Northward Boom: Hong Kong Films’ Renaissance

In the heyday of its film industry, Hong Kong was the world’s second largest film export hub and the third largest film production center. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, reform and opening up in the Chinese mainland and popularization of video recorders enabled Hong Kong movies to flood the vast Chinese mainland market.

In 1974, the Hong Kong comedy Games Gamblers Play was a big hit. The film follows a card shark escaping murder in various surprising ways. It was a typical Hong Kong martial arts comedy in the 1970s. This film helped Hong Kong movies move past the regional limitations of Cantonese and opera films, and become popular across Southeast Asia among emerging middle-class Mandarin speakers. It sparked a new wave of commercial film production in Hong Kong.

In the wake of the “Hong Kong New Wave,” several genres of Hong Kong commercial films like police dramas, martial arts films, comedies and romances started making a profound impact not only in the Chinese mainland and Chinese-speaking regions, but also in Southeast Asia, South Korea and Japan. Throughout Asia and other regions of the world, these films had considerable influence. They were also among the few commercial films to legitimately compete with Hollywood at that time.

Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997 brought historical changes in the methods of expression and cultural connotations in its films. Hong Kong films underwent unprecedented but inevitable drastic changes. A grand wave of Hong Kong films looking north towards the Chinese mainland market began.

Of course, other powerful factors fueled the “going north” movement as well. In the mid-1990s, the digital revolution started sweeping through the Hollywood film industry. Hollywood’s digital effects leapfrogged via films like Jurassic Park, Toy Story and Titanic. The new Star Wars movies around the turn of the century helped lift the global box office to a peak. In contrast, Hong Kong films lost much of their box-office territory in the Chinese mainland, Southeast Asia and other countries and regions that they once dominated. Hong Kong filmmakers never developed a strategy to compete with the spectacular Hollywood digital effects. Whether or not professionals in the film industry are willing to accept the trend and readjust their coordinates and positioning on the Chinese film map, the collective “going north” move has been the only realistic path forward.

In the years since Hong Kong’s return to the motherland, its films’ road northward has not been smooth. Since the mainland began to implement thorough cinema system reform in 2002, the scale of its film market exploded. The box office has rapidly jumped to the second largest in the world, and the Chinese film market quietly welcomed epoch-making changes. During this period, theater attendance in the mainland spread from first and second-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou to third and fourth-tier cities in the central and western regions and even smaller cities. Such a shift has been beyond anyone’s experience in the Hong Kong film industry. Various types of commercial films from Hong Kong have repeatedly run into a wall in the mainland market in these 10 years. Their journey north has been far more difficult than anyone could have imagined.

Not until 2005 did Hong Kong films start to find a resonant rhythm to adapt to the Chinese mainland market after considerable exploration. In 2013, the release of Drug War about mainland police battling drug smuggling marked the onset of genuine integration of Hong Kong films into the Chinese mainland film market.

In recent years, films such as Operation Mekong, Extraordinary Missions and Operation Red Sea, based on heroic stories of patriotic and brave Chinese soldiers and police officers, won considerable acclaim by absorbing elements of successful Hong Kong commercial films. Huge box-office earnings have become standard. Extensive offerings in the Chinese mainland market helped Hong Kong’s commercial films eventually figure out a model and path to suit to the adjustments. By 2020, Hong Kong movies accounted for more than 20 percent of the top 300 movies at the Chinese box office. The box office of Hong Kong movies in the Chinese mainland has grown rapidly in the second decade of the 21st century to around 60 billion yuan (US$ 9.4 billion). The northward trend of Hong Kong films has proven an effective way to renovate its commercial film genres to cater to the mainland market while at the same time inspiring new space for expression.

Construction of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area will undoubtedly help connect Hong Kong films with the historical and cultural source of Hong Kong’s “New Wave” films. Lingnan culture will inject imagination and creativity into the Greater Bay Area by dancing with Hong Kong films. How should Hong Kong cinema seek to express the joys, angers and sorrows of ordinary Chinese people? The opportunities and challenges for Hong Kong films are many. 

The author is an associate research fellow with the Chinese National Academy of Arts.