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Chinese Movies 中国电影
In 1999, the multi-national production Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon achieved massive success at the Western box office despite being disregarded by some Chinese cinema-goers as pandering to Western tastes. Nevertheless, it provided an introduction to Chinese cinema (and especially the Wuxia genre) for many and increased the popularity of many Chinese films which may have otherwise been relatively unknown to Westerners.
In 2002, Hero was made as a second attempt to produce a Chinese film with the international appeal of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (藏龙卧虎). The cast and crew featured many of the most famous Chinese actors who were also known to some extent in the West, including Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi, Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, directed by Zhang Yimou (张艺谋). The film was a phenomenal success in most of Asia and topped the U.S. box office for two weeks, making enough in the U.S. alone to cover the production costs.
The successes of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero blur what may be called the boundary between Mainland Chinese cinema and a more international-based "Chinese-language cinema". Crouching Tiger, for example, was made by a Taiwanese director (Ang Lee), but its leads include Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland Chinese actors and actresses while the funding is from overseas.
This merging of people, resources, and expertise from three regions (China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) seemed to imply big-budgeted Chinese-language cinema is moving toward an international arena looking to compete with the best Hollywood films. Further examples of films in this would include House of Flying Daggers (2004), The Promise (2005) and The Banquet (2006).
However, tighter-financed Chinese-language cinema are still relatively localized in content as seen in those from Hong Kong, Mainland China and Taiwan, especially in the latter two where many of the films have not yet found international distributors abroad.