China a hit in Hollywood, Bollywood a flop
By Zafar Anjum

SINGAPORE - When Elizabeth director Shekhar Kapoor predicted that the next Spiderman would be an Indian or a Chinese, he was not joking. His prediction is now coming true. But unfortunately for India, the next Spidey will apparently be Chinese, not Indian. According to a report in The New York Times, Hollywood is increasingly seeing its future across the Great Wall.

While Bollywood and some of its stars are busy fending off allegations of underworld links, some of the biggest Hollywood movie studios are quietly entering China's dream factories. With more than US$150 million in new investments, they have plans to push the growing Chinese film industry into a higher orbit in the global entertainment marketplace.

The major studios that have their eyes fixed on the Chinese film industry are Walt Disney Pictures, Columbia Tristar Pictures, and Warner Brothers, among others. Not only are these studios taking their money into China, they are also tweaking the content to accommodate Chinese characters and stories. For example, Walt Disney Pictures has plans to make a live-action martial arts remake of Snow White in China in which Shaolin monks will replace the seven dwarves! Recently, Merchant Ivory Productions' The White Countess, starring Ralph Fiennes, was filmed on location in China. The film's story is set in 1930s Shanghai.

In fact, the latest moves have only consolidated a process that started long ago. Remember Jackie Chan teaming up with Chris Tucker in Rush Hour (1998) and Michelle Yeoh vrooming off with Pierce Brosnan in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)? And decades earlier, Bruce Lee, the greatest icon of martial arts cinema, taking Hollywood by storm in the 1970s with Enter the Dragon and the many other martial arts blockbusters which followed?

But the rekindled interest in the Chinese film industry is on a much larger scale. And make no mistake, the incipient love affair between Hollywood and China is not purely artistic. China has about one-fifth of the world's population and American film studios can smell the lucrative potential. Along with the loosening of foreign film import regulations by the Chinese government, what is making China absolutely scrumptious for the Hollywood biggies now is its fast-growing economy and inexpensive film production sites (until recently, China permitted the US film studios to exhibit a mere 10 films per year, selected by the government's culture ministry). Adding to the dragon's magnetic pull are China's own increasingly popular and successful films, such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, House of Flying Daggers and Kung Fu Hustle.

The Hollywood studios' foray into China is also egged on by the prospects of future profitability at the Chinese box office. Hollywood blockbusters such as Speed, Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone have done very well in China. Emboldened by this success, investors are expecting a theater boom in China. At present, China's box office receipts are meager compared to ticket sales in the US. However, with affluence, more Chinese are thronging to theaters. This phenomenon is especially true in megalopolis such as Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai. And if Beijing-based China E-Capital is to be believed, the domestic market is expected to grow to US$1.2 billion by 2007, from about $500 million in 2004. China is expected to eventually become the world's second-biggest movie market, surpassing Europe ($4.4 billion in annual movie ticket sales) and Japan ($1.6 billion). Time-Warner is tapping into this growing market by investing in more than 70 cinemas around the mainland through joint ventures.

Apart from its commercial temptations, the main reason for Hollywood's tango with China is perhaps the fact that China now boasts a constellation of talented film directors, who are not only breaking box office records at home but also doing well overseas. Last year, for instance, two movies from acclaimed director Zhang Yimou - Hero and House of Flying Daggers - together grossed more than $190 million outside China. And this year's Kung Fu Hustle, a martial arts comedy produced by Hong Kong actor and director Stephen Chow, has already collected more than $54 million overseas. The biggest Chinese language hit to date is Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). This multiple Oscar-winning film went on to earn $128 million.

It is not just martial arts films that have captured Hollywood's attention: Chinese directors have expanded their offerings into every genre. Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine), Feng Xiaogang (Cell Phone) and Wong Kar Wai (In the Mood for Love, 2046) are not just festival circuit favorites, but are considered established storytellers with international appeal. No wonder that Miramax founder Harvey Weinstein has already acquired the distribution rights to Chen Kaige's next film, The Promise. With a budget of $35 million, it is one of the most expensive Chinese language films ever made in China.

Calling Bollywood's bluff
How has the Indian cinema establishment responded to this Chinese challenge? Not impressively, so far at least. Even as Indian filmmakers have continued to celebrate their creative vacuity by churning out the run-of-the-mill formulaic flicks or rehashed versions of great oldies, their Chinese counterparts have made Hollywood not only sit up and take note of them but have also made the Tinseltown luminaries scurry to them with business offers.

What would an occasional Black (an inspirational drama about a blind, deaf girl) or a Munnabhai MBBS (a comedy about an underworld don who decides to become a doctor) do in the face of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Farewell My Concubine? In a fiercely competitive, globalized entertainment market, China's high-quality films, with conveyor-belt-like technical finesse and redoubtable creativity, have beaten India's poorly conceived and lazily executed creative trickles from Bollywood's leaking faucet to the post.

Just take the case of this year's Cannes Film Festival - the entertainment world's biggest creative and marketing jamboree. Not a single contemporary Indian film could find a place in any category of the festival. How strange for a country that prides itself on making the largest number of films every year! This absence was singularly noticeable when Indian actress Nandita Das was part of the jury. To go by the media reports in India, the highlight of the Cannes Festival was Mallika Sherawat's ever-expanding cleavage and Aishwarya Rai's high-wattage smile. Credit, at least, must be given to Ms Sherawat for saving India's face at Cannes by being part of a Jackie Chan-helmed international project.

Talking of actors, India has only one notable actress, Aishwarya Rai, trying to break into mainstream Hollywood. I am sure she has been groaning silently under the weight of being India's sole crossover queen. Thankfully, she now has the company of Miss Sherawat. But this pair is far outnumbered by the deluge of Chinese actors in Los Angeles - Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Chow Yun-Fat, Michelle Yeoh, Ziyi Zhang, and many others. This group of world-class Chinese actors and directors can attract investment from all over the world.

When it comes to directors, India scarcely has an Ang Lee or a John Woo in Hollywood. It has M Night Shayamalan and Gurindher Chadhha, but they are hardly homegrown. It has the versatile Mira Nair who is doing a great job (Monsoon Wedding, Vanity Fair, and now Namesake) and the brooding Shekhar Kapoor who, as per Time magazine, is still active in Hollywood but has now shifted his base to Mumbai. One spark of good news is that Indian producer-director Vidhu Vinod Chopra has apparently sold a script to a major Hollywood studio, and his Munnabhai MBBS is slated to be made as Gangsta MD by Mira Nair.

India's bright directors at home don't give a damn about the global entertainment market. For them, netting in the desis (natives) everywhere generates enough moolah. That's why Karan Johar keeps making one saccharine family drama after another. That's why the Chopras keep making one candy-floss romance after another. That's why Ram Gopal Varma ("RGV") keeps on churning out one weird movie after another from his Factory. Like RGV, both Subhash Ghai and Vidhu Vinod Chopra have slipped into production. Young talents like Farhan Akhtar are doing remakes now. Farhan's next film is Don, a remake of the 1970s Amitabh Bachchan starrer. The rest of them are either into skin flicks or busily adapting Hollywood movies for the Hindi screen.

One wonders what happened to all that talk of crossover cinema and India doing another Lagaan. Look at the difference in the scale of ambitions. The Chinese are actually melting into the pot of global entertainment by winning Academy Awards, whereas the Indians are still hoping to get a Best Film in a Foreign Language win at the Oscars. In a recent interview, Naseeruddin Shah, who played Captain Nemo in Hollywood's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, said that crossover cinema was dead and whatever had to cross over had already crossed over.

One hopes Indian cinema will learn from China's successful seduction of Hollywood. What one country can do, another can also - can't it?

Zafar Anjum is an Indian writer and commentator. His fiction and journalism has appeared in Indian and foreign publications and websites. For more information, see www.zafaranjum.com.

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.)