Chinese Movies In American Theaters Still Required Fighting?

[geek_frappa]

is it true that Chinese dramas rarely make it to American theaters? (i might be wrong)

i don't think i've ever seen a non-violent film. is this the same in every other country?

(if people saw more films like "Dumplings" maybe they may lose the idea that every Chinese person knows kungfu)

[TSkillet]

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman and The Wedding Banquet were quite popular and wide spread on the arthouse circuit - as was Chungking Express.

I can't think of any mass release films though.

[geraldc]

In the UK there's a large number of art house cinemas so all the Wong Kar Wai stuff like 2046 and In the mood for love get released. The main problem is that they are released about 6 months to a year after release in Hong Kong, so everyone's already seen them on DVD by the time they get out.

[Ian_Lee]

But in reality almost every drama that is made in countries other than US, including English-speaking Britain and India's Bollywood, has a hard time to get into wide release in US.

[gato]

Even American movies without explosions or car chases have a hard time getting into the theaters. Hollywood nowadays sees movies targeting 18-year-old males as the most profitable. They have a point.

See this article:

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?050207crat_atlarge

In 1946, weekly movie attendance was a hundred million. That was out of a population of a hundred and forty-one million, who had nineteen thousand movie screens available to them. Today, there are thirty-six thousand screens in the United States and two hundred and ninety-five million people, and weekly attendance is twenty-five million.

Hollywood studios distribute two hundred movies a year (down from between five and seven hundred a year in the studio era), and only a handful are blockbusters. But the blockbuster is where the money is. Every once in a while, there is talk about the return of the midsize film—the picture that costs twenty million or so to make, and that attracts interest and attention on its own merits. “Sideways” is this season’s poster child. “Sideways” is reported to have cost around sixteen million dollars to make (exclusive of marketing costs). After ten weeks, it had grossed twenty-two million dollars. You might be able to get Tom Cruise to walk across the street for twenty-two million dollars, but that’s about it. “Elektra,” a widely panned fantasy adventure which opened in the middle of January, the deadest month in the business, grossed twenty-two million dollars in two weeks. “Sideways” was unbranded by stars or title (and was not, in marketing parlance, “toyetic,” susceptible to merchandising deals). In those first ten weeks, it was shown on three-hundred and seventy screens. “Elektra” was based on a comic-book character, and it opened on thirty-two hundred screens. To put both pictures in true blockbuster perspective: “Troy,” which is considered a failure, has grossed just under half a billion dollars. The poor reviews for “Troy” didn’t matter, because seventy-three per cent of its box-office revenue came from overseas.

Foreign box-office income started exceeding domestic box-office income for Hollywood movies in 1993. For the typical top-ten box-office hit, sixty per cent of exhibition revenue comes from overseas. This is a reason that the women don’t have much dialogue, and the men are too occupied with driving, wrecking, and leaping to utter more than an occasional mal mot. In the first “Terminator,” Schwarzenegger had seventeen lines. Foreign audiences aren’t paying to hear an interesting conversation. That’s not what domestic audiences are paying for, either. The ideal product to market is a “four-quadrant” picture, a movie that appeals to men and women in both the over- and the under-twenty-five age groups. That’s one reason performers with high adult recognition—Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Robert De Niro—are paid so much for cartoon voice-overs.

All the emphasis on box-office distorts the real financial profile of a movie, because theatrical distribution is just the first of many revenue streams. These include sales to pay television, sales to broadcast television, DVDs, and merchandising licenses. Blockbusters today aspire to be “tent-pole franchises”—centerpieces for multiple spin-off products, from lunchboxes to soundtracks, comic books, children’s books, arcade games, and computer games. “Batman” earned three times as much from merchandise as it did from ticket sales; the makers of “Jurassic Park” sold a hundred licenses for a thousand dinosaur products. Blockbusters today are commercials: they’re commercials for themselves. They also include commercials, in the form of product placement. The all-time record for product placement appears to be owned by the Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies,” which sold screen time to Visa, Avis, BMW, Smirnoff vodka, Heineken, Omega watches, Ericsson cell phones, and L’Oréal. This explains the brand names.