Global film market, regional problems

Abstract

In the global film market, China is gaining more and more importance. The Chinese box office and film admissions are growing year after year and Chinese film and related companies are able to make business more and more abroad. On the contrary, US and European film markets are flat and the production costs of their film are growing. Both are trying to enter the Chinese film market and cooperate with Chinese film companies. The article reviews the Hollywood strategies towards China and analyses the advantages and problems that will be found following this way and the reason why China is interested to cooperate with Hollywood. But also, in that case, there are advantages and problems to analyse. The place of European film industry and market is different because Europe has a lot of problems to deal with: industry and market fragmentation, little cooperation among member states, lacking distribution of European film outside national markets and too large box office share of Hollywood films. European companies would like to improve cooperation with China, but they have few financial resources to invest in co-productions, they do not have blockbusters to push the China box office and they have no know-how to offer for gaining on the global film market. They can only offer cultural, artistic and creative competences, but is that what Chinese film industry is looking for?