Chinese Speaking
Last weekend I decided to take a look at mainland China’s box office recovery from the inside and took the ferry across to Shenzhen to watch some movies. I saw two Chinese films in multiplexes in the Nanshan district – creature feature The Meg 2: The Trench, a Sino-US collaboration
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So there I was thinking that Streamlined could safely take a few months off over the summer – nothing big was likely to happen; instead of which Hollywood has gone on strike, the world is on fire (not in a good way), and a brilliant marketing gimmick has convinced everyone to
Middle East
Part Two of Streamlined’s Cannes 2023 recap looks at China’s return to international markets, funding for arthouse content in the Middle East and the growing power of the South Asian diaspora audience in the US and Canada. 4. China Is Back..Sort Of One territory that wasn’t
Africa
When storm clouds and rain were lashing Cannes in the first week, it was easy to think of all the negative forces impacting the market – global streamers upending international distribution, only to savagely cut spending when it hit their bottom line; writers on strike in the US, soon to be
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It’s been an interesting week with the Writers Guild of America (WGA) calling a strike of its members, just a few weeks before the world descends on Cannes to trade new independent film packages. I won’t go into the reasons for the strike here as they’ve been
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Now the Cannes film festival (May 16-27) line-up is mostly announced, it’s safe to say it’s one of the most internationally diverse selections for years, across both the Official Selection and the parallel sections, although the choice of an opening film starring Johnnie Depp, Maiwenn’s Jeanne du
Korea & Japan
Like many writers around the world right now, I’ve been distracted in recent weeks by playing with GPT-4, the technology that is making many creative types start thinking about retirement or a second career. But I’ve also been researching the K-pop industry, which led to an idea of
Chinese Speaking
This edition of Streamlined marks exactly one year since I launched this newsletter to summarise and analyse events in the film & streaming content industries across Asia Pacific, Africa and the Middle East. I haven’t managed to keep to a weekly schedule, especially since joining Deadline, and haven’t
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Back to India, where there has never been so much content being made, and perhaps never been so many complex political and commercial factors impacting that content. It feels as if the pandemic never happened in India, as the country is producing a staggering range of films and television – from
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I’m not sure why I thought that compiling a list of upcoming projects from Southeast Asia, and looking at recent tweaks to the region’s funding programmes, would be a quick and easy job to do. It has taken weeks to compile, and while I finally stopped at 30
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Let’s face it – even with Avatar: The Way Of Water bringing some much needed year-end box office cheer, 2022 has been a bit of a depressing year. The roaring ‘20s post-pandemic recovery we were promised has yet to materialise. So I’m going to end the year with an
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Two seemingly unrelated stories I reported on for Deadline this week reflect the worrying direction of travel in post-pandemic India. On Monday evening, Berlin Golden Bear-winning filmmaker Nadav Lapid, head of the competition jury at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Goa, stood alone on stage at the