China tops global box office

Rise of patriotic works

In the early 1990s when China started to import Hollywood blockbusters, a major concern centered on how local talent with limited resources could compete.

The picture, literally, has completely changed. In line with the domestic audience's greater spending power and love of their own culture and history, more visually arresting blockbusters, based on real stories or movies delving into the country's history for plotlines, were released, collectively contributing to the emergence of what researchers call "new mainstream movies".

Exemplifying the latest and biggest such breakthrough, The Battle at Lake Changjin, reportedly the most expensive film ever made in China, has raked in, to date, an astounding box office of around 5.77 billion yuan since its release on Sept 30, reported China Film News.

An epic movie, marking Chinese People's Volunteers' courage and sacrifice during the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea (1950-53), it gathers a number of China's top film specialists and exemplifies the successful way to lure cinemagoers with entertaining and informative offerings.

"Propelled by China's preferential policies, local audience's transforming tastes as well as reforms in the film industry, a slew of patriotic films have emerged in recent years, forming a distinctive part of the global film landscape," says Fan Zhizhong, a professor and also executive director of the film and television development institute with Zhejiang University.

"Those films have also made a breakthrough in developing characters. Most of them have featured protagonists that are 'ordinary people', employing a more personal and humanized perspective to examine the milestone chapters of Chinese history or the transformation in the new era, making the stories more relatable to the audience," adds Fan.

Another factor, Fan notes, has been that many of Hong Kong's top filmmakers have opted to work in the Chinese mainland and their creative filming techniques have given movies an added dimension, as seen in Tsui Hark's 2014 offering The Taking of Tiger Mountain.