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).