All eyes turned to a small town in the south of France on May 14 as a fleet of Hollywood icons and current A-listers took center stage at the 77th Cannes Film Festival.

The event kicked off with an honorary Palme d'Or award, the festival's enduring symbol of prestige, for American actress Meryl Streep and closed with an award for Star Wars director George Lucas. Francis Ford Coppola, director of the legendary The Godfather trilogy, had his Megalopolis, a film about one architect's blueprint to rebuild New York City as a utopia following a disaster, nominated for the top prize for the first time in 45 years.

"It does have the feeling of the old gunslinger coming back into town for one last showdown," Hollywood historian Thomas Doherty told AFP News.

Chinese films, then, made a major return to Cannes after a partial comeback in 2023, with five titles spanning commercial blockbuster, arthouse cinema and genre film entering the festival's official selection.

But while Chinese cinema is regaining its ground at Cannes, Chinese film buyers are shifting their focus. "We've decided to switch to acquiring rights and remaking them as Chinese films because we believe releasing foreign films will be challenging for a long time to come," Cindy Mi Lin, CEO of Beijing-based distributor Infotainment China Media, who was present at this year's fest, told The Hollywood Reporter.

This decision speaks to a wider trend that sees Hollywood losing its foothold in the world's second largest film market. Last year, no American films ranked among the 10 highest-grossing titles in China despite highly anticipated sequels to Avatar, Transformers and Mission: Impossible.

"There has been a shift in taste from U.S. blockbusters to domestic fare, which is more attuned to the values and tastes of Chinese audiences," Li Yang, a professor of film theory at Peking University, told Beijing Review.

To Hollywood's mighty league of heroes and superheroes, China has truly become a lost kingdom.

Adversaries and allies

China's imports of the newest Hollywood blockbusters go back 30 years.

In August 1994, the Chinese Government decided to start importing 10 foreign films every year on a revenue-sharing basis, by which China agreed to share 13 percent of the ticket revenue for those that gained entry. Three months later, The Fugitive, an action thriller starring permanent A-list actor Harrison Ford, became the first American movie to be imported under the program.

The policy was an attempt to revive the country's limping cinematic scene. China's box office sales were on a steep decline in the early 1990s amid the rapid rise of color television and video recorders, and more importantly, due to the low-quality movies available on big screens, with the cinema attendance declining from 29.3 billion in 1979 to 14.4 billion in 1991, 10.5 billion in 1992 and 4.2 billion in 1993.

Hopes were high that The Fugitive would help turn the tide. However, the film was also met with fierce resistance from industry insiders, who were worried that Hollywood's entry could muscle domestic films out of the market.

Amid great controversy, the film was taken down after only one week in theaters in six Chinese cities. Despite its extremely short theatrical run, The Fugitive was a runaway hit with a colossal revenue topping 25.8 million yuan ($3 million at the exchange rate at that time).

While Chinese cinemas were seeking external stimulus, Hollywood studios were also eagerly looking overseas for new markets as domestic profits continued to dwindle, and the success of The Fugitive made them realize that China might be an untapped goldmine.

A barrage of Hollywood offerings, including all-time classics such as True Lies, Forrest Gump, Die Hard, The Lion King, Toy Story and Speed, started pouring in and driving Chinese audiences back to cinemas in droves. In 1995, six Hollywood titles cracked the top 10 in the Chinese box office. One year later, eight of the 10 highest-grossing films in the country were U.S. blockbusters.

Topdog and underdog

The year 1998 was, according to Dai Jinhua, a professor of Chinese film and gender studies at Peking University, "a memorable year in the history of Chinese cinema." It saw the release of a slew of homemade blockbuster hopefuls including Feng Xiaogang's The Dream Factory, a box office hit that turned China's biggest annual holiday period, the Spring Festival, into one of the country's hottest movie seasons.

These films, however, were all upstaged by the Chinese debut of James Cameron's Titanic that April. The three-hour blockbuster became a huge cultural watershed moment, with tickets sold out weeks ahead of screenings and people traveling to other cities just to watch the film.

The film topped the Chinese box office by pulling in 360 million yuan (approximately $43.5 million at the exchange rate at the time), a record that it kept for 11 years until Transformers 2 came out in 2009.

Apart from its huge commercial success, Titanic also invited many Chinese filmmakers to ponder how technology could create an immersive cinematic experience through visual effects and sound design.

The sensory bombardment of Hollywood movies was brought to a new height in 2010 by Avatar, another blockbuster by Cameron that ended up smashing the all-time Chinese box-office record with a haul of 1.7 billion yuan (approximately $250 million at the exchange rate at the time).

The sci-fi megalith stunned Chinese moviegoers and filmmakers alike with its ensemble of stereoscopic 3D, live action, computer animation and other visionary filmmaking techniques. "The film has used the most advanced technologies to transform film spectatorship into a mass ritual," Zhang Hongsen, then deputy head of the film bureau under the State General Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, told Guangming Daily newspaper in 2010.

With its great visual splendor, the film sparked an enduring 3D boom in the country, which saw a drastic increase of 3D screens from 11 in 2010 to 5,000 in 2011.

The film also facilitated talks between China and Hollywood that resulted in the landmark 2012 deal, which raised the quota on Hollywood imports to 34 and allowed U.S. studios a much bigger percentage of revenue.

These new changes transformed China into one of the world's fastest-growing movie markets. According to the Motion Picture Association of America and its gigantic tracker of global box office numbers, in 2012, China overtook Japan to become the world's second largest box office with an 8-percent share of global ticket sales.

End and beginning

What followed was an ever-expanding universe of U.S. action fantasies going heavy on the computer-generated imagery (CGI). For Chinese cinemas, summers in the 2010s were defined by Marvel superhero blockbusters, the Transformers franchise and Disney animations, with audiences glued to their seats through Hollywood's signature post-credits scenes.

This Hollywood syndrome culminated in the release of Avengers: Endgame in 2019. With a gross of 4.2 billion yuan (approximately $600 million), the film cemented its place as the country's highest-grossing foreign film ever, according to Chinese film ticketing agency Maoyan.

But since then, no Hollywood film has made its way into the country's top 10 highest-grossing films of all time, with Avengers: Endgame currently sitting in eighth place on the list. An epidemic of Hollywood fatigue has set upon young Chinese audiences, taking down even the Marvel Cinematic Universe as part of a genre tailspin that landed in China with a succession of flops.

"Hollywood franchises have spread themselves too thin at the expense of quality filmmaking," Josey, a 27-year-old film major at Boston University who preferred to go by her first name, told Beijing Review, citing Wonka (2023), the new prequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, as how Hollywood fantasies have degenerated. "We were so enchanted by the 2005 classic [Charlie and the Chocolate Factory starring Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka and directed by Tim Burton] because it was not just wild fantasies, but an exploration of the parent-child relationship. Wonka, however, was pure entertainment and nothing else."

While the monotony of Hollywood formulaic blockbusters is chasing away old followers, Li also noted the rise of a new generation of Chinese audiences who never saw Avatar or Transformers. "This young generation, who grew up in the age of social media, prefers not distant fantasies but films that tap into their immediate anxieties and aspirations," he said.

The waning power of Hollywood is not a phenomenon unique to China. But the proficiency of local competition is. Over the past few years, a throng of domestic hits both technically adept and culturally anchored have topped the country's box office chart.

For Josey, her new favorites are Guo Fan's sci-fi fantasy Wandering Earth (2019) and its prequel Wandering Earth II (2023), as well as Wuershan's mythological epic trilogy Creation of the Gods, with part one released in 2023. "The reason why I love these films is because they represent a new mode of Chinese film production that is highly organized and professional," she said, noting that Creation of the Gods I was very Hollywood-like in the sense that everything is meticulously planned beforehand.

A wildly ambitious project that took an entire decade to complete, the trilogy poured years into conducting research, training its cast, fine-tuning previsualization and assembling a team of artists from 21 countries to create exquisite costumes and stage designs.

"We live in a time and space both firmly rooted in cultural traditions and deeply connected with the wider world. And that kind of unity between historical depth and a global horizon is what I wanted to achieve with Creation of the Gods," Wuershan told Beijing Review.

After three decades of self-improvement, the Chinese film industry has shown its strength to stand up to competition from Hollywood. Consequently, authorities have been trying to bring in a much more diverse range of films and bump the number of movie imports.

"The Chinese film industry is still in the process of finding its own identity. We should keep learning, and one day we will find our own unique way of expression," Wuershan said. BR

(Print Edition Title: Tinseltown Tango)

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon

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