Chinese filmmakers move to put better systems in place

Industry insiders, such as Alibaba Pictures CEO Fan Luyuan (second left), and Ren Zhonglun (right), president of Shanghai Film Group Corp, discuss the future of the Chinese movie industry at the Shanghai film festival. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Wolf Warrior 2, which features Wu Jing as both star and director, was the highest-grossing film in China of all time and the sixth highest-grossing movie in the global box-office charts last year, attracting some unlikely viewers.

Youth, a nostalgic drama directed by Feng Xiaogang, attracted middle-aged and elderly viewers, an unusual demographic as China's mainstream theatergoers are typically in their 20s.

Separately, statistics from the China Film Bureau show that domestic viewership for the year as of May was nearly 830 million, up 16 percent year-on-year.

With more than 9,000 new screens coming into service in 2017, China now has more than 55,000 screens. Nearly 88 percent of them can screen movies in the 3D format.

But though China has seen a construction spree when it comes to the world's most advanced screens, the country is lagging behind Hollywood in film technology, especially in making visual-effects-studded spectacles.

Focusing on the industrialization theme, Ye Ning, CEO of Huayi Brothers Pictures, China's first privately owned studio to go public, says: "It is a must-needed element for Chinese filmmakers."

Huayi recently unveiled its 2018 lineup in Shanghai, highlighting its films with special-effects sequences, such as Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings and Mojin, an adventure tale adapted from a namesake best-selling novel.

But post-production aside, Ye also says that industrialization of the movie-making business should be done from end to end.

As an example, he talks about a seven-author Hollywood scriptwriting team he recently met, in which two writers pen the plot while the remaining five work on characters.

"That's how Hollywood basically works on a project," he says. "But in most Chinese movies, we cannot even make the storyline look logical, let alone build the roles."

Director Guo Fan, who is working on the sci-fi epic The Wandering Earth, says China lags behind Hollywood by at least 20 years. But he believes that the Chinese film industry can catch up in five to seven years.