Flower Drum Song (1961), the first Hollywood film with a mostly Asian cast, was a rare box-office dud for Rodgers and Hammerstein. Was it a coincidence? We look back at the groundbreaking musical.
The 2004 film by Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufmann, starring the unlikely pairing of Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, puts a deliciously surreal twist on the love story.
Bloodsport is not a great movie but it always entertains. The Hong Kong-set action drama is best known for propelling Belgian martial artist Jean-Claude Van Damme into the Hollywood big league.
Calling it a masterpiece might be a stretch but the 2004 time-travel thriller The Butterfly Effect – despite its chaotic plotline – filled a void left by a dearth of quality horror films.
Jet Li received praise for his role as Danny the dog in Luc Besson’s gritty 2005 action movie. While he shone among co-stars such as Morgan Freeman, it didn’t help the martial arts actor crack Hollywood.
12 Years a Slave, director Steve McQueen’s 2013 adaptation of a book about a man sold into slavery, gave an unflinching portrayal of abuses inflicted upon African Americans in the Antebellum South.
Jackie Chan may be a household name today, but it took 15 years of trying and 1995’s Rumble in the Bronx for the Hong Kong martial artist to win over international audiences and become a Hollywood star.
2001’s Rush Hour 2, starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, was a major box office success. Chan hated the film – although not for its crude stereotypes and overt sexism.
Rowan Atkinson plays British spy Johnny English, who travels to Hong Kong to prevent an attack on a Chinese premier, in a film meant to court Chinese audiences but which was packed with stereotypes.
Starring John Cusack, Roland Emmerich’s disaster movie ‘2012’ broke box-office records in China after its release in 2009. But why? It’s hardly a flattering ‘love letter’ to China, as some at the time thought.
Michael Mann’s 2015 film Blackhat – which combines hacking, Chris Hemsworth and Hong Kong to disappointing effect – has plenty of expertly filmed action set pieces, but little else to offer.
Superhero movie Push, starring Chris Evans, harnesses Hong Kong’s unique energy to make the film feel more real than the fantastical Marvel films in which the actor would go on to play Captain America.
About the early life of the Dalai Lama, Martin Scorsese’s 1997 movie Kundun ripped a hole in US-China relations that took years to repair and saw Disney’s business in China stop overnight.
Bait 3D, an Australia-Singapore co-production, is a basic shark-attack film that flopped at the Australian box office but was a huge success in China, helped by its action, 3D shots and lack of politics.
Stephen King’s Boogeyman is brought to life by CGI for the film version in a tense, rather than terrifying, movie that is far better than the recent crop of King adaptations like Pet Sematary and Firestarter.
Jackie Chan, Fan Bingbing and Johnny Knoxville teamed up for Die Hard 2 director Renny Harlin’s buddy-cop film, which was let down by a robotic script, and bombed in the US upon release.
Penelope Cruz, Jessica Chastain and Fan Bingbing lead a powerful female cast in this spy thriller that sadly never lived up to its potential thanks to its lame dialogue, lacklustre set pieces and cliched characters.
Affleck and Matt Damon team up in Air, an oddly directionless film that charts the birth of the Air Jordan sneaker under sports brand Nike. Where is Michael Jordan in all of this?
Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim, inspired by Godzilla movies, was criticised by some in China for having geopolitical undertones, but the director said it was meant as “popcorn entertainment”.
China was unhappy with the movie Seven Years in Tibet, which saw stars Brad Pitt and David Thewlis banned from the country and even put Sony’s multibillion-dollar business empire at risk.
A super-stylised American sci-fi movie shot in China and starring Milla Jovovich, Ultraviolet (2006) had huge potential but bombed at the box office – ‘a criminal waste of time and talent’.
Why this dragon didn’t roar: despite a cast that included Jurassic Park’s Sam Neill, Sino-Australian co-production The Dragon Pearl, with its ‘laughable’ CGI, was a flop.
Dwayne Johnson action movie Skyscraper, despite failing at the US box office, was nevertheless a blueprint for US-China co-production because it courted the Chinese market with respect.
Red Corner, about an American lawyer trapped in a corrupt Chinese legal system, was highly critical of China, something that could have had a lasting impact on its star Richard Gere.
Red Dawn, starring Chris Hemsworth, started out with China as the aggressor, but this was changed to North Korea to appease Chinese audiences – who were never shown the film.
The second Batman film in Christopher Nolan’s trilogy, starring Heath Ledger, Morgan Freeman and Christian Bale, The Dark Knight was partly shot in Hong Kong – but never shown in Chinese cinemas.
Spielberg’s 1987 epic, set in and filmed in Shanghai, doesn’t hold up, fraught as it is with syrupy scenes and unbalanced representation.
With Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Li Bingbing in the cast, and a crew including legendary fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, The Forbidden Kingdom should have been a better film.
Despite co-starring Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh, and having some stunning locations, this US-China film fell totally flat, with one-dimensional characters, awful dialogue and terrible CGI.
The Expendables 2 had been planned as a China-US co-production and was meant to star Donnie Yen Ji-dan alongside Sylvester Stallone. Hasty changes had to be made to the script when that fell through.
