Why the fractured Chinese market will never buy your movie?
Most likely fresh from reading Joe Studwell's China Dream, an anonymous Hollywood executive was quoted by LA Times writer Bruce Wallace in December 2005, saying, "People have been waiting for China to open up since Marco Polo." " It is wrong...to assume that just because the Communist Party is slowly relaxing its grip over its markets that China will someday become an open media market. 'People forget...It's not just a Communist Party thing. It's a Chinese cultural thing.'" China will never buy from you. They'll copy your IP and sell it to their own markets.
In the same article Wallace goes on to say:
Excerpts:
In the same article Wallace goes on to say:
Rupert Murdoch, who in early 2004 gave a speech proclaiming that "the potential for China to become a new global center for media and entertainment is slowly becoming more real." By last September, one month after Beijing's decision to re-tighten regulatory controls on foreign media, Murdoch was publicly lamenting that News Corp.'s China business had hit a "brick wall." When it came to foreign media, he complained, China's political leadership was "quite paranoid about what gets through."All this reminds me of what Simon Cowell remarked to Larry King in March this year when asked about the prohibition of "American Idol" like shows in China. Says Cowell:
"Well, because it's a democracy, isn't it? You know, I mean, it's the public voting. So you can understand why they're getting slightly nervous about it. Because it wasn't our show in China, it was the laughing cow, so-and-so, so-and-so competition. And the public got to vote. And suddenly there were demos, and it was democracy. And I think the government went, we don't want this. So then they put out a stupid comment like that. You know? It's that we must control the public. Crazy.
I am not a China believer, yet. AP reports on Chinese TV stations rampant piracy.
Chinese filmmakers accuse TV stations of film piracyExcerpts:
BEIJING — Chinese moviemakers are accusing Chinese TV stations of becoming part of the nation's thriving movie piracy industry.The Chinese Movie Copyright Association says TV stations here air up to 1,500 pirated Chinese movies a year, costing studios up to $9.4 million in lost revenues, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Sunday.
"The number of movies illegally aired is startling — more than 100 in the first six months of the year, and most of them are very recent," Meng Yu, the association's legal director, was quoted as saying.
The accusation adds a new wrinkle to complaints that China is the world's leading source of illegally copied movies.
Beijing is under pressure from its trading partners to stamp out the piracy. But China's own studios say the damage to them is even greater than to their foreign competitors as pirates rob them of their key domestic market.
In July, China Educational TV Station was ordered to pay $6,000 to another Chinese channel for showing one of its movies without permission, Xinhua said.
