Hong Kong Film Industry Analysis

Since the year 1978, the opening of China’s door to the outside world leads China developing its own economic and social reformation. The nation is approaching to capitalism. With a long historical background, popular culture is subject to many influences. Under this rapid change, the author, Kevin Latham who is a scholar of Chinese Culture, decided to write a book to express his opinion about development in different cultures in China. The book is titled as “Pop Culture China! Media, Arts, and Lifestyle”. The author hopes to share his perceivable and future development in China popular culture.

From author’s point of view, the phrase “popular culture” does not have any exact definition, but he wants the readers can have a better understanding

When considering how can revive Hong Kong film industry, we will first look at the significant changes of the local film industry between years, which indicates the rise and fall of it.

As mentioned by Latham (2007), in the past, Chinese audiences had always been much localized, restricted to a small proportion of the population in different types of films. After the year 1949, movie watching then became familiar to a large proportion of the population, and they mainly tended to watch same kinds of movie or the same movie.

Hong Kong film industry stands at a peak position in the 1980s and early 1990s. The industry has produced large numbers of movies at that time, thus leading to a humongous success at the box office. They are mainly hero action movies and comedy. From the data sources taken from Census and Statistics Department and Commerce and Economic Development Bureau, we can see local movies have brought a total of 1240 million Hong Kong dollars to the box office in Hong Kong in year 1992. On the contrary, the box office of foreign films has reached 312 million Hong Kong dollars, which is only one-quarter of the box office of Hong Kong movies. This fact proved a golden era for the Hong Kong film

Challenges of the film industry in Hong Kong

Blindly follow trends

In fact, blindly follow trends is not a problem that only occurs in Hong Kong films, Hollywood also have films that following the trend blindly. The only different thing is that Hong Kong films has this problem even worse than the others. When the movies which blindly follow the trend becomes abuse, and the lack of fashion sense, and sometimes even the subject is not aware of obsolescence, according to follow.

There is a difference between blindly following trends and finding inspiration.

Plagiarism and lack of creativity of movies

Most people in Hong Kong believe these problems are always the “features” of Hong Kong films. A significant number of films produced by Hong Kong have a significant number of plagiarism, leading a bad image for overall’s Hong Kong film industry. When the foreigners think of Hong Kong films, they can only think of some martial arts films, gangster films, and the art films of Wong Kar-wai, who is a famous film director in Hong