Blackout
You wouldn't think the local release of Dreamgirls could have been better timed. After months of hype, glowing reviews and big box-office takings around the world, the film opened in Hong Kong last Thursday - just four days after Jennifer Hudson won an Academy Award for best supporting actress.
But things haven't gone according to script. Dreamgirls has been showing on 10 screens to rows of empty seats and took just HK$700,000 by Sunday - putting it in distant third among films that opened last week. The Messengers (29 screens) and The Queen (14 screens) have taken HK$1.89 million and HK$1.63 million, respectively. Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima, a war film nearly all in Japanese, has taken HK$480,000 from just five screens.
Dreamgirls is the latest in a series of films about African-American culture that have flopped in Hong Kong, despite success in the US.
Ray (2003) and Ali (2001) may have won critical acclaim for stars Jamie Foxx and Will Smith, but they hardly set the tills in local cinemas ringing. The same went for 2001's Monster's Ball, about a racist prison warden's affair with the wife of a prisoner whose execution he oversaw. It bombed in Hong Kong, despite Halle Berry winning a best actress Oscar for her performance.
'It's been very hard trying to push films with black actors as lead protagonists,' says one local distributor. Not even big names seem to make much difference, she says.
And the prospects are even gloomier if a film touches on race issues or politics. That may explain why, before his mainstream-friendly thriller Inside Man, Spike Lee's films have never been popular in Hong Kong.
Although Crash, winner of best film at the Oscars last year, wasn't a 'black' film, it addresses racial divisions in the US - and it was months before distributor Edko Films bought it to Hong Kong.
'Probably it's because the issue looks so distant,' says Edko distribution manager Audrey Lee Yuk-lan. 'The film just couldn't resonate with people here. If Crash hadn't got anything at the Oscars, we guess it would have netted only HK$300,000 at most, rather than the HK$2 million we got in the end.'
The Pursuit of Happyness, a real-life story starring Smith and his seven-year-old son, Jaden, will be the next test of the pulling power of films about African-Americans. It opens in Hong Kong later this month.
If black characters from the US don't appeal to local audiences, spare a thought for films with black characters from Africa.
Hotel Rwanda, the story of a hotel manager (Don Cheadle, who was nominated for a best actor Oscar) trying to save Tutsis from being slaughtered in 1994, never even made it to cinema screens in Hong Kong.
The same seems likely for The Last King of Scotland, Kevin McDonald's adaptation of Giles Foden's novel about the monstrosities perpetrated by Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin - even if Forest Whitaker won both an Oscar and a Golden Globe for his turn as the murderous dictator.
A spokeswoman handling Fox Movies releases in Hong Kong - which has local screening rights for the film - says it's still awaiting word from its US headquarters about whether the film will be released here.
