City Hong Kong Showbiz Latest News and Updates

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Asian premiere of Soi Cheang’s “Mad Fate” is just one of three locally-produced movies that have been set as the opening and closing titles of the upcoming Hong Kong International Film Festival. “Mad Fate” is joined in the festival opening slot on March 30 by “Elegies,” Ann Hui’s documentary portrayal of the topography of contemporary local poetry, which will have its world premiere. The closing film, another world premiere, is “Vital Sign,” an affecting drama directed by Cheuk Wan-chi and starring Louis Koo, Yau Hawk-sau, and Angela Yuen, which will wrap up proceedings on 10 April. In total, the festival has programmed some 200 films from 64 countries and territories. These include nine world premieres, six international premieres, and 67 Asian premieres.

This year’s Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) will open with two local films – Soi Cheang’s noir thriller Mad Fate and the world premiere of Ann Hui’s Elegies, a documentary about contemporary local poetry.

online petition to remove Hong Kong actor Donnie Yen as a presenter at this year’s Oscars due to his support of the Chinese government.The actor, who stars opposite Keanu Reeves in John Wick: Chapter 4, is set to present an award at the 95th Academy Awards which takes place in Los Angeles on Sunday (March 12).As reported by the BBC, the petition was set up by Hong Kong activist Tong Wai-hung, who claims the decision “shows contempt for the people of Hong Kong” and that Yen’s presence will “damage the image and reputation of the film industry”.Speaking to GQ last month, Yen doubled down on his opposition to the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.“It wasn’t a protest, okay, it was a riot,” Yen said. “I’m not going to be here talking about how to change how people feel about it.

International Women's Day is a time to celebrate the phenomenal female role models in our society fighting for much-needed change. The global holiday wouldn't be complete without mentioning the mesmerising Michelle Yeoh who has been a source of inspiration for many women.The Malaysian star, 60, is truly a force to be reckoned with on the silver screen. She enjoyed a meteoric rise to stardom back in the 90s after starring in a series of Hong Kong action films and has since gone on to scoop endless awards including a Golden Globe Award for her leading role in Everything Everywhere All at Once.WATCH: Hollywood A-listers arrive at the 2023 SAG AwardsBut it wasn't all plain sailing.

A new snooker hall, designed to appeal to recent arrivals from Hong Kong, could open opposite the Apollo music venue in Ardwick.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief “Cyber Heist,” a crime thriller directed by Hong Kong’s Wong Hing-fan (“I’m Livin’ It”) and scripted by Soi Cheang (aka Cheang Pou Soi), took the top spot at the mainland Chinese box office over the weekend. It earned a very modest $6.2 million, according to data from consultancy Artisan Gateway. But that was enough to win on the quietest weekend since January’s Lunar New Year holiday season. “Cyber Heist” stars Aaron Kwok as a cyber security engineer who develops a state-of-the-art firewall that is capable of fending off online attacks against the global financial system. But he does not realize that in doing so he has stepped into a minefield that is even more dangerous. The picture also stars Lam Ka-tun and Simon Yam.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Already the highest grossing local film in its home market, courtroom drama, “A Guilty Conscience” has broken into Hong Kong’s all-time top ten box office ranking with a cumulative of HK$107 million ($13.7 million). Data from Hong Kong Box Office Ltd. shows the film achieving the feat after just 41 days in cinemas and coming within HK$1 million ($150,000) of overtaking “Top Gun: Maverick.” The data firm noted that the last time a Hong Kong film got this far was with fantasy-action-comedy “Kung Fu Hustle” in 2004. Since then, it has been overtaken by a fleet of Hollywood titles. Hong Hong’s current top ten is headed by “Avengers: Endgame” and includes six Marvel movies, the two “Avatar” titles and “Titanic.”

After three years of taking place entirely online, Hong Kong International Film & TV Market (Filmart), the largest content market in Asia before the pandemic, is finally returning as a fully-fledged in-person event (March 13-16, 2023). 

At previous in-person editions of Filmart, Hong Kong’s major film companies, including Edko Films, Emperor Motion Pictures (EMP), One Cool Group, Universe Films and Media Asia, always anchored the trade show floor with huge, elaborate booths promoting the latest Hong Kong films, animation and TV series. 

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Martial arts veteran Sammo Hung is to be presented with a lifetime achievement honor at the upcoming Asian Film Awards. The ceremony is back as an in-person event after a two-year absence and shifts back to Hong Kong after previously being held in Hong Kong, Macau and Busan. Hung is expected to accept the award on Sunday March 12 at the Hong Kong Palace Museum. “I’m so happy and surprised that I can still win awards these days, especially an award that affirms my entire performing career,” said Hung in a forwarded statement. He has a career as actor, action choreographer, director and producer that stretches some 60 years.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent CNN on Monday went live from a new state-of-the-art broadcasting facility in Abu Dhabi being touted as a new chapter in the network’s commitment to the Middle East.  The new high-tech CNN bureau, with a 10-million-pixel video wall and a suite of fully robotic HD cameras, is located on Abu Dhabi’s artificial Yas Island in the new Yas Creative Hub established to lure media industries to Abu Dhabi by twofour54, the government entity which is implementing the UAE’s capital city’s media and entertainment industry effort. The new CNN hub, which also includes four editing suites and a modern open-plan newsroom, increases the scale and scope of its UAE operation boosting Abu Dhabi’s role as “one of the network’s key international production hubs, alongside Atlanta, New York, London, and Hong Kong,” CNN said in a statement.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Hong Kong courtroom drama film “A Guilty Conscience” edged aside Chinese and Hollywood tentpole films to top the mainland China box office in its opening weekend. According to data from consultancy service Artisan Gateway, the film earned $8.5 million (RMB58.4 million) in its opening three days between Friday and Sunday. “The Wandering Earth 2,” which has been in cinemas for over a month, earned $7.4 million to elevate its cumulative total to $568 million. “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” which opened on top a week earlier, collected $7.0 million, giving it a 10-day cumulative of $31.4 million.

What Priscilla So and Brian Hung don’t know about beer probably isn’t worth knowing. So Priscilla has exactly the beer in mind to go with the Hong Kong-style french toast they serve at Harcourt, their new pub in Altrincham.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Berlin Film Festival is once again finding house room for Hong Kong’s most commercially successful enfant terrible, Soi Cheang, aka Cheang Pou Soi, who previously brought film noir “Limbo” to the Berlinale. This time he attends with “Mad Fate,” a film about destiny that may be Cheang’s most bloodthirsty, but which the director says is intended to be inspirational. It plays in the Berlinale Special section. Born in Macau, Cheang developed his career at the feet of Ringo Lam, Andrew Lau, Joe Ma, Wilson Yip and Johnnie To, the great stylists of the crime and action film genre across the Pearl River estuary in Hong Kong. To, who is on the Berlin jury this year, is also a producer on “Mad Fate” through his Makerville label.

Hong Kong regulators have ordered local free-to-air TV and radio broadcasters to carry 30 minutes of national education and identity and National Security Law programming each week. 

EXCLUSIVE: Happening writer-director Audrey Diwan has recalibrated her English-language debut Emmanuelle, which is a working title. She has set Noémie Merlant (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) to star in a film that will begin production September in Hong Kong.

Subscribers to the Disney+ streaming service in Hong Kong won’t see yet another episode of The Simpsons, the latest one for referring to forced labor in China.

EXCLUSIVE: Producer Scott Einbinder (Killer Joe) has launched LA-based management and production company 5X Media.

Japanese studio Toei announced today that its total box office revenue reached a record Yen32.56BN (US$246.6M) for the calendar year 2022, partly thanks to the strong performances of anime blockbusters One Piece Film Red and The First Slam Dunk. 

Hong Kong’s box office managed to stage a partial recovery in the second half of 2022, despite cinemas being closed for nearly four months earlier in the year, due to US titles including Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way Of Water and a strong line-up of local movies.

EXCLUSIVE: Released in August, Louis Koo’s sci-fi action thriller Warriors Of Future has become not just the highest-grossing local film in Hong Kong ever, but the highest-grossing Asian film ever released in the territory, with a gross of HK$81.7M (US$10.5M). The film also raked in $100m in China over the summer and is currently number four in Netflix’s global ranking of non-English language films after launching worldwide on December 2.

Jackie Chan made a rare on-stage appearance at the Red Sea Film Festival Thursday, where he told fans that he is currently in talks to make a fourth Rush Hour movie.

EXCLUSIVE: Pan-regional streaming service Viu, owned by Hong Kong telco and media group PCCW, has been one of the biggest local success stories in Southeast Asia, holding its own against the entrance of global giants including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+.

Over the course of 144 minutes, Philip Yung’s true-crime drama Where the Wind Blows covers an awful lot of ground. An epic in the style Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in New York, it pairs Asian superstars Tony Leung and Aaron Kwok in a story spanning several decades of police corruption in Hong Kong during its time as a British colony. The detail is sometimes dense, but the tone turns playful and refreshingly light at times, and there’s even a memorable musical routine for “The God of Dance” Kwok.

The mid-80s were magical for Ke Huy Quan. Not only was he chosen by Steven Spielberg to co-star with Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the young Vietnamese-American actor followed that up with The Goonies too. But with very few roles for Asian actors at that time, Quan decided to stop acting and pursue a career behind the scenes. Here, Quan reflects on his time away from the spotlight, how the 2018 comedy Crazy Rich Asians was a personal game-changer, and the deeply humbling experience of his return in Everything Everywhere All at Once.

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” star Michelle Yeoh has been named recipient of the International Star Award, Actress at the Palm Springs International Film Awards, the Palm Springs International Film Society announced on Tuesday.The award will be given to Yeoh on Jan. 5, 2023 at the Palm Springs Convention Center, as part of the ceremony that will kick off the 12-day Palm Springs International Film Festival.Yeoh is a veteran Hong Kong Malaysian actress whose films include “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “Memoirs of a Geisha,” “Crazy Rich Asians” and the 1990s Hong Kong films that made her an action star.

Taiwanese filmmaker Chan Ching-lin’s Coo-Coo 043 was awarded best narrative feature at the Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan on Saturday night, while Hong Kong crime drama Limbo, directed by Soi Cheang, won the biggest number of awards with four prizes. 

EXCLUSIVE: Jason Wong, who starred alongside Matthew McConaughey, Hugh Grant and Charlie Hunnam in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentleman, is exploring Hong Kong’s most notorious gangster in a new narrative podcast series.

Hong Kong’s government is introducing two new funding schemes under the Hong Kong Film Development Council (HKFDC) aimed at boosting co-productions with other Asian countries and to support the production of streaming content in Hong Kong. The ‘Hong Kong-Asian Film Collaboration Funding Scheme’ will hand out grants of up to HK$9M (US$1.15M) to a maximum of eight films that are co-produced by Hong Kong filmmakers and their counterparts in Asian countries. Applicants will be able to seek other investors in cases where the production budget exceeds the grant. The ‘Content Development Scheme for Streaming Platforms’ will be conducted through a competition to select eight production teams to develop series for streaming platforms.

Netflix has announced a slate of Chinese-language films and series, headlined by fantasy series Agent From Above, which the streamer says “boasts extensive visual effects that are seldom seen in a local series”.

House of the Dragon has smashed HBO’s SVoD ratings records in Europe, Warner Bros Discovery has claimed.

The Foreign Secretary has demanded a top-level explanation from China after 'apparent scenes of violence' against Hong Kong pro-democracy protestors in Manchester.

An investigation has been launched after a protest erupted into violence outside the Chinese Consulate in Manchester on Sunday afternoon (October 16). Police were called to the incident, which involved pro-democracy Hong Kong protestors, outside the Consulate General of the People's Republic of China in Rusholme.

Rebecca Souw Achieving a balance between artistic creativity and commercial appeal has been a key component of the success of the Korean film and TV industries, said senior executives at the Asin Contents & Film Market, held this week as part of the Busan International Film Festival. Leading U.S. producer Ted Hope said that “Being audience focused but ambitiously creating authored work,” is significant and that Korean filmmakers are able to tap into a wide range of emotions. Yang Yoomin, a Korean producer who has worked with hit filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho, explained why such a discussion was important. She gave the examples of the Hong Kong and Japanese film industries which have both at times enjoyed international success, but which have recently been eclipsed. Hope said that Hong Kong films and Japanese animation are at opposite ends of the spectrum stretching from commerce and art films, but said that Korean stories demonstrate a balance between authorship and audience-focused approaches.

EXCLUSIVE: Former Legendary Entertainment executive Vasco Xu is joining forces with Hong Kong business exec Brian Cheng and Chinese venture capitalist Sun Ge to launch a Los Angeles and Beijing-based international production venture, Conqueror Entertainment. Cheng and Sun will both serve as Co-Founders, with Xu as Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer, overseeing corporate affairs, creative development, production, marketing, distribution and franchise management. Cheng is a member of one of Hong Kong’s biggest business families, while Sun is the founder Chinese VC company Grains Valley. Xu said the company will develop and produce feature films and series, both in English and Chinese, for the international and domestic Chinese market.