Jarome Matthew, a 36-year-old Canadian who has been in Beijing for seven years, has been increasingly disappointed at the theaters lately.
As a moviegoer who has watched many Chinese films, he thinks that there have been few good Chinese movies out this year.
The last Chinese film he watched is Book of Love (2016), a romance that starred Tang Wei and Wu Xiubo, which was released on April 29.
"It is a terrible movie. The writer assumes that audience will believe ridiculous things that make no sense," said Matthew, who works as a music producer and also does sound design for films. "Chinese filmmakers are not experienced in this movie genre (romance). Watch Pretty Woman (1990) or The Notebook (2004) and compare it to Book of Love, you might know what I want to say."
China's film industry has seen tremendous growth in box office revenue. Recent years have seen several domestic films breaking box office records. For example, Breakup Buddies (2014) was the highest earner in 2014 with 1.1 billion yuan. Monster Hunt (2015) earned 2.4 billion yuan ($0.36 billion) at the box office, the highest among all the films nationwide in 2015, according to douban.com, a popular social media platform in China.
However, according to a China Culture Daily report, starting from April, the growth of the movie market has slowed down with a slip at the box office compared with 2015. July and August are the designated "domestic film protection months" this year. During these months, fewer foreign films are released, so box office growth is usually expected. However, this time around there seems to be a trending decline following the earlier months, which has aroused public concern that China's film market is approaching a turning point.
Foreigners and film practitioners in China interviewed by Metropolitan think that the influx of hot capital in China's film industry has led to a proliferation of subpar movies. According to them, the slowdown might be a sign that audiences have developed more mature tastes, and there is still cause to be optimistic about China's film market.
Western vs Chinese logic
Matthew thinks that many of the Chinese films he has seen make no sense and are very poorly directed.
Sometimes, he would ask his Chinese friends why this is such a common problem. They told him that no matter how bad a Chinese movie is, a lot of people will still watch it.
"I totally cannot understand it. It is ridiculous," he said.
His friends' theory has been proven on many occasions. According to douban.com's rating system, Chinese films such as Skiptrace (2016), Forever Young (2015), and Tiny Times 4 (2015) scored poorly among filmgoers and critics, but they still made a considerable amount of money at the box office: 0.8, 0.3, and 0.4 billion yuan respectively.
"Many Chinese [screenwriters], especially those for romantic films, seem to think they can have a very wide creative license, and the audience will believe anything they decide to write," he said.
Matthew also thinks that Chinese fantasy, adventure, science fiction and animated films are really immature and underdeveloped, perhaps partly because they're more difficult to make, and certain topic restrictions in China make creating a good plot difficult, he said.
Last year, he really looked forward to Monster Hunt (2015), a fantasy movie that was directed by Raman Hui and released on July 16. However, although the film got the highest box office that year, after watching it, he was very disappointed.
"Though there was a lot of creativity in this movie, many of the characters were not likable, and the story dragged on instead of having a logical sequence of events. It seemed confused about exactly what story it was trying to tell," said Matthew.
