ABSTRACT
With a prolific domestic market and a fast-expanding international audience base (Bose 2006), India’s popular Hindi movie industry, commonly referred to as Bollywood, has ascended phenomenally in terms of its growth and global appeal over the past two decades. On the other hand, the recent history of the Hong Kong film industry, often known as the “Hollywood of the East” (Ciecko 2006: 171), has been dramatic, with many ups and downs: after one of its worst slumps in the 1970s (Curtin 2007) the industry attained the peak of commercial success and emerged as a strong foreign player through the 1980s and 1990s. It started to decline from the mid-1990s, but in early 2000 saw a fresh lease of life when two of its movies, Infernal Affairs (Lau and Mak 2002) and Kung Fu Hustle (Chow 2004), turned box office winners on both home and international turfs (Wing-Fai 2008).
