Examining the Possibility of Asian Cinema to rival against Hollywood’s domination in the world film market3

Preface: Since the 1920s, Hollywood has been dom­i­nat­ing the film indus­try and in most cases, it is not unusual to find some­one who has not watched a film that is pro­duced by his own coun­try. Thus, national films, espe­cially those from the Asian region suf­fer as Hollywood films draw away their audi­ences. In recent years how­ever, there has been a rapid surge in inter­na­tional recog­ni­tion of Asian films. Though this is partly due to them being more read­ily avail­able on video and DVD, films from Asia are also increas­ingly win­ning top prizes at highly respected film fes­ti­vals across the globe. As an Asian myself, I feel a strong con­nec­tion to the cur­rent state that Asian film indus­try is in and the need to focus on Asia because of its poten­tial growth in the global film indus­try. With that being said, the pri­mary focus of this study is to inves­ti­gate the chances of Asian cin­ema end­ing Hollywood’s strong and last­ing dom­i­nance in the world film mar­ket, and even­tu­ally achiev­ing an equal sta­tus as Hollywood across the globe in the com­ing years. In this study, I will attempt to explore the stand­ings of a few rep­re­sen­ta­tives of Asian cin­ema against the indus­try bully, Hollywood. Introduction Often con­sid­ered as one of the youngest art forms, the motion pic­ture indus­try is just over a cen­tury old with major­ity of its exis­tence dom­i­nated by Hollywood. “Hollywood films account for about 80 per­cent of the global mar­ket, American TV prod­ucts occupy about 90 per­cent of world­wide air­time, American music makes about 85 per­cent of the prof­its in the music busi­ness: such a sit­u­a­tion should be regarded as dra­matic for the whole of mankind!’’ said exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Korean Coalition Yang Gi-hwan (Bertolin, 2006, para. 8). Despite occa­sional suc­cesses attained by non-Hollywood films within their own native coun­tries as well as over­seas, films pro­duced by Hollywood ulti­mately dom­i­nates the inter­na­tional box office. Such a trend can be traced back to the 1920s, dur­ing which Hollywood and the stu­dio sys­tem that it cre­ated came to dom­i­nate the movie indus­try across the globe (Ross, 2002, p. 68). With its huge domes­tic base and its for­mal cre­ation of a car­tel, the major Hollywood stu­dios began their world­wide film dom­i­na­tion in full-fledged inte­grated fash­ion, pro­duc­ing, dis­trib­ut­ing and exhibit­ing natively and abroad. Its star sys­tem, pub­lic­ity machin­ery and pres­ti­gious grand cin­e­mas were placed into action and fur­ther expanded with the high returns flow­ing to the car­tel. In sim­pler terms, it was a busi­ness strat­egy meant for a loaded car­tel, forced into cin­e­mas across the globe, which led to more prof­its and an even greater con­trol over the world film mar­ket. Using its gen­er­ous bud­gets to its advan­tage, Hollywood fur­ther made it impos­si­ble for other nations to com­pete on the same level (Segrave, 1997, p. 281). Today, the aver­age cost that Hollywood sets aside for a film is $100 mil­lion (Jon, 2008, para. 2). In most Asian coun­tries, their national films suf­fer while Hollywood films con­tinue to draw in more audi­ence. In fact, Hollywood accounts for an aston­ish­ingly high per­cent­age of the box office in sev­eral of its Asian coun­ter­parts – 96% in Taiwan, 78% in Thailand and 65% in Japan (Lee, 2005, para. 5). It is then no sur­prise that the world­wide film rev­enue for Hollywood has soared from $34.9 bil­lion in 2007 to an esti­mated $41.6 bil­lion by the end of 2011 (Business Wire, 2008, para. 3). But even with such great suc­cess, Hollywood con­tin­ues to fight even harder to main­tain and expand their world­wide film dom­i­na­tion by com­plain­ing of dis­crim­i­na­tion and lack of access to Hollywood prod­ucts in coun­tries where it has long con­trolled 80% or more of the screen time. (Segrave, 1997, p. 281). Along its path to world­wide dom­i­na­tion, the Hollywood jug­ger­naut has destroyed the glory of many local film indus­tries like the Philippines and Singapore, while it con­tin­ues to thrive in its suc­cess. The Three Musketeers: Asian Cinema’s Hope While there is no deny­ing that this pat­tern of box office dom­i­na­tion is evi­dent in major­ity of the Asian film mar­kets, there are excep­tions. Paul Willemen, a pro­fes­sor of Critical Studies, reveals that “some coun­tries (espe­cially in Asia) have man­aged to pre­vent Hollywood from destroy­ing their local film indus­try”. These coun­tries worth not­ing are India, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Located in South Asia, India’s motion indus­try con­tin­ues to flour­ish as both Bollywood films and regional films dom­i­nate their nation’s box office, leav­ing no room for Hollywood films to pen­e­trate through. Here, Hollywood fare accounts for a mere 8% in the world’s sec­ond most pop­u­lous nation (Khanna, n.d., para. 15). A sim­i­lar pic­ture can be seen in South Korea whereby home­grown films of Hollywood stan­dards receive a fair share of the box office with Hollywood. Finally, another excep­tion who has escaped from the tyrant’s clutches is Hong Kong where films from the bully have failed to make an impact on the local film con­sump­tion. In fact, its national films out­sell Hollywood’s by a fac­tor of four to one (Williams, 2002, p. 35). Besides its for­mi­da­ble defence, Hong Kong has also exer­cised its own dom­i­nance within its region, fill­ing up cin­e­mas and video shelves of its neigh­bor­ing audi­ence like Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan (Cinema of Hong Kong, 2010). India Often con­sid­ered by many to be the heart of the Indian motion pic­ture indus­try, India is the world’s largest motion pic­ture pro­duc­ing coun­try, churn­ing out nearly 1000 films annu­ally and receiv­ing pos­i­tive recep­tions in Indian and in its neigh­bor­ing nations. Even though the for­mat of Bollywood films has under­gone sev­eral changes over the years, the movies are typ­i­cally melo­dra­matic, 3–4 hours long, full of music and dance num­bers, inten­si­fied with elab­o­rate and brightly col­ored cos­tumes and sets, and essen­tially revolve around tra­di­tional val­ues such as fam­ily and reli­gion. Amongst all these is usu­ally a love story, where lovers over­come hard­ships in order to be together. But what makes the Bollywood films truly unique is the fact that most of them are musi­cals. Indian film pro­ducer and direc­tor Bobby Bedi said that, “We are very opti­mistic that within the next five years a Bollywood movie will match the suc­cess of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the global mar­ket.” Much like the Indian econ­omy, the Indian film indus­try is also glob­al­iz­ing. As a mat­ter of fact, the motion pic­ture of India has prided itself as being the largest film indus­try in the world. As men­tioned pre­vi­ously, India pro­duces on aver­age a 1000 films a year, com­pared to a rel­a­tively mod­est 600 films pro­duced by the US. This fig­ure, how­ever, does not trans­late into an equally pro­por­tional fig­ure in terms of rev­enue. In 2006, the seem­ingly high rev­enue of $2.1 bil­lion brought in by the Indian film indus­try sadly matches up to what takes only 4 Hollywood films to gen­er­ate. As for why there was a low income turnover, two fac­tors con­tributed to the growth of it. Firstly, tick­ets in India were made as afford­able as they could be for every­one to enjoy a movie. In fact, the price of a ticket is con­sid­ered a lot way cheaper when com­pared to other coun­tries. Secondly, growth in piracy has also pre­vented the film­mak­ers to earn their desired income from the home video mar­ket. Hence, for Indian film­mak­ers, dis­trib­ut­ing their films abroad seems like a lucra­tive route to take as going global pro­vides a promis­ing oppor­tu­nity to rake in greater sales, higher profit mar­gins and much added vis­i­bil­ity. Additionally fac­tors like chang­ing con­tent, inter­na­tional avenues for financ­ing, increased star power, and the pop­u­lar­ity of satel­lite as well as other dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels has fur­ther induce India to enter glob­al­iza­tion. While the route to glob­al­iza­tion seems attrac­tive, it does not come with­out its own set of prob­lems. The evolv­ing nature of glob­al­iza­tion for Indian cin­ema also car­ried its own set of busi­ness impli­ca­tions. Indian film­mak­ers won­der if the future gen­er­a­tions would one day flock to watch a Bollywood release as reg­u­larly as a Hollywood block­buster while stu­dio exec­u­tives con­sid­ers the big threats that Indian films pose to Hollywood. As these thoughts con­tinue, one thing was cer­tain: both Bollywood and Hollywood have no inten­tion of destroy­ing each other’s mar­kets and los­ing the mil­lions of audi­ence they have gar­nered around the world in the process. Instead, both are tight­en­ing their film ties through film col­lab­o­ra­tions like Slumdog Millionaire and Kites and are becom­ing highly vested in each other’s mar­kets (Lakshmi, 2009). With the hope­ful mind­set of “Bollywood ver­sus Hollywood” now out of the way, we take a look at Hong Kong’s cin­ema. Hong Kong One can draw con­sid­er­able sat­is­fac­tion from the achieve­ments of Hong Kong cin­ema and the influ­ence it have had on film­mak­ing around the world. Be it film stars or direc­tors, names such as Jackie Chan, Jet Lee, and John Woo have become house­hold names head­lin­ing sev­eral block­busters, includ­ing those from Hollywood. Along its path of suc­cess tag along numer­ous Western film­mak­ers who are explor­ing and employ­ing the visual dynam­ics of Hong Kong movies, fus­ing their own film styles with hyper­ki­netic mar­tial arts action, “wire-fu”, and grace­ful gun bat­tles to the main­stream audi­ences through films like The Matrix and Kill Bill. However, despite attain­ing such accom­plish­ment over­seas, the lus­ter on Hong Kong’s native motion pic­ture indus­try has faded quite dras­ti­cally as the Hong Kong film indus­try is met with cri­sis. Within the home­grown mar­ket, Hong Kong’s mar­ket share has reduced sig­nif­i­cantly by 40% with a decrease in box office earn­ings as well. As men­tioned pre­vi­ously, Hong Kong is one of the coun­tries that man­aged to thrive in the face of Hollywood dom­i­nance. This, how­ever, no longer stands true as its famous pre­dom­i­nance in the home­grown mar­ket has been increas­ingly diluted with Hollywood prod­ucts. For the first time in nearly 30 years, the Hong Kong cin­ema has given way to its west­ern coun­ter­part who man­aged to gain a secure foothold in its mar­ket. Such phe­nom­e­non can be first observed in 1993 when Jurassic Park became the high­est gross­ing film of all time in the Hong Kong box office (Teo, 1997, p. 253). The down­fall of Hong Kong’s film indus­try has been due to a num­ber of rea­sons even though the biggest cul­prit to blame is the han­dover of Hong Kong by the British back to the People’s Republic of China, which brought with it its own set of prob­lems for the film indus­try, not least among them stricter cen­sor­ship (Carter, 2007, p. 61–62). Spurred by the uncer­tainty that aroused dur­ing the han­dover back to Mainland China in 1997, the best and bright­est play­ers have also jumped on the band­wagon as these valu­able human resources have been drawn into the bright lights of Hollywood, result­ing in a con­sid­er­able “brain drain” in Hong Kong’s film indus­try (Yoon, 2006, p. 63). Adding on to this loss is the deaths of two of its most pop­u­lar per­form­ers: Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui. Similar to India, Hong Kong’s indus­try is also threat­ened by the wide­spread of piracy, which puts films out onto the streets at a frac­tion of a cost of a movie ticket as they get released into the­aters (Leong, 2002, p. 1). Year 2003 proved to be par­tic­u­larly dis­as­trous for the indus­try. In addi­tion to the already promi­nent eco­nomic woes, the SARS out­break made peo­ple even more reluc­tant and afraid to go cin­ema. Film pro­duc­tions also came to a halt for 4 months. In fact, only 54 films were made that year. Efforts made by the gov­ern­ment to pro­mote invest­ment in films by banks have also been futile as banks still see films as a high risk invest­ment (Carter, 2007, p. 62). Moreover, the “shoot fast and cheap” men­tal­ity of Hong Kong’s film indus­try has not helped either, with stu­dios pro­duc­ing bad qual­ity and dis­pos­able offerings. Indeed, there are films that have helped to brighten up Hong Kong’s cur­rent film indus­try, such as the recent suc­cess of Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle and Johnnie To’s Election (Cinema of Hong Kong, 2010). But on a wider scope, the magic of the so-called “Hong Kong New Wave”, Hong Kong’s golden era, is all but gone. South Korea Just as all hopes seem lost for Asian cin­ema when two of its biggest play­ers, India and Hong Kong, have been removed from the façade of Hollywood’s dom­i­na­tion, South Korea’s film indus­try has been grad­u­ally climb­ing its way up into suc­cess. Accustomed to fight­ing for sur­vival, South Korea seems like Asia’s only hope in pro­pelling Asian cin­ema to greater heights, thus bring­ing Asia’s glory back in the process. When that day comes, only then will Asian peo­ple be able to rejoice as the sun rises from the East again. Over the last decade, the motion pic­ture indus­try of South Korea has trans­formed remark­ably. Since the 1970s, the native motion pic­ture indus­try of South Korea was already con­sid­ered quite strong, even though Hollywood films dom­i­nated 80% of the mar­ket until recently whereby South Korea’s national films have increased their stakes to slightly over 50% of the film mar­ket. Though not dom­i­nant, this fig­ure is def­i­nitely con­sid­ered far greater than what most Asian coun­tries could occupy com­bined (Yoon, 2006, p. 63 — 65). The roots of Korean cin­ema, the melo­dra­mas and exploita­tion films have given rise to a new gen­er­a­tion of film­mak­ers. Educated aboard and heav­ily influ­enced by the con­tem­po­raries across the globe, this new wave of Korean film­mak­ers is mold­ing the indus­try with dar­ing art films, big bud­get action flicks, thought pro­vok­ing dra­mas and sub­ver­sive satires. In some places, South Korean is spec­u­lated to being the next new “Hong Kong” and even the “Hollywood of the East” with its indige­nous film indus­try on the verge of pro­pelling onto the world stage (Leong, 2002, p. 1–2). Indeed, this is strik­ingly sim­i­lar to the “Hong Kong New Wave” that man­aged to launch Hong Kong and its ground­break­ing direc­tors into inter­na­tional spot­light and recog­ni­tion in the past. In fact, some Korean films like Shiri have already found suc­cess in the world mar­ket, includ­ing its rival’s mar­ket through lim­ited release. The film­mak­ers behind the suc­cess of the films are also being wooed by Hollywood stu­dios for lucra­tive remake rights, such as the recent deals for Joint Security Area and My Sassy Girl (Cinema of Korea, 2010). Part of the rea­son behind the suc­cess is because of the vast improve­ments in qual­ity as well as quan­tity recently. A wide range of gen­res has also been devel­oped to cater to the masses. The size of invest­ment placed on its national films has also dra­mat­i­cally increased. Also, the indus­try struc­ture is under­go­ing reor­ga­ni­za­tion as it arms itself for glob­al­iza­tion (Yoon, 2006, p. 65). Over the course of reform, Korean film­mak­ers have closely fol­lowed the Hollywood model and it took only a while before the Korean film indus­try trans­formed its dis­tri­b­u­tion and exhi­bi­tion sys­tem to match that of Hollywood’s. South Korea used to have small scale locally owned cin­e­mas and dis­trib­u­tors. Today, that has evolved into two big dis­trib­u­tors that con­trol 70% of the local mar­ket, and 4 big mul­ti­plex own­ers that occupy most of the screens. The pro­duc­tion sys­tem of South Korea is the last aspect that the film indus­try wants to change. In South Korea, direc­tors are given autonomous con­trol over cre­ative deci­sions in film pro­duc­tions rather than the pro­duc­ers. Crew mem­bers and engi­neers are trained by mas­ters and paid very lit­tle. Now, the film peo­ple are mobi­lized for restruc­tur­ing by con­tend­ing the adop­tion of Hollywood’s sys­tem. As a result, pro­duc­ers are get­ting more author­ity in film pro­duc­tion. Additionally, Argent Web, which was just set up recently has a close part­ner­ship with CAA, one of Hollywood’s biggest agen­cies. Today, the film indus­try of South Korea is actively involved in the course of glob­al­iza­tion and it does so not only by export­ing of films and human resources, but also the ref­or­ma­tion of its native film indus­try. Its rival, Hollywood has been get­ting more inter­ested in Korean films as they attain suc­cess natively and inter­na­tion­ally (Yoon, 2006, p. 66). With Hollywood con­tin­u­ously buy­ing dis­tri­b­u­tion and remake rights from Korean films, inter­na­tional recog­ni­tion of Korean films is bound to rise in com­ing years. And as peo­ple around the world starts to open them­selves up to Korean cin­ema, there will def­i­nitely be more export oppor­tu­ni­ties for the Korean film indus­try, which will in turn lead to greater inter­na­tional sales for film­mak­ers to lever­age to ensure a smooth flow of returns on their prod­ucts, thus promis­ing a over­all good con­di­tion of the Korean film indus­try. Conclusion There is almost no doubt that South Korea is fol­low­ing in both Hollywood’s and Hong Kong’s foot­steps. However, one ques­tion remains and that is whether South Korea will be able to bet­ter Hong Kong and India in parts where they have failed by sus­tain­ing its native industry’s extra­or­di­nary growth through per­se­ver­ance, inno­va­tion and empha­sis on qual­ity, or crash into the same walls that have befallen what were once Asia’s hope of stand­ing up against the indus­try bully. Only time can tell. Written by Jacky Yen Zi Shyun References Bertolin, P. (2006, May 21). 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