China Film Bureau Declares War On Hollywood, VICE TV to Launch at UCCA

Kipp Whittaker | Jul 4, 2014 4:30 pm | Add a comment | 3779 reads

The government is urging theater owners to shorten screen time for Transformers: Age of Extinction in order to benefit domestic productions.

It is no surprise that China is worried about it's competition. Of the top ten movies in the first half of the year, 1.04 billion (48 percent) came from domestic productions while 1.12 billion (52 percent) (box office tampering aside) came from international productions. Four of the top films were Chinese and six were imports. These aren’t comforting numbers for the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) considering that imported films are currently regulated to 34 per year, compared to the 300 plus domestic movies released in 2013.

One thing I don't get is this sort of war rhetoric used when it comes to China’s floppy state of big budget motion pictures. It’s possible that Hollywood's influence is massaging the wrong muscle. China should be competing by making better movies, not making irrelevant Chinese versions of blockbuster films. Ultimately, what makes a better film industry is freedom for creatives to produce the stories they feel need to be told with little or no supervision.

Regulations surrounding the import of movies to the mainland are supposed to relax by 2017, so this gives China's filmmakers four more years to step up their game or else the entire market could be taken over by slick Hollywood sequels. This will make it impossible for China's government to continue providing favorable conditions for the domestic industry to develop once 2017 rolls around, leading to Hollywood’s perpetual dominance of the Chinese box office.

In other news, on July 13, UCCA will be hosting the launch of the new HBO mini-series VICE. What started as a little free magazine for hipsters, is now a part of an international media empire, providing the planet with extreme views of the world's underbelly. It's kind of like what Kurl Loder was doing for MTV News in the 90's but filled with a sort of snobby pretentious nature that people seem to eat up like gummy bears. Just check out this one example, The $wiftest Pigeon, when one of their correspondents visited Beijing for a high profile pigeon racing event. The guy seems like a total dick, and I feel sorry for local DJ Billy Starman for having to facilitate this awful dude for the duration of his visit.

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