The renowned Chinese director Zhang Yimou has been in the limelight in the entertainment news: he has joined forces again with Gong Li after an 11-year breakup. The former “golden couple” is now devoted to a new movie set in ancient China, which has attracted a total investment of 360 million yuan, a new record for the domestic film industry.

Another Chinese director, Feng Xiaogang, secured an investment of over 100 million yuan for his film The Banquet, which is expected to be a box office blockbuster.

The Chinese film industry, celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, is attempting to attract as much investment as possible, with Zhang, Feng and Chen Kaige as its leading forces. The list will become longer as more directors join this group, whose mission, whether direct or indirect, is to save the industry.

The Chinese film industry faces difficulties, caught between Hollywood’s output and DVDs. In some cases, movies from countries other than the United States are a threat to the domestic industry as well. Film industry insiders, who were once proud of reaching 29.3 billion in the annual number of movie goers, now have to face a cruel fact: The number of people who haven’t been to a cinema for a year or more is increasing, while ticket sales have been declining year by year.

Therefore, the first issue confronting Chinese filmmakers is the market, which is paramount in the ups and downs of the domestic industry. Even producers who are not profit-oriented cannot get sufficient investment if the box office receipts cannot cover the expense of making a film. No filmmaker wants his movie to become a kind of “art in a drawer,” which reflects an inability to communicate with the audience. Thus, producing powerful, expensive and pretentious films has been regarded as a good way to lure audiences back to the theaters.

An important role model is the film Hero, directed by Zhang Yimou in 2002, which had a total cost of 240 million yuan. It generated domestic box office receipts of over 250 million yuan, considered a “miracle.” The blockbuster’s box office accounted for 60 percent of the total box office receipts of all movies in that year. Previously, a film was considered successful if its box office exceeded 20 million yuan.

Moreover, the audio tape and videotape rights to Hero were sold to three companies for 17.8 million yuan, considered sky high in a country where pirated DVDs and VCDs are rampant. Before, the record for such a sale was only 100,000-200,000 yuan.

For a long time, filmmakers did not have to consider the box office in their pursuit of art, uniqueness and reward. In the mid-1980s, many did not give a thought to the market, and didn’t even have a clear concept of what a market was. Even a decade ago, Chinese movie studios had little expectation of making a huge profit. The average investment in a movie was around several million yuan. Very few movies, even in 2002, had an investment of over 100 million yuan.

The investment in Hero was 25 times more than the previous movie directed by Zhang and over 55 times more than the average investment in all of his previous movies. A subsequent Zhang film, House of Flying Daggers, cost 290 million yuan, making it the most expensive movie of 2004. In contrast, Red Sorghum, for which Zhang won the Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1987, had a mere investment of about 600,000 yuan.

The movie The Promise, shot by Chen Kaige, a classmate of Zhang and a winner of the Golden Palm award, cost even more money--350 million yuan--which is a middle level investment by Hollywood standards. The cost was three times that of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Brokeback Mountain, and equivalent to the total investment in 100 Chinese movies made by other directors.

No escape from criticism

On the surface, these powerful and expensive movies have indeed attracted a large number of people to cinemas, which has helped the rapid development of the economy. But none escaped sharp criticism from their viewers.

When the box office hits a record high, such blockbusters face even more criticism from reviewers on everything ranging from the quality of the film to the marketing effort.