By Tom Fowdy
The development of China's economy and consumer lifestyle has naturally propelled the rise of its creative industries, especially film. Although America has long dominated global cinema and shaped global culture with the iconography of Hollywood, China has in recent years developed one of the largest domestic cinema markets on earth producing films that are capable of competing with global blockbusters in terms of revenue.
In 2025, the animated Chinese fantasy film Ne Zha 2, inspired by China's mythology, earned over US$2 billion at the box office and became the highest-grossing animated film of all time, beating every single production made by global giants Disney Pixar and Universal's Dreamworks. In fact, only James Cameron's Avatar films and Titanic, as well as Marvel's Avengers, can say they have beaten the Chinese blockbuster.
With this in mind, the 49th Hong Kong International Film Festival is set to debut on April 10th. The festival, which is one of the world's largest, will feature almost 200 films made across 69 countries and is a massive opportunity to showcase Chinese language cinema and films from the Chinese mainland to the world, with many new productions from across Asia also set to have their premiere at the festival.
The film festival shows the ongoing importance of the city as a global cultural and commercial hub, as well as an icon of Chinese culture as a gateway between the mainland and the world. Hong Kong's film industry has always shined brightly and during the 20th century, it served as the primary means for Westerners to discover the Chinese world when the country as a whole was less developed and geopolitical tensions were higher during the divide of the Cold War. One just has to go to the "Avenue of Stars" in Tsim Tsa Shui, Kowloon, and glance at the statue of Bruce Lee to gaze upon these glories, and how the film has shaped the romanticism of China and its culture.
Now, with the development of the mainland film industry, new opportunities have opened for Hong Kong as it has become the center stage of a boom in Chinese language cinema which allows the city, as it has with trade, commerce, and finance, to showcase China and its cultural products to the rest of the world. Many critics have wrongly contended that the passage of national security laws would undermine creativity in Hong Kong by eroding "creative freedom," and therefore its film industry, but the size and strength of the city's upcoming festival, as well as the success of mainland Chinese films, show this is not the case at all.
These people have been determined to push the narrative that Hong Kong is "dead" or in "decline", a great deal of it is politically and ideologically motivated, but the huge enthusiasm for the Hong Kong festival illustrates this is not based in reality. The city itself remains one of Asia's most influential film hubs and not only that, China as a nation is now showing that it has a globally competitive film industry, one which is taking Chinese culture, mythology, and folklore, and transforming them into blockbuster hits which are capable of the highest levels of success.
For Hong Kong, this is an opportunity to in fact reach new levels, with the city being able to propel itself through deeper integration with the mainland's film industry while accessing and benefitting from the colossal size of the Chinese market for its own regionalized productions. If they say in geopolitics we live in a "multipolar world" whereby there are multiple co-existing superpowers, then it is only true that this is reflected in terms of industries too. Hollywood, once a unipolar power, does not have the century-long monopoly it has enjoyed, but a great deal still needs to be done to take Chinese blockbusters "out of China" and show them to the world as a whole, and that is the role Hong Kong must perform in.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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