'Wow, China is really awesome, it's a really important country now.'"

Hollywood's recent attempts to woo Chinese audiences, he says, have begun to feel superficial and forced. "If they included more content about Chinese families, or Chinese culture, that might be more interesting."

Nonetheless, the latest Transformers film is a textbook case of how Hollywood's profit-making machine does its job with ruthless focus. In a bid to win over a Chinese audience, a large chunk of the action is set in Hong Kong, with roles for Chinese star Li Bingbing and boxer Zou Shiming, albeit smaller parts than those of their American co-stars.

Producer Paramount has also pulled out all the stops to make a film that will please China's censors, as well as state-run CCTV China Movie Channel and its online film streaming partner Jiaflix Enterprises, who backed the movie for an undisclosed sum.

While real-life Hong Kong residents took to the streets in their tens of thousands to march for democracy, the Transformers film shows a local leader calling on central government to save the day when the territory faces an invasion by the mutant robots. The Chinese government is depicted as benevolent, while the US government manages to be both sinister and useless – typified by the black-clad CIA operatives, one of whom gets beaten up by a Chinese character.

Another reason for the film's success is simple economics. China is opening 10 new cinema screens every day, so almost any film has a shot of being the biggest ever, says David Hancock, director of film and cinema at consultancy IHS Technology. He estimates the Chinese cinema market will be worth $4.6bn in 2014, almost a one-third increase on last year.

And China has a lot further to go: it had 18,200 screens at the end of last year, compared with 40,000 in the US. If China had the same number of screens per capita as the US it would have 133,000. "We are talking about a very, very large market," says Hancock, who made that calculation. "Within six years China will probably be the largest film market in the world."

Transformers is hardly the first attempt at buttering-up the Chinese filmgoer: James Bond turns up in Shanghai and Macau in 007's most recent outing, Skyfall, while Chinese stars Fan Bingbing and Wang Xueqi had small roles in the Chinese version of Iron Man 3, although audiences reacted angrily when it emerged their scenes were cut for the international version.

The chase for the Chinese market also appears to have heightened the big studios' natural risk-aversion to comedies, traditionally a bigger gamble, and more likely to be lost in translation. Figures from Nomura and Box Office Mojo show comedies now account for just 13% of new releases from the four big Hollywood studios, compared with almost a third in 2010.

"The centre of gravity of the film business is moving towards Asia," says Hancock, who notes that Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and India are also increasingly important for Hollywood. The US studios have been shooting films abroad for decades, but the interest in cultivating Asian filmgoers is a more recent trend. "The internationalisation of production is already a fact. What we are having now is the Asian turn to be dominant in terms of consumption of movies and if you are a studio you have to stay in line with that trend; and that means focusing a lot of your attention or having a strategy to get into those markets."

Not all Chinese officials sound convinced that the influx of Hollywood's mutant cars and aliens is a good thing. In a recent comment piece entitled "Beware of superhero films", the state-controlled China Daily worried that US superheroes may not be ideal role models. "The problem is that children and, even some adults, lap them up, helping them promote American lifestyle and values that do not necessarily conform to their own cultural values."

In another report in the Chinese state media, Zhang Hongsen, a senior official in the State Administration of Press Publication, Radio, Film and Television, ticked off studio exhibitors for their "irrational" wish to give Transformers space at the expense of local films.

His complaint comes as box-office takings show just how far the scales have tipped in favour of US film-makers. Hollywood has dominated Chinese cinemas since the start of the year: the likes of Godzilla, X-Men and Captain America mean only three Chinese-language films feature in the top 10 highest-grossing releases of the year, according to Rentrak – and one of these was made with American money.

In 2013, only three Hollywood films made it into the top ten and the most popular was a homegrown comedy, Journey to the West (Xi You Xiang Mo Pian). Concern over preserving China's own film-making means that strict government rules on foreign films are unlikely to disappear anytime soon: only 34 foreign films can be shown each year, while foreign studios can take no more than 25% of profits.

As a result, James Mudge, director of the London-based Chinese Visual Festival, expects to see "a bit more blurring of the line in what you consider a Hollywood film and a Chinese film", as foreign studios look to pair up with Chinese counterparts to get round the restrictions. Hollywood is still the world leader in making big special-effects-laden action films, but China is getting better at them, he says, pointing to this year's hit fantasy epic The Monkey King.

However, Chinese films will remain "a tough sell" for a mass audience in the west, where audiences avoid subtitled films. "Even a [subtitled] commercial film will be seen as an arthouse film," says Mudge.

Top 5 films in China in 2014

1 Transformers: Age of Extinction (US) $222.7m (£130m)

2 The Monkey King (China) $178m

3 Captain America: The Winter Soldier (US) $127m

4 X-Men: Days of Future Past (US) $115m

5 Dad! Where are We Going? (China) $104m

Source: Rentrak

 

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