Like the rest of American industry, Hollywood has seen the future, and it is China. Some of the biggest movie studios are now scrambling to the Chinese mainland and planning to invest more than US$150 million over the next few years in China's burgeoning film industry.
Walt Disney Pictures may even spend part of its legacy, with a plan for what some people involved say is a live-action martial-arts remake of "Snow White" that would be shot in China and replace the dwarves with Shaolin monks. The director is expected to be Yuen Woo-ping, the Chinese director and choreographer who arranged the fight scenes for Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" series, as well as "Kung Fu Hustle" and the "Matrix" movies.
Other studios intent on China include Sony's Columbia Tristar Pictures unit, which is already producing and financing feature films in the country. Time Warner's Warner Brothers studio recently formed joint ventures to make films in China. And Merchant Ivory Productions' latest film, "The White Countess," set in 1930's
Shanghai and starring Ralph Fiennes, was filmed on location in China last year.
A few weeks ago, Harvey Weinstein, the co-founder of Miramax Films and one of Hollywood's biggest producers, told a gathering at the
Shanghai International Film Festival that the company he would run once he left Disney's Miramax would also produce and finance feature films in China.
Drawn by China's fast-growing economy, inexpensive film production sites and its increasingly popular martial arts and feature films — most notably "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" in 2000 — Western studios are stepping up their presence in the country and looking to eventually turn China into a major film production base.
"China is going to grow, so a lot of companies want to come in here and produce films," said Li Chow, the general manager of Columbia Tristar Film Distributors, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment. "Chinese films have done well internationally, ever since ‘Crouching Tiger' came out. So this is a trend."
The moves come as Hollywood officials are still fighting to get their own American-made movies shown in China. Hollywood executives also say they are making plans to produce and invest in movies with a Chinese theme or Chinese language movies that could later be exported to the rest of the world. And American studios are laying the foundation to produce movies solely for China's domestic film market.
China's box office receipts are still small compared with ticket sales in the United States, where box office revenues were a record US$9.4 billion last year, according to Exhibitor Relations. But analysts said affluent Chinese were becoming avid movie-goers, particularly in big cities like Beijing,
GuangZhou and Shanghai. The domestic market was expected to grow to US$1.2 billion by 2007, from about US$500 million last year, according to China E-Capital, a private investment bank in Beijing.
Hollywood is also coming to tap into China's growing television, Internet, gaming and mobile phone markets, which producers see as new and potentially lucrative outlets. A few weeks ago, Warner Brothers Online announced that it would team with Tom Online, an online and wireless service based in Beijing, to distribute Warner Brothers film content on the Internet and to mobile phone users across China.
Perhaps more significantly, Hollywood executives recognize that China now has a collection of talented film directors who are breaking box office records at home and selling well overseas.
