Epilogue

Summary

Since the beginning of the 2010s, there has been a radical transformation of the scale and the nature of the Chinese film industry. In just ten years, the number of movie screens in China increased more than ten-fold, from 6,256 to 69,787, and the number of cinemas from 1,646 to 12,000. As noted in a special account published by Mtime – a mainland Internet movie and TV database – on the development of the Chinese film industry, the 2010s will probably enter the annals of Chinese film history as the decade of change, and the major changes included, among others, the declining influence of Hollywood and Chinese period blockbusters and the rise of Chinese main melody and genre films. The ecology of the Chinese film industry also changed a great deal in the 2010s. As noted in a report published by Deloitte China in 2017, there were new transformations of the business model in the mainland market after China's culture and entertainment industry entered into an unprecedented ‘golden age’, such as the emergence of ‘new giants’ (e.g., Wanda Group) driven by policy, the Internet and capital, which ‘used resource advantages to gradually penetrate the entertainment industry and build an ecosystem’. Moreover, ‘the current singular profitability model will require a diversified strategy’, and the ‘[r]evenue structure will be rebalanced, shifting from “Long Tail” to “Thick Tail”’:

For example, with Disney as its model, Huayi Brothers has launched a ‘de-cinematic’ strategy that integrates the traditional film business, Internet entertainment, and location-based entertainment, and expands into upstream and downstream industry chains to alleviate dependence on the film industry.

It is also true that the emphasis of the industry has shifted from ‘Made in China’ to ‘Made for the World’, but given the special nature of a film industry with Chinese characteristics, the changes have been sticking with the main melody, although this genre was ‘blockbusterised’ in the 2010s. There was a need to diversify the genre of main melody films, for example, moving from a focus on political figures to ‘ordinary’ heroes – pilots, firefighters, coast guard members, climbers, sportspeople and the like – in order to attract more local as well as global audiences.