China makes real on its digital cinema promise

I've always joked that the easiest way to make digital cinema happen is if you can write it into your Five Year Plan ('Comrades, a digital cinema within bicycling distance for every farmer, worker and soldier!' as Mao might have said). And for a while China was at the forefront with digital cinema through the government-led 100 digital screen test network.

Unfortunately the timing was such that the deployment that started in 2002 took place in the middle of the 1.3K to 2K transition and the growth stalled after the first 100. In the last year, however, there are renewed sign that China might once again take a Great Digital Cinema Leap Forward. The latest piece of news is that China Film Group and the somewhat unlikely partner Shougang Steel are to build 2,000 digital screens. This is what the Hollywood Reporter had to report on it:

Dubbed China Film Group & Shougang Digital Cinema Building Co. Ltd., the joint venture, first unveiled to local media last week, believes the use of digital cinema technology will help stem some of China's rampant movie piracy problem.

Last year, about 93% of the discs sold in China were illegal copies, costing moviemakers upward of $2.6 billion in lost ticket sales, according to MPA estimates.

"The goal of our cooperation is to build digital cinemas across the country," Han Sanping, CFGC's board chairman told the official Xinhua news agency. "We will build about 2,000 new digital screens before the end of 2008."

But it looks like the construction might stop before it's even began due to the fact that a construction ban kicks in ahead of the Beijing 2008 Olympics. But it is a much needed growth for the exhibition sector in China. From the same article:

China now has about 3,000 modern movie screens, only 124 of which were digital in 2005, according to a recent report from the Nielsen Co. and Screen Digest. The number of digital screens in China rose from just 93 in 2004, with growth led by China Film, with 91 digital screens, and Stellar Film, with 27.

China Film's digital screens account for roughly half of their total 180 screens, a total that makes it the second-largest distributor in the country after Shanghai United Cinema Circuit, the report said.

What will they show on the digital screens? Well, in other Chinese digital cinema news ScreenDaily reports that Shrek 3 will get a digital-only release on 150 screens in China, which means that Hollywood titles are starting to return in digital after the studios put a halt to digital screenings, again because of piracy issues.