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A low-budget feature can go well below US$1 million. A major release with a big star, aimed at "hit" status, will typically cost around US$5 million (Yang et al., 1997). During previous boom periods, the number of movies made by a successful figure in a single year could routinely reach double digits.įilms are typically low-budget when compared with American films. In the small and tightly knit industry, actors (as well as other personnel, such as directors) are kept very busy. In the current commercially troubled climate, the casting of young Cantopop idols (such as Ekin Cheng and the Twins) to attract the all-important youth audience is endemic.
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Many, if not most, movie stars have recording sidelines, and vice versa this has been a key marketing strategy in an entertainment industry where American-style, multimedia advertising campaigns have until recently been little used (Bordwell, 2000). Possibly even more important is the overlap with the Cantonese pop music industry.
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For the past three or four decades, television has been a major launching pad for movie stardom, through acting courses and widely watched drama, comedy and variety series offered by the two major stations. In earlier days, beloved performers from the Chinese opera stage often brought their audiences with them to the screen. As is common in commercial cinema, the industry's heart is a highly developed star system. The studios made the stars and, due to notoriously restrictive terms imposed by exclusive services contracts, the studios also owned the stars (McDonald, 2000). In the vertically integrated Hollywood film industry of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, these responsibilities were all undertaken by the studios themselves.
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The star system Īccording to McDonald, a star system emerged in Hollywood as talent scouts, coaches, and publicists were involved with finding performers and making them into stars. 331 films were released in 2017, dropped from 348 the year before. In 2017, the box office gross was HK$1.85 billion compared with HK$1.95 billion in 2016. There were 56 Hong Kong films and 220 foreign films released in 2011. In 2010, the box office gross in Hong Kong was HK$1.339 billion and in 2011 it was HK$1.379 billion. This, combined with a fast and loose approach to the filmmaking process, contributes to the energy and surreal imagination that foreign audiences note in Hong Kong cinema. But the borrowings are filtered through elements from traditional Chinese drama and art, particularly a penchant for stylisation and a disregard for Western standards of realism. Hong Kong film derives a number of elements from Hollywood, such as certain genre parameters, a "thrill-a-minute" philosophy and fast pacing and film editing. It is a thoroughly commercial cinema: highly corporate, concentrating on crowd-pleasing genres like comedy and action, and relying heavily on formulas, sequels and remakes. Unlike many film industries, Hong Kong has enjoyed little or no direct government support, through either subsidies or import quotas. 5.2 Works which include Hong Kong cinema.2.3.2 Golden Harvest and the rise of the independents.2.2.3 Mandarin movies and the Shaws/Cathay rivalry.In the West, Hong Kong's vigorous pop cinema (especially Hong Kong action cinema) has long had a strong cult following, which is now arguably a part of the cultural mainstream, widely available and imitated.Įconomically, the film industry together with the value added of cultural and creative industries represents 5 per cent of Hong Kong's economy. Despite an industry crisis starting in the mid-1990s and Hong Kong's transfer to Chinese sovereignty in July 1997, Hong Kong film has retained much of its distinctive identity and continues to play a prominent part on the world cinema stage. As a former British colony, Hong Kong had a greater degree of political and economic freedom than mainland China and Taiwan, and developed into a filmmaking hub for the Chinese-speaking world (including its worldwide diaspora).įor decades, Hong Kong was the third largest motion picture industry in the world (after Indian cinema and American cinema) and the second largest exporter. The cinema of Hong Kong ( Chinese: 香港電影) is one of the three major threads in the history of Chinese language cinema, alongside the cinema of China and the cinema of Taiwan.
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