It seems you don’t have to swing a dead cat very far to find a project that has Chinese money attached.
What’s the lowdown on this foreign dough and is it for real?
Over the past couple of years, a number of sovereign funds have emerged in China, initially to exploit the television arena, and once that proved responsive, a new focus was directed on movie production.
The number of theater screens has increased an impressive 50% in the past two years, proving that there are fast-growing outlets available for new content to be seen by Chinese audiences.
Unfortunately, the indigenous, government-backed film industry can’t survive on the intermittent successes of its big-budget, mega-epic, sword-wielding, martial-arts blockbusters, and the government has therefore been looking to attract foreign productions to the country (the bigger the better).
This is seen as mandatory to China’s long-term media success.
Providing production services for foreign producers wishing to access cheap labor in China is certainly a win-win that helps satisfy the country’s mandate to provide jobs and training to their local film industry, while also providing a pipeline for mainstream, commercial movies that can fill its quickly multiplying theaters.
Recognizing that a reliance on foreign productions is never a good model for sustainability, the Chinese government has taken the extra step of subsidizing investment funds specializing in financing independent films.
These sovereign-backed film funds (some which are “managed” by Hollywood insiders) are tasked with structuring co-productions with movie producers such that selected projects are provided with early-stage, development funding; once the potential for a film’s success becomes tangible to a fund’s directors, additional money is allocated for its production.
The country’s largest film studio, China Film Group (CFGC), has a strong hand in the expansion of these programs.
The China Film Co-Production Corporation, a subsidiary of CFGC, is responsible for 100 percent of foreign co-productions (known as Sino-foreign co-productions).
According to the CFCC website, a Sino-foreign co-production is defined as a “contractual arrangement between a foreign party and a SARFT (State Administration of Radio, Film and Television) accredited Chinese party to conduct filming in China.”
What’s important to note is that the China Film Group maintains not only the country’s largest studio, but also full control of a wide distribution network that owns a majority of China’s screens.
This means that the “private” Chinese studios are forced to compete with the federal government to make the next big blockbuster.
SARFT, meanwhile, maintains ultimate control as the governing authority for any Sino-foreign co-production.
To facilitate this, SARFT has appointed the China Film Co-Production Corporation as it’s “sole agent to assist in managing and coordinating the applications, conducting preliminary review of the screenplay and completed film, and other logistical matters relating to Sino-foreign co-productions.”
Translation: The Chinese government ultimately controls everything.
Go back five years, and you’ll recall a time when hedge-fund money was pouring into the coffers of studios and fly-by-night film funds.
