What does Philippine cinema really need?
Philippine cinema finds itself in a bizarre position. On one hand, the movie theater experience has risen sharply in cost. Tickets would cost between P200 and P300 pre-pandemic. Today, around P400 to P500 is practically the standard—with prices breaching P700 and even P1,000, depending on the theater. In fact, according to a 2024 survey by the Film Development Council of the Philippines (FDCP), cinema attendance is practically limited to those in the A, B, and C social classes.
That said, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” which crossed the P1 billion mark just 12 days after its premiere, and “The Odyssey,” which continues to dominate IMAX theaters, seem to be exempt from this financial limitation.
FDCP chair and chief executive officer Joey Javier Reyes asks in his blog: “If the price of tickets were the problem, then where did the P400M+ and P700M+ box office bonanza of two Hollywood mammoth productions come from?”
Is it simply a matter of quality then? Will audiences—no matter the purchasing power—watch if the product is good?
It all boils down to the material
“The price of the ticket may be forbidding, but if an audience finds value, enthusiasm, excitement, and even curiosity to see a movie, money will not be a hindrance, much less the problem,” writes Reyes.
For the FDCP chair, secondhand tropes and story structures that may have worked previously—kabit versus kabit, family dramas, and even rags to riches—are no longer enough to satisfy the modern Filipino audience. “Feed the audiences with three-in-one formula movies, and they will not invest their hard-earned money just to be lured into a booby-trap.”
Instead, he says that “filmmakers must be challenged to create works that can relate to an audience and entice them into an investment of time and money.”
Still, that’s only one front that should be addressed. More than ticket prices and the film’s content, the bigger problem for Reyes is bias: “that tragic impression of our own audiences that we are not worthy of their patronage.”
The question of the viewer
For local filmmaker Rodina Singh, while exasperation from used tropes is an understandable criticism, it deliberately ignores the circumstances that encourage its continued usage. “The commercial industry has a very brutal indicator: money. What audiences repeatedly pay for, industries repeatedly produce,” they post in a lengthy social media post.
“Hindi nahulog mula sa langit ang formula. Formulas exist because somewhere along the line, it worked.”
Instead, on top of asking filmmakers to evolve, Singh sees room for improvement in the viewers themselves. “We live in a country where disinformation has become part of everyday life, where documented facts can become negotiable depending on political loyalty, evidence can conveniently become ‘fake’ when it contradicts what someone already believes, and history itself can be rewritten according to whichever version confirms an existing bias.”
“Do we really expect those habits of receiving information to magically disappear when people enter a cinema?” Singh asks.
For Singh, these lived realities prove that our widespread basic literacy doesn’t translate into functional—let alone, film—literacy. After all, how do you expect filmgoers to understand nuance when it’s rarely ever used?
Biases and double standards
Like Reyes, Singh also places the utmost importance in identifying and questioning our own biases. Why do we cry wolf at cinema ticket prices then spend a collective billion at a superhero movie? Are Filipino movies only worth watching when they’re priced less than a foreign blockbuster?
“We can understand American superheroes, Korean class struggles, Japanese monsters, British royalty, Greek mythology. We learn their references, their humor, their worlds, their cinematic languages. Pero kapag sariling pelikula natin ang humingi ng konting curiosity: corny, cheap, pangit, Netflix ko na lang,” adds Singh.
“We learned how to extend our imagination toward other cultures before we learned how to extend the same generosity toward ourselves. And then we ask: Bakit hindi lumalaki ang pelikulang Pilipino?”
In Japan, Hollywood blockbusters have their place, but they aren’t quite as dominant.
For example, “Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of the Mermaid Island” topped the box office charts despite the juggernaut that is “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.” And it’s not as if they’re collectively impartial to the hero; in fact, iconic Japanese band Mrs. Green Apple released “Brand New” in time for the Marvel film.
So what’s the difference? Especially during conversations like this, discourse often veers toward comparing our film industry with those of Japan and Korea. They have anime, K-dramas, K-pop, and are competitive in Western markets—why shouldn’t we have the same?
Culture takes time
Though we undoubtedly should have our own comparable products, these discussions fail to understand the time and resources put into making them in the first place.
While “Chiikawa” is a fairly new IP made in 2020 by Japanese illustrator Nagano, it stands on the shoulders of an anime industry dating back to the 1900s. Meanwhile, the success of K-drama and K-pop dates back to the humble beginnings of the Korean Wave—which was quite literally a government-supported push in cultural and tech industries following the Asian Financial Crisis.
What about us? While government agencies such as the FDCP and the Film Academy of the Philippines have their respective mandates in furthering Philippine cinema, this isn’t the same as having a national strategy tailored around the entertainment industry.
As for the culture we’re trying to promote through film and music, ours is literally fragmented by distance, regional differences, political loyalties, and colonial history. What unified culture would we even have to share?
Better products and better audiences are undoubtedly key to bringing life back to Philippine cinema. But perhaps, coinciding with those efforts, is the need to identify the very culture these films should propagate.
