China's box office takings reached 3.3 billion yuan ($471 million) in 2007, 600 million ($86 million) more than the previous year. It is expected to more than double by 2010. Over the past five years, the national box office has been growing more than 20 percent every year.
"China's middle class is now 250 million," Mummy director Rob Cohen told Variety earlier this year. "We're feeling the buying power of those 250 million people."
In sharp contrast to these rich earnings is the low cost of filming in China. As is widely known, China has a variety of scenic locations and relatively cheap labor.
Director Rob Minkoff works with Chinese film stars to present The Forbidden Kingdom.
Beijing was one of the filming locations for Kill Bill. Quentin Tarantino was to cooperate with Japan's Toho Films at first, but the quoted price was enough to shoot just one quarter of the film. It turned out that in China, they would have to spend much less.
Terence Chang, producer of Asian action maestro John Woo's Red Cliff (Chi Bi), said in an interview to Variety that the film would have cost at least $200 million to shoot in the US. China's filmmaking costs are about a third of those in the US.
Kill Bill is considered a turning point in international productions in China, according to Zhang Jinzhan, the first assistant director and leader of the project's Chinese team.
"The Last Emperor had only a few Chinese staff, but two-thirds of Kill Bill's team was Chinese. Almost every position had Chinese and American staff," Zhang recalls. "Quentin praised China after his return to the US, and more and more projects began to move here."
What these outsiders bring to the locations is obvious. The crew of The Painted Veil transformed a local inn in Huangyao of Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region into a four-star hotel. When director Spottiswoode and Chow Yun-fat showed up on the stage of a stadium in Huangshi, a small city in central China, to announce their film's premiere, the locals saw the chance to make their city and the beautiful landscape more widely known to not only filmgoers but also to businessmen.
But international filmmakers do face challenges in China. Largely owing to the absence of a rating system, producers have to submit their scripts in Chinese to the film bureau, and sometimes changes have to be made.
Then there are the cultural issues. Minkoff tells China Daily that crews from the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and the United States need to learn how to communicate, and this can pose great difficulties.
"The production designer comes from America, but the art director is Chinese, and art designers come from different places," he says. "They have different backgrounds and are schooled in different techniques; we need to make a lot of adjustments in a short time."