Hollywood is investing in China. Link. Excerpts:
Like the rest of American industry, Hollywood has seen the future, and it is China. Some of the biggest movie studios are now scrambling onto the mainland and planning to invest more than $150 million over the next few years in China's burgeoning film industry.
Walt Disney Pictures may even spend part of its legacy, with a plan for what some people involved say is a live-action martial-arts remake of "Snow White" that would be shot in China and replace the dwarves with Shaolin monks. . .
Drawn by China's fast-growing economy, inexpensive film production sites and its increasingly popular martial arts and feature films - most notably "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" in 2000 - Western studios are stepping up their presence here and looking to eventually turn China into a major film production base. . .
China's box office receipts are still small compared with ticket sales in the United States, where box office revenues were a record $9.4 billion in 2004, according to Exhibitor Relations. But analysts here say affluent Chinese are becoming avid movie-goers, particularly in big cities like Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai. The domestic market is expected to grow to $1.2 billion by 2007, from about $500 million in 2004, according to China E-Capital, a private investment bank in Beijing.
Hollywood is also coming here to tap into China's growing television, Internet, gaming and mobile phone markets, which producers see as new and potentially lucrative outlets. A few weeks ago, Warner Brothers Online announced that it would team with Tom Online, an online and wireless service based in Beijing, to distribute Warner Brothers film content on the Internet and to mobile phone users across China. . .
Perhaps the most telling sign of the movie world's interest in this country has been the appearance of a Chinese language version of Variety magazine, published here by IDG, and the opening of a new Beijing bureau of The Hollywood Reporter.
"Why am I here?" Jonathan S. Landreth, the new Beijing bureau chief of the Hollywood Reporter, asked rhetorically. "Because everyone else in Hollywood is."
