Tag Archives: China’s box office

China’s Box Office: Hollywood Films Regain Dominance

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[Note: If you’re looking for the article “China’s Film Investors Flex Their Financial Muscles in Hollywood” you may have been directed to the wrong link. Please click here for that article]

By Albert Wang for China Film Biz

February 8, 2012

For the second week in a row, Mission: Impossible 4 Ghost Protocol reigned at the Chinese box office, grossing a reported $39.4 million and bringing the film’s cumulative 9 day gross in mainland China to just under $56 million.

Out of the $24.3 million that MI:4 grossed over the weekend in the foreign theatrical circuit, $19.8 million came from China. To put the numbers in context, MI:4 grossed a mere $7.4 million in its opening weekend in Japan in December of 2011. Until recently, Japan was the world’s 2nd largest movie market. It took MI:4 film little over a week in China to gross as much as it did in a full month in Japan.

In second place was Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, which continues its decent showing in China with a gross of $3.56 million over the week, bringing the film’s 22 day total to $27.7 million.  Meanwhile, both The Viral Factor and All’s Well, Ends Well 2012 held on to the number three and four spots, grossing $2.9 million and $2.4 million, respectively.

The lone newcomer into the top five was Jonnie To’s Life Without Principle, which earned a rather mild $2.3 million over three days to claim the number five spot.

With the exception of To’s Life Without Principle, there was relatively little movement in the box office top 10.  And so this week it is worth noting the complete dominance Hollywood films have had in the Chinese market, with M:I 4 and Sherlock Holmes together accounting for a cool 75% of the mainland Chinese box office this week.

This dominance by a pair of Hollywood films comes at a time when it seems that just about anyone and everyone with deep pockets in China is looking to develop a film fund.  This week saw the announcement of Bruno Wu’s $800 million Harvest Seven Stars Media Private Equity Fund, as well as the announcement of a Chinese government-backed film fund to be overseen by China Mainstream Media National Film Capital Hollywood Inc. (HSSMPEF and CMMNFCHI, respectively; good luck remembering those acronyms), the U.S. division of China National Film Capital Co. Ltd.  Even retired NBA star Yao Ming has been reported to be looking into developing a film fund in recent weeks.

The purported goal of most if not all of these film funds is to produce Chinese films with a more global appeal.  And yet as we see from the Chinese box office this week, Chinese films have yet to find a way to effectively compete with Hollywood films on their own turf.   This is due to a wide range of issues, from overly restrictive government regulations, to a lack of quality source material being developed in China for the big screen, to Chinese audience’s demonstrated preference for Hollywood’s film offerings.  However, I’d like to posit another problem a globally appealing Chinese cinema faces.

China, in spite of all the capital being thrown at film funds of late, lacks the necessary star power to promote its films globally.   M:I 4 had Tom Cruise, Holmes had Robert Downey, Jr.  Without those stars headlining their respective films, it’s difficult to imagine either film performing as well as it has on the foreign theatrical circuit.

And so in spite of all the promises the various film funds have made regarding a future global Chinese cinema in the making, a big question remains:  Who will be the Chinese Tom Cruise?  The Chinese Robert Downey, Jr.?  Or the Chinese Shia Lebouf?

Albert Wang is an aspiring producer of US-China film co-productions who joined the Pacific Bridge Pictures team in December, 2011. His previous blog on US-China films can be seen at hollymu.com.

China’s Box Office: Bird Soars with ‘Mission 4’

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By Albert Wang with Robert Cain for China Film Biz

February 3, 2012

In mainland China, the seven-day-long Spring Festival is a holiday break to commemorate the Lunar New Year, and it is also the time when many make the long and arduous trip back home to celebrate with their families and relatives.  For about a hundred million  Chinese migrant workers this holiday break is one of the few times during the year they ever have a chance to visit home.  And so as one might expect, the Spring Holiday is an incredibly difficult travel season, regardless of whether one is traveling by plane or train.

If the week’s box office numbers are anything to go by, mainland Chinese are also increasingly taking time out of this hectic annual holiday break to enjoy movies at their local cinemas.  Weekly box office was up by about 25 percent (in US dollar terms) over the comparable holiday week last year, with a total of $62 million. The month of January was very strong, running 43 percent of January, 2011, though it should be noted that this is not a direct comp, since last year’s Spring Festival didn’t occur until the beginning of February.

The big winner for this week was the Brad Bird directed action picture Mission: Impossible 4 – Ghost Protocol, which in a span of only two days took in an estimated $15.8 million at the Chinese box office, or well over half of M:I 4’s $25 million weekend total on the foreign theatrical circuit.

Paramount claims that Mission: Impossible 4 took in a haul in China that was five times greater than that of 2006’s Mission: Impossible 3 opening weekend in China.  But this feat may not seem quite so impressive when one realizes that China’s box office has grown by more than six-fold during that period.

Rounding out the top 5 for last week were Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, The Viral Factor, All’s Well Ends Well 2012, and The Great Magician.

During the week-long holiday, the mainland Chinese box office totaled 390 million yuan (roughly $US 62 million), significantly higher than the Spring Holiday Week numbers from 2011 and 2010 (320 million yuan and 340 million yuan, respectively).

What makes this year noteworthy is the fact that non-domestic films dominated what has traditionally been a solid week for domestic Chinese films.

Typically, the Lunar New Year ushers in a selection of ensemble Chinese films headlined by big Chinese stars.  The All’s Well Ends Well series, for instance, is an example of this distinct genre; the franchise dates all the way back to 1992, when the original All’s Well Ends Well featured a massive Hong Kong cast that included Stephen Chow, Maggie Cheung, Leslie Cheung, Raymond Wong, Sandra Ng, and Teresa Mo.

Just last year, the Spring Holiday week (Feb. 2-Feb.8, 2011) saw three Chinese films – All’s Well Ends Well 2011, My Own Swordsman, and What Women Want – take the top spots at the Chinese box office.

This year’s Spring Festival Holiday, however, saw fewer big domestic films in this genre.  The week’s top grossing Chinese language film, for instance, was the Hong Kong-produced The Viral Factor, which released a week prior to the Spring Holidays and had no thematic connection to the Lunar New Year celebrations.  The only newly opening non-Hollywood films to crack the top 10  last week—the Taiwan-made Perfect Two and the Shangjing-directed Fan Ju Ye Feng Kuang—opened to less than $5 million each.  The latter was in fact a Chinese New Year film directed by the director of My Own Swordsman, a comedy that played to big opening numbers last year.

It remains to be seen whether 2012 marked a fundamental shift in box office behavior over the Chinese New Year Holidays. It may be that the Chinese government prefers to see domestic films dominate this culturally important holiday week, and would thus implement policies to favor domestic films.  This could have been the reason that M:I 4’s release came at the tail end of the holiday. Then again, with so much money being spread around during the Spring Holidays, party officials may not mind sharing in the profits that a Hollywood blockbuster like M:I 4 or Sherlock Holmes can rake in.

Albert Wang is an aspiring producer of US-China film co-productions who joined the Pacific Bridge Pictures team in December, 2011. His previous blog on US-China films can be seen at hollymu.com.

Robert Cain is a producer and entertainment industry consultant who has been doing business in China since 1987. He can be reached at rob@pacificbridgepics.com and at www.pacificbridgepics.com.

China Passes Japan and is Now the World’s #2 Film Territory

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By Robert Cain for China Film Biz

February 2, 2012

You heard it here first: China has surpassed Japan and is now the world’s biggest film territory outside the United States, as measured by total box office revenue.

For the past several months China has handily beaten Japan’s national box office take, and the gap is widening as China’s torrid pace of revenue growth continues.  Although China’s annual total of $2.05 billion for 2011 fell slightly behind Japan’s $2.29 billion, the last few months of 2011 and January of 2012 saw China surge ahead. 2012 will undoubtedly be the year in which China solidifies its position as the world’s number 2 market behind the United States.

.                    Source: Pacific Bridge Pictures research

.             Source: Pacific Bridge Pictures research

Now it is just a matter of time—about 6-7 years if current trends continue—before China overtakes the United States to permanently become the world’s biggest and perhaps most important movie territory.

For Japan, the lingering effects of the 8.9 magnitude earthquake and tsunami that devastated the country last March have certainly been a factor in its descent to #3. Hobbled by the damage to northeastern Japan’s infrastructure, and by a dampened national mood, box office dropped by 10 percent (nearly 18 percent in local Yen currency) from the record-breaking tally of $2.66 billion in 2010.

But even had there been no earthquake, Japan would have inevitably yielded the number two spot to China by 2013. Japan, like the U.S., has been a mature market for some time; even if we dismiss 2011 as an aberration, the annualized box office growth rate there has been in the low single digits for years. China, by contrast, has been growing by nearly 40 percent per year for a decade.

And aside from total box office, China outperforms Japan in other key measures. As a market for Hollywood films, China has the clear edge over Japan. Of the 26 Hollywood films that were released in both territories in 2011, 19 grossed more in China than they did in Japan, many by a very wide margin. Transformers 3 and Kung Fu Panda 2, for example, each grossed 3 times as much in China as they did in Japan. Had China allowed more American films into its theaters last year, it would have undoubtedly surpassed Japan in total box office in 2011.

.       Source: Pacific Bridge Pictures research

China also offers better upside for its domestic films than Japan does for its films. The top grossing Chinese films of the past year—The Flowers of War, Flying Swords of Dragon Gate, Let the Bullets Fly and Aftershock—have all earned more than $85 million in their domestic Chinese releases. During the same period, not one Japanese-made film cracked even $60 million in Japan.

The implications of China’s rapid ascension are enormous for the global entertainment business. As China’s theatrical business grows, so will its television and home video industries. In the coming years China’s global share of the entertainment pie will expand from the low single digits to 20 percent and higher, and China’s buyers will rapidly gain clout in deciding which films get made, and how and where they are produced. The flows of capital for production and marketing of movies will increasingly come from China. By simple attrition, U.S. tastes will become less dominant, and Chinese tastes will become more influential.

Hollywood’s major studios have been extraordinarily slow to respond to China’s emergence. It is no longer reasonable for them to expect that China will play by their rules, or that Hollywood will remain the world entertainment industry’s center of gravity for much longer. Any of us who hope to enjoy career longevity in the global film business had better start thinking and acting more with China firmly in mind.

Robert Cain is a producer and entertainment industry consultant who has been doing business in China since 1987. He can be reached at rob@pacificbridgepics.com and at www.pacificbridgepics.com.

China’s Box Office: A Holmes-y Reception

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by Albert Wang with Robert Cain for China Film Biz

January 31, 2012

Note: Due to an unexpected week’s delay in China’s box office reporting, we’re just now putting out the report for the week ending January 22nd, with the report for the week ending January 29th to come shortly.

We can only speculate as to why China’s box office numbers were delayed last week. The hold-up may have been related to SARFT’s recent crackdown on box office misreporting and under-reporting. Apparently new systems are currently being implemented to prevent the widespread practice of selling tickets for one film and then writing the name of another film on the face of the ticket. This sort of manipulation allows monies paid by the ticket buyer for one film to be funneled to another.

When the numbers were finally released they showed Warner Bros’ Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows to be last week’s big winner at the mainland Chinese box office with a decent $10 million gross. This may come as a bit of a surprise, given that the original Sherlock Holmes movie was viewed by some as a relative flop in mainland China when it was released in 2010. NYMag, for instance, pointed out that while Avatar earned in China about one-third of what it made in the US, the original Sherlock movie’s China release earned just one-eighteenth of its US box office haul.

Perhaps the first film’s underperformance can be attributed to China’s unfamiliarity with the Sherlock Holmes brand, but Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows has had no such marketing woes. The sequel is on pace to significantly outdo the original at the Chinese box office.

In second place with $7.3 million was Dante Lam’s newly released thriller The Viral Factor, reportedly Taiwan megastar Jay Chou’s last starring role in an action movie. The film also stars Nicholas Tse in yet another gritty and nuanced “bad guy” role. Stylish Hong Kong director Lam, whose most acclaimed film is 2008’s Beast Stalker (also starring Nicholas Tse), is known for making his films chock full of car chases and explosions — not to mention the occasional male actor literally crying his heart out.

The rest of the Chinese box office leaders include the previous week’s top film, The Great Magician (starring Tony Leung and Zhou Xun), the animated film Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf 4, and the 2012 installment of the All’s Well Ends Well series, the Chinese New Year comedy that stars many of Hong Kong’s biggest stars. With an opening weekend tally of just $2.2 million, an 80 percent drop from the 2011 edition’s first week result, the numbers for All’s Well Ends Well 2012 don’t bode well for continuation of the series.

The Taiwanese romance You Are the Apple of My Eye, while dropping five places to the eighth spot at last week’s box office, continues its strong showing, having already grossed more than all 2011 Taiwanese releases in mainland China combined.

Meanwhile Zhang Yimou’s war epic The Flowers of War has wound down its theatrical run on the mainland with a cumulative gross just below the $100M mark. Assuming the reported numbers are accurate, even though Flowers stands as the 3rd highest grossing film ever in the PRC, the film’s initial theatrical returns will fail to repay even half of its $90 million production cost.

Cumulative box office for the week was $40.8 million, up by 13 percent as measured in dollars (up 7 percent in Chinese yuan) over the same period last year. This would be a nice bump in most territories, but given that the mainland’s screen count has risen by 50 percent since January, 2011, theater operators will undoubtedly be disappointed with the weekly result.

Albert Wang is an aspiring producer of US-China film co-productions who joined the Pacific Bridge Pictures team in December, 2011. His previous blog on US-China films can be seen at hollymu.com.

Robert Cain is a producer and entertainment industry consultant who has been doing business in China since 1987. He can be reached at rob@pacificbridgepics.com and at www.pacificbridgepics.com.

A Sweet and Sour Week at the Cinema

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By Robert Cain for China Film Biz

January 4, 2012

It was a December to remember in China, with the national box office hitting a new record at just over $2 billion. What has been most noteworthy about the past year—and the past decade—is the Chinese cinema industry’s extraordinary rate of growth. The quadrupling of the country’s overall economy in the decade since 2001 has been astonishing enough, but that was barely a blip compared to the nearly thirty-fold growth of China’s theatrical box office during the same period. In the blink of an eye China has matured from a minor film territory into an international powerhouse, the country to watch.

One of the bright spots in December was the ongoing competition between Zhang Yimou’s The Flowers of War and Tsui Hark’s Flying Swords of Dragon Gate. Both films performed extremely well, becoming the two highest grossing Chinese language films of 2011, with nearly $77 million in revenue for Flowers and $69 million for Flying Swords so far.  Both are in contention to possibly break the all-time record gross in China for a Chinese-language film, which is currently held by the 2010 release Let the Bullets Fly with $105 million.

And yet, in some ways December was a disappointment. Without a single major Hollywood film released during the entire month, Chinese audiences had limited choices at the multiplex, and many stayed away. For the week ending January 1st, revenues declined by 4.5 percent compared with the same week in 2010, despite higher ticket prices and nearly 3,000 new movie screens in operation. Per-screen averages were down by about 40 percent from last year.

Six new films opened last week, but their combined revenue amounted to less than $6 million, with the Chinese action pic Speed Angels leading the way at $2.4 million. Speed Angels was the seventh film of the year released by the successful indie distributor Enlight, but it fell far short of the company’s 2011 hits Mural ($27 million gross), All’s Well Ends Well ($24 million), and White Vengeance ($23 million).

The lone American opener was the Daniel Craig-Rachel Weisz ghost thriller Dream House, which echoed its weak U.S. opening with a tepid $1.4 million take at the Chinese tills.

Flowers and Flying Swords should continue to lead the market for the next two weeks, as there won’t be any serous competition until January 15th, when Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, hits the theaters. Things will heat up after that, with the Jay Chou action vehicle The Viral Factor opening on the 19th, and All’s Well Ends Well 2012 opening on the 20th.

Late in the fall American movies’ share of the Chinese box office was above 50 percent, but because the last Hollywood blockbuster release of the year—The Adventures of Tintin—came all the way back in mid-November, U.S. box office share drifted down to 46 percent by the end of the year. Home grown Chinese films captured a 24 percent share and China/Hong Kong co-productions took 22 percent.

        Share of China Box Office receipts by Film’s Country of Origin, 2011

Look for more 2011 box office analysis in an upcoming post later this week.

Robert Cain is a producer and entertainment industry consultant who has been doing business in China since 1987. He can be reached at rob@pacificbridgepics.com and at www.pacificbridgepics.com.

SARFT Report Confirms It: China Box Office to Exceed $2 Billion in 2011

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By Robert Cain for China Film Biz

December 16, 2011

SARFT Chairman Cai Fuchao picked an auspicious day, December 15, to announce the latest statistics for China’s cinema business. While two just-opened films featuring Christian Bale (Flowers of War) and Jet Li (Flying Swords of Dragon Gate) battled for moviegoers’ attention and drew huge crowds at the theaters, Cai dropped the news that box office revenue in China this year has already exceeded 12 billion RMB, or US $1.86 billion at 2011’s average exchange rate. Cai also noted that the country’s cinema screen count has crossed the 9,000 mark, a 45 percent increase over the 6,200 screens operating at year end 2010.

That 12 billion figure was for the week ending December 11, which means that there are still 3 more weeks in the year for China to extend its record breaking revenue surge. With last night’s screenings of Flowers of War and Flying Swords reportedly running at better than 90 percent of capacity and with ticket prices high—$12.50 for Flowers and nearly $19 for the 3D Flying Swords—these two films alone will likely push China past $2 billion for the year.   

For those of us who closely track China’s film business, Cai’s announcement was like water in the desert, as SARFT only announces these figures a few times a year. Both the box office and screen count numbers were positive surprises for me. It now appears certain that box office growth will hit or exceed the 30 percent rate I had predicted. New screens have been opening at a rate of 8 per day, and the current screen count has surpassed my year-end estimate of 8,900.

Total revenue has expanded by a staggering 110 percent in just two years, and is up more than six-fold in the past 5 years. When compared with North America’s sluggish growth of less than 2 percent per year (actually, negative growth on an inflation adjusted basis), it’s mystifying that Hollywood’s major studios haven’t deployed teams of their best people to tackle the opportunities there.  Most are largely sitting on the sidelines, tossing a picture or two a year into Chinese theaters, and mainly just watching the China juggernaut pass them by.

For 2011, China’s box office growth has once again nearly quadrupled the country’s overall GDP growth rate, at least the 8th year in a row that it has done so. And contrary to those who think the industry is due for a downturn, I believe China’s film business is still in its infancy.  It will most likely pass Japan in 2012 to become the world’s biggest territory outside North America; give it 7 or 8 more years and China will pass North America. The reasons for this continuing surge have to do with income growth, improving availability and quality of films, and especially rising screen count. Cinemas will continue to be built because there is a huge shortage of them: China has dozens of cities with populations larger than Boston or Washington that still lack a single multiplex.

There exists a fairly predictable straight-line correlation between the number of cinema screens in a country and total box office revenue. If you build it, they will come, so long as you aren’t over-built. Even with its spectacular 10-year long cinema expansion, China is still the world’s most under-screened major market. Given the country’s projected GDP and per capita income growth, it can build another 50,000 screens and still not be anywhere near over-built. With upside like that, fortunes are just waiting to be made.

Robert Cain is a producer and entertainment industry consultant who has been doing business in China since 1987. He can be reached at rob@pacificbridgepics.com and at www.pacificbridgepics.com.

China’s Box Office: The Calm Before the Storm?

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By Robert Cain for China Film Biz

December 14, 2011

For the week ending December 11th, White Vengeance held the top spot for the second week in a row in a disappointingly sluggish frame at the Chinese box office. While Vengeance grossed a respectable $8.3 million for the week to up its cume to $21.4 million, the 5 new openers combined mustered an aggregated gross of only $5 million between them.

Tops among the new entrants was South Korea’s monster flick Sector 7, which picked up $2.5 million, good enough for second place and also making it the highest grossing Korean film in China this year. Far behind among the new releases was India’s Bollywood smash hit from 2009, the Aamir Khan starrer 3 Idiots, which despite amassing a $55 million total in India, managed a scant $1.2 million from Chinese theaters.

Priest and The Adventures of Tintin held onto the 3rd and 4th slots, respectively, raising their cumes to $5.3 million for Priest and $20.4 million for Tintin. Distributor DMG has done a respectable job in handling Priest; despite the conventional wisdom that horror doesn’t click in China—not to mention the fact that vampire movies are technically prohibited under SARFT rules—the picture has significantly over-indexed in its PRC release, earning an estimated 8 percent of its worldwide gross there.

White Vengeance became the 34th film of the year to join the 100mm RMB/$15mm club, double last year’s total of 17. Of those 34 films 17 are from Hollywood, 9 are from China, and 8 are China-Hong Kong co-productions.

Breakaway rom-com hit Love is Not Blind winds down its run with nearly $56 million, making it the second highest grossing Chinese language film this year behind Beginning of the Great Revival.

All told the week was one of the slowest of the year, with total receipts of $23.4 million, a 21 percent dip from the same week in 2010.  Many are hoping that the year-end box office will kick into high gear next week when the $35 million budgeted Tsui Hark/Jet Li wuxia action romp Flying Swords of Dragon Gate opens against the  Zhang Yimou/Christian Bale $90+ millon historical epic Flowers of War.  Both pictures represent big gambles for their backers, as each will need to make record or near record box office numbers in order to recoup its investment.

Indeed, with questionable prospects outside of China due to its dark subject matter and contrived, melodramatic plotting, Flowers of War will need to gross well over $200 million in China to pay back its reported $91 million investment. That would be double the existing record for a domestic release of a Chinese language film (Let the Bullets Fly at $111 million). Although director Zhang Yimou is a huge draw in China, and star Christian Bale is well known there, it’s unlikely that this film has the commercial juice to pull in the Avatar sized numbers it needs.

Flying Swords of Dragon Gate seems the likelier of the two films to achieve commercial success. The Tsui Hark/Jet Li pairing represents a potent box office combo with a long pedigree of success. The Once Upon a Time in China films they made together are well-loved around the world and propelled both of their careers as masters of the action genre. And it should also help that Flying Swords is a remake of the beloved classic 1966 King Hu film Dragon Gate Inn, one of my personal all-time favorites.

Still, as Chinese audiences have proven, nothing is certain and anything is possible. Both films should perform well, and it won’t be much of a surprise if this turns out to be the biggest week at the box office this year.

Robert Cain is a producer and entertainment industry consultant who has been doing business in China since 1987. He can be reached at rob@pacificbridgepics.com and at www.pacificbridgepics.com.

China’s Box Office: The Power of ‘Love’

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By Robert Cain                                                                        November 23, 2011

Love is Not Blind has throttled its Hollywood competition for the second week in a row with a $14.8 million box office take last week, more than enough to hold off the unimpressive $9.2 million debut of Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin. In just 13 days of release the indie hit Love has become the highest grossing romantic comedy in Chinese history, and the fourth biggest film overall at the box office in 2011.

Love declined 48 percent in its second outing, a strong hold considering that two new high profile films opened against it, and three other Hollywood blockbusters are still occupying Chinese movie screens.

Despite Tintin’s inauspicious release—it didn’t even crack the top 20 among opening weekends for films in China this year—overall box office was up by more than 50 percent over the same period in 2010, when the Chinese ancient costume comedy Just Call Me Nobody opened to $9 million. Just Call Me Nobody finished its run with over $24 million last December; it remains to be seen whether Tintin can reach even that moderate level of success.

Among other films in release, Rise of the Planet of the Apes added another $1.6 million for the week, boosting it into the ranks of the $30 million box office club, the 15th film of 2011 to reach this level. Only 10 films surpassed this mark in all of 2010—half of them Chinese and half imported from Hollywood—and only 5 films did so in 2009. Even more impressive, 31 films have now grossed at least $15 million this year, against only 17 for all of 2010 and 8 in 2009.  As the Chinese market matures it is clearly broadening both in the numbers of films that are making solid profits, and in the range of genres that are working.

One genre that appears on the surface to be working but which looks shaky under closer scrutiny is animation. The Chinese government has made domestic animation production a huge priority, investing heavily in facilities and equipment, but Tintin’s lackluster debut raises doubts about the wisdom of this investment initiative.  Of the 17 animated feature releases this year only three—Kung Fu Panda ($92mm), Smurfs ($40mm), and the Chinese-made Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf ($22mm)—can be deemed successes. Most foreign animated films have under-indexed in China relative to their success in the U.S. and international markets, and most home-grown animated films have been dismal failures.

Even animated films that perform well elsewhere often under-perform in China. Cars 2 earned only 2 percent of its global box office take in China, versus an average of 5-6 percent for other foreign filns, and Rio likewise disappointed. The problem may be over-supply. Because animation is one of only a few genres considered a safe bet to pass through China’s strict censorship process, producers and capital tend to gravitate to these projects, even when the scripts and artistic talent are lacking.

To be sure, there are some capable animation shops in China, but they may find it tough going in the years ahead as an increasing number of poorly made or poorly targeted films flood the market. The government should balance its enthusiastic investment in animation equipment and facilities with an equal level of funding for artistic training and  story-telling skill development.

Robert Cain is a producer and entertainment industry consultant who has been doing business in China since 1987. He can be reached at rob@pacificbridgepics.com and at www.pacificbridgepics.com.