China’s Movie Moguls Call For Tax Reforms, Precision Marketing and Diverse Content
China might now boast the world’s most
enthusiastic financiers and audiences for movies in the world today, but the
country’s leading film executives are showing no signs of complacency – some of
them are calling for further improvements in industrial norms so as to
"make the cake bigger."
Speaking at a
series of panels at the Shanghai International Film Festival Forum on Monday,
some of China’s most high-profile movie moguls are calling for measures which
could ramp up the system, ranging from demands to cut down the tax bill for
film companies, to pleas for their colleagues to consolidate diversified slates
and market them with precise audiences in mind.
Yu Dong, CEO of the
Beijing-based but Nasdaq-listed Bona Film Group, said the Chinese government is
keeping up tax rates which are too steep to allow for development in what he
described as a "cultural industry with special characteristics and
qualities."
While painting an
aggressively upbeat picture of the future of the Chinese film industry – which,
he said, will earn a record-breaking $35.9 billion (22 billion yuan) this year
to be on its way to surpass that of the US by 2018 – he complained about the
authorities’ legal requirements to take five per cent of a film’s box office
revenue in addition to the profits tax film companies have already paid.
He also said
mainland Chinese filmmakers might be facing an uphill struggle in cashing in on
the ever louder ringing tills too, saying how he sees “local” productions as
taking up half of total earnings in the future – but with that gross shared by
co-productions with Hollywood and also film companies from Hong Kong and
Taiwan.
Speaking at a
subsequent panel, Le Vision Pictures’ CEO Zhang Zhao said financiers and
producers eyeing co-productions should reflect on whether these projects could
attain “multilateral co-operation between markets and audiences” from the
source countries of the funding.
“What is your main
target audience? How will your find a local marketing company which could help
you reach that demographic [in the country of the co-producers]? It’s only
after this that you could be sure what films you are to make, and how you are
going to make them,” he said. Quoting his experience in distributing The
Expendables 2 in mainland China – the film took $54.8 million (336 million
yuan) during its run last September, despite being released around the same
time as The Dark Knight Rises and The Amazing Spider-Man – Zhang said his use
of social media in promoting the film among younger film-goers is a way to
“localize” co-productions.
Meanwhile,
producers should also aim for diverse slates rather than simply following
trends, said two other high-flying executives in yet another panel on Sunday.
Enlight Media CEO
Wang Changtian said he was dismayed by people cashing in on the success of his
company’s recent box-office hits Lost in Thailand and So Young. “After the
two films were hits, I saw more than 100 titles being submitted [for approval
from the Film Bureau] – and most of them are problematic premises,” said Wang.
Still, he also
stated that his company is pursuing a strategy of both supporting new directors
and sticking to genre films – a reference, perhaps, to Lost in Thailand (an
odd-couple buddy road movie directed by actor-turned-director Xu Zheng) and So
Young (rite-of-passage romance drama helmed by Vicki Zhao Wei, the A-list
actress making her directorial debut).
Ren Zhonglun, CEO
of the Shanghai Film Group, also said the key to success for Chinese commercial
cinema is in the consolidation of genre movies – but producers should also look
at how different projects could succeed in different ways.
Culled from HOLLYWOOD REPORTERS
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