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Playing to the World's Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV

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I write this from Los Angeles, which has the Hollywood film industry. It has dominated world cinema since its inception. Yet in this book, Curtin suggests that the expansion of Chinese film and TV might one day make it a serious global cultural competitor.

He analyses the current geographic distribution of Chinese output. Until recently, it was mostly Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. While mainland China had been making movies for decades, the hitherto insular nature of the Chinese economy relegated its film output to mostly China itself. But the burgeoning rise of the overall economy and its opening to global trade has also expanded the scope of Chinese films. This is perhaps the most interesting part of the book. Much of the future projected growth emanates from China.

The quality of the films is also described as rapidly improving. Due to larger budgets, which in turn is a functioning of greater real spending power by Chinese audiences. It has meant that the cheesy, low budget kung fu and romance films are increasingly sidelined.

The discussions about Singapore and Taiwan are interesting, certainly. But those are largely saturated (and small) markets.

The only missing feature of the book is the minimal discussion about animation. The technology for this is now largely available to Chinese studios. While the latest animation techniques are still dominated by American studios, there might be a trend of diminishing returns. Thus, there might be good prospects for a global Chinese animation industry. Akin perhaps to Japanese anime.