Co-productions are all the rage in the Hong Kong film business, with the mainland market swelling to No 2 in the world. Fears that this is a marriage of convenience that panders to established tastes are being dispelled as collaboration proves to create a singular vision. Honey Tsang reports.

The on-and-off courtships, witty banter and ribald puns exchanged between a couple in the latest rom-com Love Off the Cuff have continued to tickle viewers' fancy across the boundary.

The movie stars Hong Kong's Miriam Yeung Chin-wah and Shawn Yue Man-lok as the sparring sweethearts. Directed by Hong Kong auteur Pang Ho-cheung and co-produced with mainland production firms, Love Off the Cuff is the second sequel to Pang's Love in a Puff series. It gave Pang his most lucrative opening day of all his movies by far - raking in over HK$1.8 million in ticket sales on its April 27 premiere.

While Hong Kong moviegoers are guffawing at Pang's Cantonese wordplay, the crowds on the Chinese mainland - undeterred by colloquial difference - are also enamored of the gags. As of now, it's taken in over 155 million yuan ($22.5 million) in ticket sales since its release in mainland theaters on April 28.

Love Off the Cuff represents one of the many Hong Kong-mainland co-productions that have lately pulled in hefty receipts and made hay across the boundary.

In recent years, the commingling of mainland movie market has been accelerating. Hong Kong filmmakers' inclination to serve mainland audiences has been fueled by the mainland's rapidly growing film market. It is now the world's second-largest in box-office receipts and is forecast to overtake the US to become No 1 in a few years.

In 2016, a record 89 Hong Kong pictures - up 11 percent from 2015 - were granted co-production permits for shooting, after being vetted by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television.

A total of 54 cross-boundary joint films were produced last year, a huge step up from an annual average of 10 titles before 2004.

Very often, Hong Kong-mainland productions have fared well in mainland theaters, with many of them reaching nationwide blockbuster status. In 2016, seven out of the top 20 blockbusters on the Chinese mainland were joint ventures with Hong Kong.

Tam Yee-lok, lecturer and program director of Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing for Film, Television and New Media at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU), who has analyzed Hong Kong's movie industry for decades, said that comedies always have the potential to be a hit with mainland audiences.

Annual mainland box-office receipts appear to evince such a preference. Of all seven cross-boundary films screened in 2016, The Mermaid, a huge comedy hit directed by Stephen Chow Sing-chi, was the highest-grossing co-production, with a tally of 3.39 billion yuan.

"On the Chinese mainland, there's an increasing number of emerging middle class. Most of them go in for comedies, which have been a strong suit of Hong Kong filmmakers," Tam said.

Reel change

For decades, Hong Kong had one of the most potent cinema industries in the world. It was at its zenith in the 1980s and early 1990s. Tam stated that the good times started to fade after the release of Hollywood's mega hit Jurassic Park in 1993. It was a time when Hong Kong producers began to see themselves as pitted against big-tent Hollywood studios.

The SARS epidemic and economic downturn in the 2000s became a double whammy for the city's movie industry, Tam explained, dragging it further into a downward spiral.

The overseas box office for Hong Kong movies dropped by over 80 percent from a pinnacle of HK$1.86 billion in 1992 to just HK$300 million in 2014, according to research done by Chung Po-yin, professor of the Department of History at HKBU.

But thanks to the roll-out of the Mainland and Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) in 2003, the Hong Kong-mainland co-production mechanism has picked up steam.

CEPA is an agreement that allows Hong Kong-mainland co-productions to be treated as Chinese mainland motion pictures, in such a way that cross-boundary joint films can enjoy exemption from the current annual quota of 34 Sino-foreign films, and be distributed freely in the Chinese mainland.

CEPA was a boon that invigorated the waning industry at that time. Subsequently, it has allowed industry players to tap highly profitable box-office revenue on the mainland.

Currently, the mainland movie market is 27 times the size of Hong Kong's and also the world's fastest growing. From 2012 to 2016, the mainland's total box-office receipts went through the roof, boasting a 168-percent increase. By comparison, box-office revenue in the US only expanded modestly, with just a 5-percent increase.

Amy Liu, partner at EntGroup, a mainland entertainment research firm, describes the growth in mainland cinema business as "meteoric" in the global film industry.

On top of that, the mainland had 41,179 movie screens in 2016 - a 30-percent increase from 31,627 in 2015. It overtook the previous multiplex king the US, with 40,759 screens. Liu said this has made the Chinese mainland the world's top cinema-going territory.

Cross-boundary benefits

Throughout the changes, Hong Kong filmmakers have turned to the Chinese mainland for finance. Such collaboration has resulted in some "indie" movies, like Pang's Love in a Puff series, growing famous abroad. In return, the Chinese mainland acquires the know-how of Hong Kong filmmaking talents.

Ann An, founder and chairman of Desen International Media, a renowned film producer and distributor on the Chinese mainland, told China Daily the movie industry in the mainland has always been hunting for creative talents from Hong Kong and overseas.

"The Chinese mainland movie industry has only been commercialized for 10 years. In terms of filming techniques, it still hasn't become full-blown yet, particularly when compared to Hollywood which has over 100 years' history," An added.

Co-production here, then, offers a platform for movie makers to learn and exchange skills and ideas. And comedy is not Hong Kong's only strong suit. The filmmaking techniques employed in Hong Kong action movies - a forte of the city's filmmakers - have been highly valued by the mainland audiences.

In 2016, action movies took up four positions among a total of seven Hong Kong-mainland co-productions in the top-20 blockbusters list. Hong Kong director Dante Lam Chiu-Yin's Operation Mekong was the most prominent, pocketing 1.18 billion yuan.

Teddy Chen Tak-sum, a Hong Kong veteran director in action cinema, has embraced the dynamics of cross-boundary productions. Speaking to China Daily, he said, "Action films are a relatively good fit when it comes to cross-culture productions."

Chen's latest cross-boundary title Kung Fu Jungle, starring Donnie Yen Chi-tan and Wang Baoqiang, did well with global audiences, generating $10.1 million in worldwide box-office revenue, according to Box Office Mojo, an international database that keeps track of box office records.

This is especially true for the mainland. "The (martial) arts fights between characters, together with a not very convoluted storyline, can break the language and cultural barrier across the boundary," he explained.

Crafting a whole

Much as many co-productions are setting the bar for plentiful returns in the mainland, filmmakers never consider them easy money.

Looking back, not all epic co-productions have been a guarantee of success. The Great Wall, the Sino-US big-budget film directed by Zhang Yimou with a budget of more than $150 million, wound up a box-office flop. Industry observers believe it lost more than $75 million.

"The crux of making bestselling cross-culture movies is to find a topic global audiences really care about and are interested in," said Chen Yiqi, chairman of Sil-Metropole Organisation Ltd, a Hong Kong production company.

"You can't simply win over viewers from other parts of the world just by casting a mixture of actors from the mainland and abroad," he added.

In an earlier China Daily Asia Leadership Roundtable Panel themed "Sino-Foreign Co-Production Films Summit", Yip Chai-tuck, executive director of Media Asia Group Holdings Ltd, which is a leading Hong Kong production firm and distributor responsible for the production of Love off the Cuff, stressed that movies are craft in nature.

"Discerning viewers never value a film by whether it's a co-production or not," Yip said.

While many enjoy penetrating the flourishing movie market on the Chinese mainland, some Hong Kong filmmakers think co-productions might also entail a few wrinkles - such as what they called the "pandering" issue. They are worried that the collaboration might stymie creativity as some content is inserted to cater for the mainland audiences.

In response to this, film director Teddy Chen said that a nicely written screenplay can meld different components into one that can charm all audiences from various cultural backgrounds.

Such an outlook is also evident in Love off the Cuff, which has succeeded in enabling audiences across the boundary to get a kick out of Cantonese repartee and a serpentine urban love story set in Hong Kong.

Dagan Potter, production lead at Oriental Dreamworks - the studio that produced the high-grossing Sino-US animated film Kung Fu Panda 3, told China Daily: "Once you have the ability that captures those little components everyone loves and can relate to, there comes the magic."

When asked about the recipe for a winning co-production, Potter said: "We're just one big team, such that we don't even think it's a co-production." Instead, he said, they think of themselves as filmmakers.

"It's really bringing talents together, and ultimately, creating one big team that has a singular vision - and delivering on that."

Contact the writer at

honeytsang@chinadailyhk.com

The co-production fi lm Love O the Cu, starring Miriam Yeung Chin-wah and Shawn Yue Man-lok, has become a hit across the boundary. Provided To China Daily

(HK Edition 05/26/2017 page7)