IT IS ALWAYS deadly to disagree with Jackie Chan, as hundreds of villains in his movies have demonstrated, but I am going to anyway. In an article on the Hong Kong movie industry in May, the action star was quoted as saying, in regard to the poor performance of the Hong Kong movie industry, that 'we can only wait for a miracle'.
Not that I disagree with him on the dire straits that the industry is in, but I do think that there are more things the industry can do than waiting for a miracle to revive what was once the third-largest film producer in the world.
Sure, VCDs, other forms of entertainment, piracy and the long economic downturn contributed to the industry's decline. The total box office receipts of the 100 highest grossing films, according to the Hong Kong, Kowloon & New Territories Motion Picture Industry Association (MPIA), dropped 25 per cent in the 10 years ending in 2001, even without accounting for inflation.
But during the same period, the receipts of non-Hong Kong produced films have increased three times, and by 2001 they accounted for 56 per cent of the box office receipts, up from 13 per cent a decade earlier. Waiting for a miracle is perhaps the last sort of answer we would expect from any chief executive when asked what his company plans to do in response to a dramatically declining market share.
I am well aware that Hong Kong's movie production houses, at this stage at least, simply cannot compete on resources with their US counterparts.
US movies that employ heavy animation and special effects techniques are not something that Hong Kong's companies can justify given the size of their markets. But how do they justify the fact that about 30 per cent of the gross receipts in 2001 were collected by foreign-made movies that are made with modest technology?
The audiences who have flocked to these medium-budget foreign films in Hong Kong has simply outgrown the movie industry in sophistication. They are increasingly demanding entertainment that has a clever, unexpected plot.