My "auntie" once tried to teach me Mandarin. My parents owned a Chinese restaurant in Kentucky in 1981. It had an upstairs boarding rooms. It was cool, like a western. It had a massive porch that was fenced in. Imagine a human sized chicken coop sitting on top of a restaurant saloon. This is where she attempted to teach me the language of our conquerors. As she posted up a large chalkboard there. It was like some odd pioneer school. I was 5 going on 6 at the time and wasn't interested. Boy, did I fuck that up.
Ever since DVDs went into the tank, the industry was searching for its money loss. To give you an idea of what the movie business was feeling...DVD sales were at least 50% of the profitability of a movie. You thought it was box office? Yeah, so did I. It wasn't. It was the shit you buy or rent after it. So, essentially movies in theaters became a commercial for their DVDs. Well, when internet hit, and they got enough bandwidth to stream movies at high def rate, everything started to go ka-put. It is near impossible to fathom that practically overnight, over a half of your revenue vanished.
Needless to say, every studio went into a panic. Where could they supplement this income? Enter foreign markets. Specifically the communist countries once off limits to the west, now opened up MASSIVE revenue. China was very interested in this. We're talking BILLIONS of people. Imagine if half of that gave you $1 to see your movie. China is insanely capitalistic and won't admit it. Ruthless with their business dealing, unyielding in contracts but determined to get high quality at someone elses' costs. In fact, they were the first to implement projection specifically only IMAX movies to give the full experience of movies they can't get at home...and of course, at the cost from American companies. I thought IMAX was just trying to get a foothold here in America. Nope. This was just because they already had made it for China, we got their seconds. The script has flipped.
What does it mean for new filmmakers who want to work for studios? Well, start thinking about global ideas instead of geocentric. Angry, inner turmoil movies don't translate abroad. Broad humor does. Colorful characters that are about mundane things do well, and make Chinese censors happy. Also, make the Chinese look good. Make them the heroes to their story. You will get money to make your movie. There's more of them than us anyway. Make non-subversive romantic comedies. China loves American faces, hates American sensibilities. But are still sentimental at heart (biggest grossing movie last year in China was a romantic comedy, produced by them, went over a billion yuan). If you don't like any of this, then fuck you. You are the idiots who gave up on DVD. In your neverending need to have access controlled content, you overlooked the guys who ran an industry. I'm sure no one understood the ramifications of their needs, because we're selfish dumbasses. But what we did was force studios into looking to cover their void.
I probably should've known something was up when my last visit to Taiwan, there were multiplexes that sprung up with theaters nicer than the ones here. My first visit to Taiwan in the late 80's, there was NOTHING. The only way you could see a movie was in a dark room renting a laser disc (yeah, you don't remember those either). Now, they've (as in the past) taken what America's invented and pipelined billions of people to our puny hundreds of millions. And now...the real market isn't domestic anymore...yes...news of domestic box office is pittance to what overseas does. I heard the figure now over 70% of real business is done overseas. Our studio movie will change stories due to this. Yes, they will throw us a bone come Oscar time, but the money is the money.
The other reason I became suspicious, the last script that I got was written in phonetic Mandarin Chinese...
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