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The Chinese film market is out for the money more than ever! With films made over 500 million Yuan around the New Year's holiday last year, with the expectation of topping that, more films are queuing up to play out the New Year season this year.

Over ten movies are heavily promoted for the coming New Year's Day holiday alone, 7 of which are domestically made films. Trailers have been played repetitively on television; giant posters hanging everywhere in public; and coverage of its production on entertainment news from major TV stations.

One resemblance between these films is its all-star casts. Almost every film targeted at the New Year period contains at least 5 familiar faces to the Chinese audience. Including not only actors, also pop icons all joining in the holiday season on the big screen.

Industry experts say it's a trend across the whole of 2009 to have large numbers of A-list stars in the movie to create a buzz, the representation of which, is the epic film "Funding of a republic". The film contains more than 70 Chinese top shelf stars and was a huge business success at the box office. But what does the audience think?

"Sometimes it's very improper for pop icons to star in a film just because they are famous, Jay Zhou and Lin Zhilin in an action film about tomb raiders? Come on! They don't even know how to handle a gun for God sakes, its good publicity, but I don't think they're going to get any real acting out of them."

Good publicity, but bad movies seems to be the general respond from audiences for the New Year films. They're compacted with Computer Graphed Images. With more and more visual stunts and commercial taglines treated as first priorities, flying pop icons rendered with heavy post-production CGI are filling up the screens.

One of the films' director says in a interview that 90% of his efforts during the production are on the CGI production. A movie goer who just watched it says the CGI in the film is quiet spectacular and mind blowing, but the story seemed shallow and dull. Another movie goer simply concludes "a good film takes more than fancy effects and action stunts".

"I think Chinese films now are overly focused on publicity rather than the script, I can't be bothered with them at all. If they want to go commercial, if they want to go full-on entertainment, that's fine. I don't have a problem with that, but they haven't done a decent enough job to qualify as something people would pay to see. I don't think that's a good trend for the Chinese Film industry in general."

New Year is closing in, only time will tell if the upcoming films are merely one-hit wonders or long-lasting classics. But for what it's worth, the number of film options is building up for the domestic audiences, who wouldn't say that's a good start of a healthy film industry?

From China Drive, I'm Zhao Kun.