Reinvention or hollowing-out? The dilemma of production restructuring of the Hong Kong film industry through cross-border co-production with China film companies

Abstract

In the early 1990s, the Hong Kong film industry reached its peak, producing over 200 feature films per year with over 15,000 employees taking up 79% of the gross local film market. The figure was drastically reduced to 25% in 2008. With the increasing penetration of Hollywood and Asian cinemas in the local and regional markets, the heyday of small-and-medium budget Hong Kong films have been replaced by a bifurcated production organization. Medium budget films disappear. Small budget productions targeting local and Southeast Asian markets are struggling to survive, while extremely large budget films co-produced with Chinese film companies targeting the China market have become more dominant recently. The bifurcation has exacerbated the 'winner-take-all' phenomenon in the Hong Kong film industry. We found that Hong Kong cross-border co-production is not merely a minor expense in run-away locational shooting, as it is for Hollywood, which maintains a majority of pre-and-post production expenses in Los Angeles. The Hong Kong film restructuring story is more like a gradual hollowing-out phenomenon that results in the shrinking of the local labor market and the tarnished dream of upward mobility for young film graduates. The non-interventionist Hong Kong government did little to revive Hong Kong film, causing it to further lose market share to other Asian films (Korea, Taiwan, Thailand), which have strong backup from developmental states aggressively promoting film as their major 'culture and creative industry.