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Growth of film industry

(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-04-08 09:07

China's film industry has much room to develop but several things need to be done first, says an article in the Oriental Morning Post. The following is an excerpt:

A recent newspaper article said that China's film industry has seen fast growth in the past five years, and both production figures and box-office revenues set new records last year. More than 400 films were produced in China last year, a 21 percent rise over 2006.

China today is the third largest film-maker in the world, after India and the United States. Box-office revenues surpassed 3 billion yuan last year, increasing by 30 percent over the year before. It experienced its fastest growing rate and ranked 11th in the world in terms of box-office revenues.

China's film industry is now experiencing a boom. It is expected that by 2012, box-office revenues will exceed 10 billion yuan. To achieve this target, however, several things must be done.

First, ticket prices should be lowered. Tickets cost an average of 50 yuan ($7.1) last year or nearly 5 percent of the monthly income of urban residents. For ordinary people, it is a luxury to watch a film. In 1990 when China's box-office revenues were only 2.5 billion yuan, every Chinese was able to watch 25 films on average a year. Ticket prices ranged from 2 to 3 yuan. But now, fewer people are watching films because of rising ticket prices.

Pu Cunxin, a popular actor, suggested recently that ticket prices should be less than 20 yuan. If the price of a ticket could be reduced to 20 yuan, the country's 500 million urban residents would be able to watch at least one film a year, raising box-office revenues to 10 billion yuan.

Second, we should try our best to develop second or third-tier city markets. The real contributors to box-office revenues comprise only about 30 theater companies in first-tier cities. Many theaters in small and medium-sized cities went out of business many years ago, and the vast countryside market is still starved of films.

At present, China has 1,527 theaters with 3,527 screens; while the US has 36,000 screens. From this we can see our country should endeavor to develop the market in second and third-tier cities.

Third, we should support small budget films. Last year, these films were in the majority of the total 402 films produced. But only 80 made it to the market. In order to maintain healthy growth of the industry we simply cannot depend only on blockbusters.