Hong Kong as Asian Hollywood? Hong Kong’s Film Industry in the Golden Age and After

Abstract

AbstractOver much of the past century, Hong Kong had been well-known for its motion picture industry. As many of the films it produced, there are dramatic twists and turns in the history of the industry. To begin with, although the city’s film industry was deemed the “Hollywood of the East” or the “Asian Hollywood” (Stokes, 2007; Hammond, 2000; Stokes & Hoover, 1999, p. 17; Dannen & Long, 1997), its box-office grosses had been dominated by imported movies for several decades prior to 1982 (see Fig. 6.1 and Appendix for the overall trend in HK film box office takings). Despite the famed Chinese martial-arts pictures produced by Golden Harvest and starring Bruce Lee in the early 1970s, the output of Hong Kong film companies accounted for only around forty per cent of the total box-office revenue throughout the 1970s. The rebound of Hong Kong movies did not occur until the early 1980s. For the first time in the history of Hong Kong cinema, the box-office grosses of Hong Kong movies outweighed those of the imported films in 1982, announcing the arrival of the industry’s golden age. The output of Hong Kong movies subsequently surged to 120 in 1990, and reached its peak of 186 in 1993 (Appendix).