Tougher government censorship has blocked potential hits and compelled filmmakers to stick with safe formulas that aren’t winning audiences, while a tax evasion crackdown has made some investors reluctant to back films, crimping output even further.
In February, director Zhang Yimou’s “One Second” was withdrawn from the Berlin Film Festival and has since been subject to a series of government-ordered re-cuts, the Hollywood Reporter reported last month. Amid the dearth of hits, China’s box-office sales fell 3.6% in the first half of this year, led by declines for films debuting outside the February Chinese New Year and this year’s May 1-4 Labor Day holiday, according to data from Maoyan Movie and Box Office Mojo.
For instance, “Hobbs & Shaw,” a spinoff of a Universal Pictures’ “Fast & Furious” car-chase franchise that has been a huge hit in China, has been approved for summer release, according to Green.Every film must be cleared by the government to appear in China and an informal cap has been imposed of about 34 foreign films a year on a revenue-sharing basis.
In the previous year, the top four films were all Chinese, led by action film “Operation Red Sea” and the comedy “Detective Chinatown 2.” The scandal and the government’s limits on pay for performers spooked investors and slowed production at studios that had been spooling out films to meet the demand that more than quintupled since 2010 to 56.6 billion yuan last year.