Hong Kong auteurs ready to roll on coproductions

The filmmaking techniques employed in the city's action movies are highly valued by mainland audiences.

Last year, action movies took four positions among seven Hong Kong-mainland coproductions in the top 20 blockbusters list.

Hong Kong director Dante Lam's Operation Mekong was the most prominent, pocketing 1.18 billion yuan.

Chen Tak-sum, a veteran Hong Kong action movie director, has embraced the dynamics of cross-border productions: "Action films are a relatively good fit when it comes to cross-cultural productions."

Chen's latest cross-border title Kung Fu Jungle, starring Donnie Yen and Wang Baoqiang, did well with global audiences, generating more than $100 million in worldwide box-office revenue, according to Box Office Mojo, which tracks box-office records.

This is especially true for the mainland. "The (martial) arts fights between characters, together with a reasonably straightforward storyline, can break the language and cultural barriers across the border," he said.

Crafting a whole

As much as many coproductions are setting the bar for plentiful returns in the mainland, filmmakers never consider them easy money.

Looking back, not all epic coproductions have been a guarantee of success. The Great Wall, the Sino-US movie directed by Zhang Yimou with a budget of more than $150 million, wound up a box-office flop. Industry observers believe it lost more than $75 million.

"The crux of making bestselling, cross-cultural movies is to find a topic global audiences really care about and are interested in," said Chen Yiqi, chairman of the Sil-Metropole Organisation, a Hong Kong production company.

"You can't simply win over viewers from other parts of the world just by casting a mixture of actors from the mainland and abroad."