When martial arts blockbuster Ip Man set regional box offices ringing two years ago, it didn't need a fortune-teller to predict local producers would be quick to bring more of the maestro's escapades to the screen.
Sure enough, 2010 has seen different companies completing a sequel, Ip Man 2, and prequel, A Legend is Born - Ip Man, which opens on June 24. Part III is scheduled for next year; Wong Kar-wai's long-awaited epic (conceived before the brouhaha began) will presumably be completed someday. It's the latest example of a Chinese film tradition: the celluloid bandwagon of a variety more intense than the Hollywood strain.
Riding a trend until it is done to death is neither new nor Asian. But in the early days of Chinese cinema, the cultural homogeneity of audiences, common source pool for script material and close proximity of studios in the major filmmaking centres of Shanghai and Hong Kong ensured competition would be especially fierce for anything perceived as a winning formula.
It was a vogue that predated motion pictures, a phenomenon of the Chinese operatic stage in which a limited repertoire of legends and literary works, and the characters who made them popular, were endlessly recycled and reinvented. The custom continued on celluloid, where viewers never seemed to tire of multiple interpretations of tomes such as the fanciful Journey to the West, the ghostly Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio and the dramatic Dream of the Red Chamber.
These films transferred the subject matter to distinctive locales and eras. Not that novel concepts remained so for long, as evidenced when the contemporary tack taken in Modern Red Chamber Dream was quickly followed by another Hong Kong company's The Red Chamber's New Dream (both 1951).
Matters reached a frenzied peak in 1939-1940 Shanghai, when a major studio would announce a project and a rival would simultaneously rush a similar script into production. Prominent among these 'twin cases' was duelling versions of Three Smiles (1940), in which box office queens Li Lihua and Zhou Xuan played competing variations of servant girl Qiu Xiang.