World's largest movie markets hit it big

In November 1994, The Fugitive, an action-packed thriller starring Harrison Ford, arrived in Chinese cinemas, becoming the first major American feature film released on the Chinese mainland since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. It marked a new chapter in cinematic exchanges between China and the United States, now the world's two largest movie markets.

But the story began long before The Fugitive. In 1959, Salt of the Earth, inspired by a 15-month miners' strike in New Mexico, was actually the first American film screened in Chinese cinemas after 1949. "To some extent, the movie introduced the lives of ordinary people in the United States to Chinese audiences for the first time," says Zhi Feina, a veteran researcher.

Zhi has revisited some of these little-known episodes in her newly published book, Exploring the Path of Film Modernization with Chinese Characteristics: Policy, Management, and Industrial Development. The book examines various aspects of China's film industry, including the development of film-import policies, industry management and international cooperation, with China-US exchanges forming pivotal moments.

An anecdote from 1987: the China Film Administration, the country's top film sector regulator, invited the creators of The Living Daylights, the 15th installment in the James Bond franchise, to China from Oct 2 to 11 to discuss possible cooperation on the planned sequel, Licence to Kill.

The cooperation fell through partly because Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor had already captured the novelty of filming in China. Still, such early discussions helped lay the foundation for later cooperation. One notable case was Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, which, according to Zhi's book, became the first major American feature film to receive Chinese cooperation for filming inside the country.

Such exchanges remained sporadic in the early years and often faced setbacks. Systematic discussions began taking shape in the 1990s, as China's reform and opening-up gathered momentum and Hollywood films started entering the Chinese market on a larger scale.

"China's film market is vast and full of potential. Hollywood has long regarded it as vital," says Zhi, also a professor at the Chinese National Academy of Arts.

"These imports have brought some of the biggest-budget blockbusters to China, exerting an enduring influence on generations of Chinese filmmakers while also boosting the development of the domestic film industry," she adds.

Hollywood films that reached Chinese audiences in the early years included the Oscar-winning Forrest Gump and Arnold Schwarzenegger's action-comedy True Lies. Yet, as Zhi recalls, it was James Cameron's Titanic, a tragic romance set aboard the famous luxury passenger liner that sank in 1912, that became a nationwide phenomenon and left a particularly lasting impression on Chinese moviegoers.