Xinhua Insight: China cinema boom excites Shanghai film festival

The sense of excitement at the Shanghai International Film Festival is understandable -- these are boom times for the Chinese film industry, as cinema box office soars and capital pours in.

"It's only a matter of time before China surpasses the United States to become the world's largest movie market," said Shi Chuan, deputy chairman of the Shanghai Film Association, on the sidelines of the festival.

After 11 years of gradual growth in the number of cinemas in China, the country reached 10,000 screens in 2011. But that had doubled within three years. As of the end of May, China had 28,000 cinema screens.

The United States has 40,000 but the number has remained almost unchanged over recent years.

China is on course to overtake the United States within three to five years, said Shi.

U.S. moviegoing among Hollywood's key 18- to 39-year-old audience fell to its lowest level in five years in 2014, as overall attendance in most markets around the world was flat or declining, according to a report released in March by the Motion Picture Association of America.

The notable exception was Asia and in particular China, in which growth in the number of theaters continued to be robust. Box office reached 29.6 billion yuan (around 4.8 billion U.S. dollars) in 2014, more than 30 times that of 2002.

"Furious 7" reaped more than 2 billion yuan in April in China and became the country's most successful movie ever, overshadowing the U.S. market.

China's box office so far this year has surpassed 17.5 billion yuan, up 55 percent year on year.

"Several years ago, we were proud of a theater chain taking a billion yuan in a year. Now, one billion is just the box office of a single film," said Lu Yang, a manager with Wanda Cinemas, the film arm of the Wanda Group conglomerate.

Wanda Cinemas has more than 1,300 screens across China and accounted for 14.5 percent of the country's box office in 2014.

Seeing the bright prospects, big names like e-commerce giant Alibaba have been investing heavily in the film industry.

Alibaba paid 6.24 billion HK dollars last year for 59.32 percent of Hong Kong-listed China Vision Media Group Ltd and renamed it "Ali Pictures". In March, Alibaba acquired an 8.8-percent stake in Enlight, one of China's leading film and TV production companies. It announced at the film festival that a Netflix-style video streaming service will be launched within two months.

The lucrative market has also attracted global movie mainstays like DreamWorks to open studios in Shanghai. Major movie academies, including the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts and Vancouver Film School, have established branch schools in China.

QUANTITY DOES NOT EQUAL QUALITY

Despite the bonanza for Chinese cinemas, industry movers and shakers in Shanghai have been at pains to stress both the lack of quality in Chinese films and the lack of success in exporting them.

"The domestic film industry still lags far behind Hollywood in terms of industrial scale, technology, market standards, filmmakers' pedigree and diversity of movie genres," said Ren Zhonglun, president of Shanghai Film Group.

Many luminaries at the festival have expressed concern over the industry's pursuit of profit at the expense of quality and the craze for cheap movie adaptations of Internet novels and TV shows.

"When I saw that 'Where Are We Going, Dad?' was completed within six days yet reaped 700 million yuan in box office, I felt ashamed," said Yu Dong, president of Nasdaq-listed Bona Film Group, referring to the big-screen version of the popular TV show.

It made that sum in a short cinema run in February last year. "Running Man", another TV hit rushed to cinemas, made more than 400 million yuan this February.

China-made films have so far failed to make much of a mark outside of China. Very few Americans watch Chinese movies.

The quality of Chinese filmmakers will never really be tested until their work is globally distributed, said Marc Shmuger, former chairman of Universal Pictures. "The rise of the Chinese film industry can not be reflected by mere numbers," he added.

The Chinese film industry has achieved much in a very short space of time in China, but it will take a lot longer for it to become competitive abroad, "Rush Hour" director Brett Ratner told Xinhua. Endi