China's Film Industry: On the Up

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China's Film Industry: On the Up

As the weekend came, Zhang Chen, 21, began to plan how to spend his leisure time. He decided that going to bars and karaoke parlors seemed like good choices. "And for the rest of the time, I can watch movies," he said, meaning watching pirated movies on a VCD/DVD (video compact disc and digital videodisc) player. Going to the cinema seems to have never entered his mind.

"I like American films and seldom watch homemade (domestic) films. But going to the cinema takes time. The tickets are a little expensive for me. I went to cinema only when I was eager to ask my girlfriend out for the first time. Now, we watch DVDs together," said Zhang, a college student in Beijing .

Zhang is one of millions of Chinese moviegoers who, for various reasons, have long abandoned the habit of going to the cinema to watch films, especially domestic films, which were once the most popular entertainment among Chinese people.

To lure movie buffs like Zhang back to cinemas to watch homemade films, China has been making great efforts to reform its film industry in recent years, some of which have already begun to pay off.

According to the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT), China's mainland gross box office reached 1.5 billion yuan (US$180 million) in 2004, while the number of films screened rose by 50 percent to 212. Besides, 2004 was the first year in China's filmmaking history that the top 10 domestic films out-performed blockbusters imported from abroad. SARFT predicts the gross box office of China's mainland film industry will exceed 2 billion yuan (US$242 million) this year.

During the period of the Chinese Lunar New Year, two domestic films, both festive big-budget comedies -- Steven Chow's Kung Fu Hustle and Feng Xiaogang 's A World Without Thieves -- outperformed foreign imports, with takings of more than 100 million yuan (US$12 million) each.

Many industry analysts believe that the success of the box office in 2004 and of films shown during this year's Chinese Lunar New Year is only the tip of the iceberg, compared to the huge market potential in China. As China celebrates 100 years of filmmaking, many hope for 2005 to be a year marked by the accelerating growth of an industry that has been slow to mature in the past decade.
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