The 1970s
In 1970, former Shaw Brothers executives Raymond Chow and Leonard Ho left to form their own studio, Golden Harvest. The upstart's more flexible and less tightfisted approach to the business outmaneuvered the Shaws' old-style studio. Chow and Ho landed contracts with rising young performers who had fresh ideas for the industry, like Bruce Lee and the Hui Brothers, and allowed them greater creative latitude than was traditional. By the end of the '70s, Golden Harvest was the top studio, signing up Jackie Chan, the kung fu comedy actor-filmmaker who would spend the next twenty years as Asia's biggest box office draw (Chan and Yang, 1998, pp. 164-165; Bordwell, 2000).

Meanwhile, the explosions of Cantonese and kung fu and the example of Golden Harvest had created more space for independent producers and production companies. The era of the studio juggernauts was past. The Shaws nevertheless continued film production until 1985 before turning entirely to television (Teo, 1997).

1980s-early 1990s: the boom years
The 1980s and early '90s saw seeds planted in the '70s come to full flower: the triumph of Cantonese, the birth of a new and modern cinema, superpower status in the East Asian market, and the turning of the West's attention to Hong Kong film.

A cinema of greater technical polish and more sophisticated visual style, including the first forays into up-to-date special effects technology, sprang up quickly. To this surface dazzle, the new cinema added an eclectic mixing and matching of genres, and a penchant for pushing the boundaries of sensationalistic content. Slapstick comedy, sex, the supernatural, and above all action (of both the martial arts and cops-and-criminals varieties) ruled, occasionally all in the same film.

The international market
During this period, the Hong Kong industry was one of the few in the world that thrived in the face of the increasing global dominance of Hollywood. Indeed, it came to exert a comparable dominance in its own region of the world. The regional audience had always been vital, but now more than ever Hong Kong product filled theaters and video shelves in places like Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and South Korea. Taiwan became at least as important a market to Hong Kong film as the local one; in the early '90s the once-robust Taiwanese film industry came close to extinction under the onslaught of Hong Kong imports (Bordwell, 2000). They even found a lesser foothold in Japan, with its own highly developed and better-funded cinema and strong taste for American movies; Jackie Chan in particular became popular there.

Almost accidentally, Hong Kong also reached further into the West, building upon the attention gained during the '70s kung fu craze. Availability in Chinatown theaters and video shops allowed the movies to be discovered by Western film cultists attracted by their "exotic" qualities and excesses. An emergence into the wider popular culture gradually followed over the coming years.

Leaders of the boom
The trailblazer was production company Cinema City, founded in 1980 by comedians Karl Maka, Raymond Wong and Dean Shek. It specialized in contemporary comedy and action, slickly produced according to explicitly prescribed commercial formulas. The lavish, effects-filled spy spoof Aces Go Places (1982) and its numerous sequels epitomized the much-imitated "Cinema City style." (Yang, 2003)

Directors and producers Tsui Hark and Wong Jing can be singled out as definitive figures of this era. Tsui was a notorious Hong Kong New Wave tyro who symbolized that movement's absorption into the mainstream, becoming the industry's central trendsetter and technical experimenter (Yang et al., 1997, p. 75). The even more prolific Wong is, by most accounts, the most commercially successful and critically reviled Hong Kong filmmaker of the last two decades, with his relentless output of aggressively crowd-pleasing and cannily marketed pulp films.

Other hallmarks of this era included the gangster or "Triad" movie fad launched by director John Woo and dominated by actor Chow Yun-Fat; romantic melodramas and martial arts fantasies starring Brigitte Lin; the comedies of stars like Cherie Chung and Stephen Chow; and contemporary, stunt-driven kung fu action epitomized by the work of Jackie Chan.

Recent trends
Efforts by local filmmakers to retool their product have had middling results overall. These include technically glossier visuals, including much digital imagery; greater use of Hollywood-style mass marketing techniques; and heavy reliance on casting teen-friendly Cantopop music stars. Successful genre cycles in the late '90s and early 2000s have included: American-styled, high-tech action pictures such as Downtown Torpedoes (1997), Gen-X Cops and Purple Storm (both '99); the "Triad kids" subgenre launched by Young and Dangerous (1996); yuppie-centric romantic comedies like The Truth About Jane and Sam (1999), When I Fall in Love...With Both (2000) and Love on a Diet (2001); and supernatural chillers like Horror Hotline: Big-Headed Monster (2001) and The Eye (2002), often modeled on the Japanese horror films then making an international splash.

In the 2000s, there have been some bright spots. Milkyway Image Productions, founded by filmmakers Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai in the late '90s, has had considerable critical and commercial success, especially with offbeat and character-driven crime films like The Mission (2000) and Running on Karma (2003). An even more successful example of the genre was the blockbuster Infernal Affairs trilogy (2002-2003) of police thrillers co-directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak. Comedian Stephen Chow, the most consistently popular screen star of the '90s, directed and starred in Shaolin Soccer (2001) and Kung Fu Hustle (2004); these used digital special effects to push his distinctive humor into new realms of the surreal and became the territory's two highest-grossing films to date, with the latter garnering numerous awards locally and internationally.

Still, some observers believe that, given the depressed state of the industry and the rapidly strengthening economic and political ties among Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan, the distinctive entity of Hong Kong cinema that emerged after World War II may have a limited lifespan. The lines between the mainland and Hong Kong industries are ever more blurred, especially now that China is producing increasing numbers of slick, mass-appeal popular films. Predictions are notoriously difficult in this rapidly changing part of the world, but the trend may be towards a more pan-Chinese cinema, as existed in the first half of the twentieth century.

From Wikkipedia