is at work on a slate of a dozen Chinese-language films for its Flagship Entertainment banner, a partnership with Beijing-based China Media Capital.
Sony struck a financing deal with Dalian Wanda Group, and Paramount recently closed a purported $1 billion pact with Shanghai Film Group and Huahua Media Group.Ĭhina's Latest Hollywood Megadeal Leaves a $100M Open Questionĭeveloping fully Chinese content with local joint ventures also is seen as a safer bet than co-productions. Instead, studios have focused on strategic partnerships to boost their returns. The highest-profile co-productions in the works are low- to midbudget period pieces such as Skydance and Alibaba’s World War II drama The Flying Tigers, written by Randall Wallace ( Braveheart), and producers Mark Gordon and Hawk Koch’s road movie Edge of the World, to be co-produced by Pegasus and China Film Group. Past tentpoles, such as Paramount’s Transformers: Age of Extinction and Disney’s Iron Man 3, were briefly planned as co-prods before their producers realized the depth of Chinese involvement and script control. To date, the studios have viewed officially sanctioned China co-productions with skepticism, even though they offer vastly greater financial benefits, enabling backers to pocket 43 percent of ticket-sale revenue out of the country, far more than non-co-productions allow. “You’re trying to appeal to everyone, and you’re not compelling enough to appeal to anyone. “This was the first movie of its type,” says one executive connected to the project. Among the lessons insiders have learned are the difficulties of finding stories that meld Eastern and Western characters and the challenges of blending crews, which in Wall‘s case meant hiring 100 interpreters and solving conflicts that allegedly took place among some below-the-line workers. Still, the crumbling of this Wall has toppled much hope for major Sino-American pictures.
'The Great Wall' ('Chang Cheng'): Film Review
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If the movie generates hoped-for ancillary revenue (including $20 million from domestic home entertainment and as much as $40 million from international home entertainment, with $25 million to $30 million from TV - admittedly, a best-case scenario), that will further stanch the red ink. The four partners will split any further theatrical income equally. The studio gets to collect a roughly 10 percent distribution fee from all theatrical revenue (between 40 percent and 50 percent of the total box office), and box-office rentals likely will recoup much, if not all, of its marketing outlay before other investors dip into whatever money is left to cut into production costs. The good news for Universal is that its share of this failure will be relatively modest.
Adds one Hollywood executive who has dealt extensively with China, “There’s no question but that it’s a failure.” 2 movie markets in the world will eventually happen, but it is a misfire, domestically speaking,” says box-office analyst Jeff Bock.
That’s way less than investors had anticipated for the biggest-ever U.S.-China co-production. The film earned $171 million in China (a disappointment) and is expected to top out at about $320 million globally. But Universal also covered Wall‘s global marketing expenses, conservatively estimated at $80 million-plus. The studio funded about 25 percent of the film’s $150 million production budget, the rest coming in equal parts from Legendary Entertainment, China Film Group and Le Vision Pictures.