In 2024, Hong Kong films created two box-office records. What’s even better is that more and more viewers favor thoughtful and critical depictions of the real world over action flicks, writes Amy Mullins.
At a Filmart panel in 2023, someone asked director Jack Ng if Hong Kong cinema was all set for a renaissance. Ng’s A Guilty Conscience was the locally produced box-office champion at the time, the highest grosser among a string of theatrical hits since 2022. The list includes Sunny Chan’s Table for Six, Ng Yuen-fai’s Warriors of Future, and Ho Cheuk-tin’s The Sparring Partner.
“This is very much a beginning. We need a little bit more time — say, three to five years — before we can say for certain whether this is an actual spring of Hong Kong cinema,” Ng said. He went on to remind his audience that as with any renaissance, the onus lies on the younger and upcoming filmmakers to lead the charge, and that programs like the First Feature Film Initiative were providing opportunities to nurture them. “I’m confident there will be loads of new directors emerging soon.”
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There are scores of factors that could nip any rebirth in the bud — trade wars, rising production costs, a dearth of production labor, and enigmatic censors. But two years down the line, Ng’s fond hopes for the future of Hong Kong cinema could well be on the way to materializing.
Two new records in a year
In 2024, Hong Kong films fared more or less on a par with those produced by the world’s noteworthy film industries. Total receipts came in at just over HK$1.3 billion ($167 million), 6.2 percent below 2023 according to the Hong Kong Motion Picture Industry Association. However, within that total, receipts for Hong Kong films were up 5.5 percent, and three of the city’s top five grossers were locally made films — Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine being the other two.
Admittedly, the year started on a shaky note when Table for Six 2 — the sequel to the HK$79-million-grossing Mid-Autumn dramedy Table For Six — landed during Chinese New Year and racked up just HK$37 million. That’s a solid return, generally speaking, but for a starry holiday tentpole, it was an underperformance. Things took a turn for the better in May, when Soi Cheang’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In posted the best opening day ever on its way to a robust HK$108 million. It went on to earn a slot at Cannes and has claimed nine of the just-announced Asian Film Award nominations, including best film.
Its status as the biggest local hit of all time lasted only until Anselm Chan’s The Last Dance came out in November. Starring Dayo Wong and Michael Hui, the film took the city by storm, earning HK$145 million — and counting — and three of its own AFA nods. Rounding out the top five were Anthony Pun’s disaster thriller Cesium Fallout (HK$42 million) and The Moon Thieves (HK$28 million), a charming heist comedy starring multiple members of the boy band Mirror.
The year’s top two — a gritty, fantastical crime thriller set inside the former Kowloon Walled City and a deliberately paced family drama interrogating how religion actively oppresses women and has the power to divide families — probably owe their geneses to Hong Kong’s grim dual years, 2019 and 2020. It was a time when filmmakers were looking inward and viewers craved the comfort of their favorite blanket. Unsurprisingly, many of the films released in 2024 offer a nuanced view of challenging times and are finding favor with the audience. Walled In has a thread of nostalgia running through it, set as it is in the ’80s, when the city was on the cusp of change and the Kowloon Walled City had not been demolished. There are scores of “I remember those!” moments tucked in the film’s meticulous production design and vivid art direction.
Conversely, the philosophical Last Dance looks forward. Chan challenges a patriarchal system that punishes anyone who is not a straight man, through a family drama that audiences of all creeds will recognize. The film also celebrates the uniquely Hong Kong funeral rite of “breaking Hell’s gates”. In balancing a need for change with respect for tradition, Chan won his audience members over by trying not to judge them. The film’s star, Wong — who has headlined one of the biggest-grossing films of the year for the third year running — was just one factor in the film’s success.
A diverse catalog
Hong Kong’s glory days as Asia’s trailblazer film industry are a thing of the past. The baton was passed on to South Korea, and may actually have already moved on to the burgeoning Indonesian industry. A happy side effect of Last Dance and Walled In was the bodies it drew into cinemas. Despite crossing the HK$100-million line, Hong Kong remains an art-house industry of modestly budgeted — and often publicly funded — films that rely on playing at festivals and theatrical distribution.
Boutique producer and distributor Golden Scene and production house Pica Pica Media have become indie powerhouses by adhering to a credo of universality through specificity. By staying laser-focused on intimate, localized storytelling, indie producers are carving out a niche for themselves and sometimes garnering international attention.
Walled In raked in HK$130 million from global sales. However, it’s the resonant themes, the celebration of Hong Kong’s generic features and shameless nostalgia that have been buoying cinema of late. It has to be said though that Hong Kong is producing more diverse films than ever before. On that front, 2024 was a banner year.
Philip Yung returned to form with the dreamlike and intensely human Papa, about a man (Lau Ching-wan) trying to live with the aftermath of violence in his family and finding that he and his son are caught between the legal system and the medical establishment. Ho Miu-ki turned what could have been a rote weepie about a woman scammed on a dating app into an exploration of empowerment and self-determination in Love Lies. It made for a nice companion piece to the similarly themed Blossoms Under Somewhere, Riley Yip’s coming-of-age debut about how we communicate. Albert and Herbert Leung sought to reimagine and reposition the action-film genre to make a bittersweet and reflexive drama — Stuntman. Jill Leung’s supernatural romance Last Song For You brought together two stars from different Cantopop generations — Ekin Cheng and Ian Chan of Mirror, playing a songwriter wrestling with depression, regret and second chances. How the law is or isn’t applied was the subject of the muted All Shall Be Well, about a woman who loses her partner and her home because the law doesn’t recognize LGBTQ relationships. Donnie Yen’s The Prosecutor closed out the year with a more conventional action film about a public prosecutor who ends up espousing the cause of a wrongly accused defendant. And despite the pall Mabel Cheung’s To My Nineteen-Year-Old Self cast over documentaries, Jessey Tsang’s Winter Chants, Leung Yik-ho’s Once Upon a Time in HKDSE and Robin Lee’s Four Trails peeled back the layers on some of the city’s more enigmatic institutions to general acclaim.
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There will always be action cinema in Hong Kong, and beyond the borders, audiences still want it. High Forces, I Did It My Way, Crisis Negotiators and Customs Frontline all fit the noisy cops-and-robbers bill, but local audiences seem to have moved on, turning toward thoughtful and critical considerations of their worlds. Phenomena like Walled In and Last Dance are lightning in a bottle and impossible to duplicate. As the industry continues to reshape itself, chances are high that Hong Kong audiences will have plenty to respond to in 2025.
