Why Hollywood isn't panicking about China's economic crisis

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/aug/28/china-hollywood-makes-hay-in-land-of-eastern-promise

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Hollywood seldom misses an opportunity to panic, but China’s financial turmoil has left it serene, even smug, while the world economy trembles.

Related: Hollywood zooms in on China's film market

Keeping your head while everyone around you is losing theirs can mean you’re not paying attention, but Tinseltown appears to have good reason to remain calm.

China is still on course to overtake the United States as the world’s No 1 film market thanks to insatiable demand for blockbusters and breakneck cinema expansion, with 14 new screens opening daily.

German carmakers and Brazilian soy growers, among others, are bracing for a slump in exports but Hollywood is confident movies will buck a slowdown, even a recession, in China.

Terminator: Genisys, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s latest cyborg outing, this week became the latest blockbuster to be saved by China. A huge $27.4m opening signalled healthy profits for Paramount despite the film’s underperformance in the US.

Warner Bros is showing faith in China’s future by reportedly planning a joint venture with China Media Capital, a state-backed investment fund, to produce local-language films.

“It’s not complete relaxation but there are many reasons to feel relatively secure about the Chinese film industry,” said Peter Shiao, chair of the US-China Film Summit and founder and CEO of the Los Angeles-based Orb Media Group.

“There hasn’t been any indication that the Chinese market has slowed down. The performance of Chinese movies in the past 45 days, during the turmoil, has been stellar. If history is any indicator when there is stress in the social fabric of society people rely on movies even more.”

China was declared the world’s second-largest box office territory in 2013 and revenues continue to surge. The total for 2015 so far is up 43% on the year before, at $4.3bn. Four of the top 10 performers are Hollywood imports, led by Fast and Furious 7, with $379m.

Last year nearly 5,400 new cinemas screens opened, bringing the total to 23,600. Just four years ago there were only about 9,200 screens.

Across the country – from the Tibetan plateau to the isolated desert cities of Xinjiang – moviegoers are snapping up tickets to watch action flicks and romantic comedies.

“Now we can watch the latest blockbusters anytime,” Liu Zhilin, a film buff from Huocheng county near China’s remote border with Kazakhstan, gushed to state media after a 3D cinema opened there in January.

While the financial press has chronicled stomach-churning rises and falls in world stock markets the past week, Hollywood’s trade press, which routinely feasts on stories of box office bombs and studio anguish, has reported rude health in la-la land.

“China’s Top Film Companies Report Strong First Half Revenue, Earnings Growth Despite Stock Slide,” reassured the Hollywood Reporter. “Hollywood’s China Love Story,” declared Yahoo Finance! “Why Hollywood Could Win Big From China’s Market Meltdown” trumpeted the Wrap, speculating that a selling panic in China could funnel cash to Beverly Hills.

Robert Cain, a partner at independent producer Pacific Bridge Pictures and founder of the ChinaFilmBiz blog, listed eight reasons why a slowdown won’t crash China’s movie business.

Principal among them: enormous pent-up demand for films. “An economic slowdown would, at most, slow the pace of box office growth from torrid to merely very fast,” noted Cain. “China’s movie business is still far from reaching the maturity stage of its life cycle. Movie-going has swiftly become a favored pastime, and it will only become increasingly accessible and affordable for hundreds of millions of people.”

That commercial imperative means Hollywood will probably continue to tweak plots, locations, casting and funding to satisfy authorities in Beijing, which control which foreign films get screened, as well as Chinese audiences.

The Great Wall, an upcoming science fiction action blockbuster starring Matt Damon, has been billed as the largest film ever to shoot entirely in China for global distribution.