Hollywood d-cinema titles for China dry up

There was great hope for digital cinema in China for many years. The country topped the Asia-Pacific league of digital installations; digital cinema was seen as a way of both beating piracy and showing more Hollywood films than the foreign film quote would otherwise allow and rolling out digital is always easier when you can write it into a Five Year Plan, as I joked. But based on the first day of CineAsia, things are apparently no longer going so well.

At least, that seems to be the message of this article from Screen Daily (China’s digital loop stymied by lack of US product):

The Chinese government started to develop the country’s first digital cinema circuit in 2002 with an initial investment of $25m. Local cinema owners then began to lease equipment - mostly from state-owned China Film Digital - which has been sourced from global digital cinema service suppliers such as Barco, Christie and Panasonic.
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However, few digital cinemas in China are compliant with the Digital Cinema Initiative’s 2K technical standard announced in July 2005. Therefore the US studios have stopped distributing digital versions of their films in China even though such films bypass the country’s import quotas.
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Barco and GDC Technology are business partners with Guangdong Dadi Cinemas and have supplied its six cinemas and 14 screens with 2K - 4K resolution equipment.

But as the US studios say there are not enough screens to make it worthwhile releasing any digital versions.

It appears that no major Hollywood film has been released since Dreamwork's Shark Tale in April 2005. That's over a year without a digital titles from Hollywood! And that's not the only bad news:

Separately from d-cinema expansion in China’s major cities, China’s Film Bureau is rolling out cheaper, lower-resolution e-cinema in smaller cities and rural villages.

Good news for small villages, as long as they don't want to watch Eragon or Bond, but not good if you want a global digital market based on one standard.