random thoughts on film part 2

Continuing my random thoughts on hk film biz…

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The big question is, how do you make films that make money? Or, how do you make films so you won’t lose your shirt? There seems to be three strategies that people are doing –

• Mr. Bill Kong, king of blockbuster Chinese period films (although he does a “Riding Alone for Thousand Miles and a Lust, Caution once in a while).  Get Zhang Yimou, Jet Li, etc etc, shoot a film for US$20m+ get prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /US distribution, make lots of money.

• Andy Lau’s Focus Features.  Make a bunch of films with good new directors, hope you get a home run out of it. They got 1 out of 6, which is an unbelivable ratio.  But I personally do not know if they got a lot of the upside from Crazy Stone’s success in China. I hope they did. But generally China’s usually sold for flat deals…

• Media Asia (they were public so we actually can tell). They do manage to put together a range of movies with varying budgets, and they’ve had some hits like Infernal Affairs and Initial D. But seems like it hasn’t been doing so well since though.  But now they’re privatizing so we won’t know how it will do…

And the other guys are apparently seriously struggling these days…

It seems to be so difficult to get back your money in this business, let alone make money.  China supposedly gives you a quarter or so.  Now Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, might give you another quarter, if you are lucky.  The rest comes from Japan, Korea, US, Europe.  And that’s a crapshoot...