The box office’s biggest success stories of 2017 make, for the most part, rather easy guesswork.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Beauty and The Beast. Spider-Man: Homecoming.
And then there’s one that probably wasn’t on the tip of your tongue: Wolf Warrior 2.
Despite going almost entirely under the radar beyond Asia, the Mandarin-language patriotic action flick made more worldwide last year than some of Hollywood’s biggest hits – not IT, nor Guardians of the Galaxy 2, nor Wonder Woman measured up to director-lead Wu Jing’s Oscar-nominated triumph.
Even more impressively, it also broke through as the first non-Hollywood movie in history to enter the all-time top 100 of films by box office gross, raking in seven times its 2015 prequel.
So what’s going on?
Essentially, the first global ripples of the long-in-the-tooth burgeoning of ‘Chollywood’.
The last twelve months alone have seen multiple moviegoing records in China broken, with the first day of the Chinese New Year celebrations seeing a new single-day takings record and an all-time admission high of 21 million moviegoers.
And though not featuring in Forbes’ latest list due to a quieter schedule, Fan BingBing – introduced to many as the mutant ‘Blink’ in 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past – made news the year before when she was named as the fifth highest paid actress in the world.
It seems to say one thing; China’s stars are rising, and fast.
So fast in fact, that you can almost hear Hollywood turning its head across the Pacific in anxiety.
While the likes of the Transformers series have enjoyed wild success in China for some time, in spite of laws restricting theatrical annual foreign releases in the country to a maximum of thirty-four, each domestic blockbuster in the vein of The Mermaid or Monster Hunt is having the effect of making Chinese cinema screens look more and more Chinese.
The screens are starting to look less American, too, with 72% of foreign film box office revenue in China now being non-Hollywood in origin.
With such clear and present danger for the international markets of the American film industry, it’s no wonder that co-productions are increasingly sought after.
One such project billed for 2018 is ‘Confetti’, starring Amy Irving (Sue Snell in the 1975 adaptation of Carrie), which tells the story of a mother whose efforts to care for her dyslexic young daughter takes them from rural China for New York City.
Its dialogue will, according to director Ann Hu, be in “80% English” and “20% Mandarin”, reflecting in its own way what one could see as a shift in in power dynamic; we’ve now got Chinese studios eyeing up English-speaking audiences, rather than solely the other way round.
Interestingly enough, Wolf Warrior 2 itself is the kind of flag-waving, jingoistic shoot-‘em-up that could, thematically, be straight out of the hackneyed Reagan era American cinema of Rambo, Commando et al.
The feature follows Leng Feng (Wu Jing), a retired special ops hero living in an undeterminable African country, who is sprung back into action when his new home is struck by civil war.
The audience is variously treated to imagery of him aiding with the evacuation of his Chinese compatriots, winning an underwater fist fight with pirates, facing-off with Frank Grillo of Captain America fame and contracting an incurable Ebola-type virus from which he is, through his own sheer hardiness, cured.
It’s unsurprisingly been accused of racial insensitivity in its at-best condescending depiction of the natives, whom in full tribal dance and all seem at times a little too willing to worship their Chinese saviours, not to mention a particular line in which Leng’s brother’s in arms talk of the continents “good food, excellent scenery and hot women”, which falls some way short of good taste.
But it’s this kind of bravado and chest-thumping national pride that also holds a great deal of the secret of Wolf Warrior 2’s runaway success. Not unlike the western world, China has been experiencing a resurgent nationalism of late, in no small part fostered by the state’s ever-tightening control of the country’s news cycle in management of its self-image.
It is, indeed, also the state apparatus that poses by far the biggest challenge to the onward march of Chinese film – for as with most things media-flavoured in the world’s most populous country, the boom of the silver screen has not escaped the glare of the censor.
In March the National People’s Congress passed the ‘Film Industry Promotion Law’, a vaguely worded piece of legislation that states that all film shown in the country should “serve the people and socialism”, and not impinge the “dignity, honour and interests” of the nation.
Its implications remain as unclear as its phrasing, but if the words of President Xi Jingping back in 2007 are to be taken as any kind of explanation, it means a dissuasion of releases “talking about bad things in imperial palaces” and an encouragement of projects in the style of 1950s-60s American war films, which he praised for their “grand” nature and strong moral messaging.
All current trends make it seem most unlikely, though, that ‘Chollywood’ will hit its own great wall anytime soon.
According to current market forecasting, it should be safe to place plenty of Yuan on it being a when and not an if we see China becoming the world’s biggest movie market.
Some commentators, such as Paul Dergarabedian of Comscore, say even as early as next year.
There is, however, no way of saying what Chinese film ascendancy will look like yet – nor are we to know what censorship will do, what the era of the Chinese blockbuster will truly look like, and what it will really take for western audiences to, ahem, wolf these films down.
benedict tetzlaff - deas. 