The Chinese are now targeting Hollywood. The Financial Times reports that Chinese interests are looking to merge and acquire Summit Entertainment, the company behind the blockbuster Twilight vampire films, and Colony Capital. If the Chinese pull it off, it's likely to lead to more consolidation in Hollywood with studios already closing or selling non-core divisions specialising in edgier movies.
There is a certain irony here with Beijing maintaining control at home through censorship and limiting the number of foreign films that can be shown in Chinese cinemas to 20 a year.
Marc Graser and Clifford Coonan at Variety say that all this is a way for Chinese brands, like technology company Lenovo, to amplify brand awareness and influence in the West through product placement. "In last summer's "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," one of the new characters in the trilogy is Brains, an Autobot that shape-shifts into a Lenovo ThinkPad Edge Plus laptop – putting China's biggest brand at the heart of the battle with the Decepticons and into the hearts and minds of millions of potential consumers worldwide,'' they write. "Although there are a slew of other Chinese brands in the pic, including clothing chain Meters/bonwe and Shuhua milk, Lenovo is far and away the most noticeable, particularly as Brains is woven into the plot, and the company's sleek, bright white all-in-one PC, the IdeaCentre A300, prominently appears on the desks of several office sets in the film."
In a sense, Chinese investment in Hollywood is just the next stage of what we have seen already with more Sino-US co-productions like the 2010 remake of Karate Kid, starring Jackie Chan and Jaden Smith, produced by Sony Pictures' (SNE) Columbia TriStar and state-owned China Film Group.
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