The development of China’s economy and consumer lifestyle has naturally propelled the rise of its creative industries, especially film. Although the United States has long dominated global cinema and shaped global culture with the iconography of Hollywood, China has in recent years developed one of the largest domestic cinema markets on earth, producing films that are capable of competing with global blockbusters in terms of revenue.

In 2025, the animated Chinese fantasy film Ne Zha 2, inspired by China’s mythology, has earned over $2 billion at the box office, making it the highest grossing animated film of all time, beating every single production made by global giants Disney Pixar and Universal Pictures’ Dreamworks. In fact, only James Cameron’s Avatar films and Titanic, and Marvel’s Avengers, can say they have beaten the Chinese blockbuster.

With this in mind, the 49th Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) opened on April 10. The 12-day festival, which is one of the world’s largest, features nearly 200 films made across 69 countries and regions, and is a massive opportunity to showcase Chinese language cinema and films from the Chinese mainland to the world. Many new productions from across Asia are also set to premiere at the festival.

The HKIFF shows the ongoing importance of the city as a global cultural and commercial hub, as well as an icon of Chinese culture as a gateway between the Chinese mainland and the rest of the world. Hong Kong’s film industry has always shone brightly and during the 20th century it served as the primary means for Westerners to discover the Chinese world when the country as a whole was less developed and geopolitical tensions were higher during the divide of the Cold War. One just has to go to the Avenue of Stars in Tsim Tsa Tsui, Kowloon and glance at the statue of Bruce Lee to gaze upon these glories, and see how film has shaped a romanticism of China and its culture.

Now, with the development of the Chinese mainland’s film industry, new opportunities have opened up for Hong Kong as it has become the center stage of a boom in Chinese language cinema which allows the city — as it has already done with trade, commerce and finance — to showcase China and its cultural products to the rest of the world. Many critics have wrongly contended that the passage of national security laws would undermine creativity in Hong Kong by “eroding” creative freedom, and therefore its film industry, but the size and strength of the city’s upcoming festival, as well as the success of mainland films, show this is not the case at all.

These critics have been determined to push the narrative that Hong Kong is “dead” or in “decline”, a great deal of it being politically and ideologically motivated; but the huge enthusiasm for the Hong Kong festival illustrates their narrative is not based in reality. The city remains one of Asia’s most influential film hubs and not only that, China as a nation is now showing that it has a globally competitive film industry, one that is introducing Chinese culture, mythology and folklore to the world, and transforming them into blockbuster hits that are capable of the highest levels of success.

For Hong Kong, this is an opportunity to reach new levels, with the city being able to propel itself through deeper integration with the mainland’s film industry, while accessing and benefitting from the colossal size of the mainland market for its own local productions. It is said in geopolitics that we live in a “multipolar world” whereby there are multiple coexisting superpowers, then it is only true that this is reflected in terms of industries too. Hollywood, once a unipolar power, does not have the century-long monopoly it previously enjoyed, but a great deal still needs to be done to take Chinese blockbusters out of China and show them to the world as a whole, and that is the role Hong Kong must perform.

The author is a British political and international-relations analyst.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.