TVB gives another hit series the movie treatment

Once the most popular Hong Kong TV content provider for mainland viewers, Television Broadcasts has again adapted a hit series into a movie.

More familiar to viewers as TVB, the company has turned its highly rated 2014 series Line Walker into a movie of the same name. It will premiere on Aug 11.

Last year, two of TVB's most popular series, Triumph in the Skies - season 1 was screened in 2003 and season 2 in 2013 - and Return of the Cuckoo (2000) were both adapted into feature-length movies.

The large fan following of these series is why they have been turned into movies.

According to the producers, the 31-episode series Line Walker has so far been viewed almost 2.4 billion times on digital platforms - mainly mainland streaming sites - since it aired in August 2014 on TVB's Jade Satellite Channel.

The fast-paced story, the dramatic twists and the high-profile cast enticed a large number of mainland fans, winning it 8.1 of 10 on Douban.com, the largest Chinese review site for movies, TV, literature and music.

Besides TV actress Charmaine Sheh reprising her role, the movie has Hong Kong A-listers Louis Koo, Nick Cheung and Francis Ng.

The movie is about the double lives of undercover police agents, who are struggling to return to normalcy, while hunting for moles.

But despite the series receiving a lot of praise, some viewers say parts of the plot don't work.

The shortcomings will be fixed in the movie, says Jazz Boon, the film's Hong Kong director and also the series' executive producer.

"The scale and budget of the movie is much bigger than the series. We have more resources and more time for filming, so the movie will have a much better story," he said last week at a press conference in Beijing.

Work on the movie began in Hong Kong in December, and the crew later traveled to Macao, Shenzhen in South China's Guangdong province and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

The filmmakers spent three and a half months on filming.

Cheung says filming in Brazil was the biggest challenge because of high temperatures and security concerns.

"It was my first time to Brazil. Local policemen escorted us to the sets. We could see bullet holes in the walls," he says.

"But despite what we heard about the local situation, the filming went without a hitch," he adds.

Referring to the latest "IP" fad, which is about bankable content with wide public recognition, Boon says the story can be developed into big IP content and then turned into a franchise.

However, despite what Hong Kong TV producers wish for, such series-adapted movies often fail to do well in the mainland market.

Triumph in the Skies raked in average box-office returns of 156 million yuan ($23.4 million) during last year's Spring Festival holiday, one of China's most lucrative movie-screening seasons. The movie was widely criticized for its storyline and characters.

Return of the Cuckoo, which grossed just 42.6 million yuan, was also for its storyline, which is about the protagonist being diagnosed with cancer and being reunited with a lover.

While it is common now for Hong Kong filmmakers to do well in the mainland market, it seems their fellow TV producers are not doing so well.

Commenting on their plight, Yu Ruoran, a Beijing-based critic, says: "Hong Kong TV series were very influential in the mainland in the 1980s and '90s, but have lost some sheen recent years.

"So even with highly rated TV series, they might not be as well-known as some Mandarin series made by mainland producers," she says.

(China Daily USA 07/21/2016 page7)