The Chinese government allows only 34 foreign movies to be shown in theaters every year, but there is no such limit on co-productions. But securing co-production status comes with hurdles of its own. Movies need to include Chinese elements in the story, in producing and financing.
Robert Caine is a partner at a film co-production company. He says one major obstacle is censorship, and the opaque bureaucracy that comes with it.
“And it is not even much the fact of censorship itself, but the process of getting your script through and being approved. It's very difficult to predict what will happen. The rules are not very clearly defined, and it can seem very arbitrary - the decision whether a script can be approved for censorship purposes.”
Yet, the perks of co-productions are difficult to miss. Most notably, they get a 43 percent cut of the box office revenues, compared to only 25 percent for foreign movies entering the market through the yearly quotas.
Caine says on top of that, Chinese studios are eager to work with foreign talent.
“They are reaching out now. They have just made a big investment in the facilities, and they want to see it filled and used. In many cases they have overcapacity now so they would really like to bring in work from the outside and do service work. They know that their experience base is still not at the [top] level, because the industry is just newer here; so it's still not at the level that many foreign producers have. People here are eager to learn; they are especially eager to have good stories, good scripts, and good projects and stories to work on.”
最新
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25