Hong Kong’s beleaguered cinema market had some good news in the first half of 2026, with overall box office revenues increasing by 25% thanks to a strong line-up of local and Hollywood releases.

Total box office for the six months from January 1 to June 30, 2026, reached $84.7M (HK$664M), according to figures from Hong Kong Box Office, compared to $67.7M (HK$531M) in the same period last year. 

Edko Films’ comedy drama Night King topped the box office over the six month period with $15M (HK$118M) from its Lunar New Year release. Dayo Wong and Sammi Cheng head the cast of the film, directed by Jack Ng, about a fading nightclub’s fight against a hostile takeover. 

Crime thriller prequel Cold War 1994, also produced by Edko Films, was the second highest grossing local film with $4.8M (HK$38M) since it opened on May 1. Directed by Longman Leung, the film revolves around power struggles among the elites in the run-up to the Hong Kong Handover and features major local stars including Chow Yun-fat, Aaron Kwok, Tony Leung Ka-fai and Louis Koo. 

Other local hits in the first six months included Philip Yung’s comedy The Snowball On A Sunny Day, Herman Yau’s crime thriller We’re Nothing At All and Patrick Leung’s drama Ciao UFO about four housing estate kids who bond over a UFO sighting. 

Avatar: Fire And Ash was the highest-grossing foreign movie during the first six months, taking $5M (HK$40M), followed by The Super Mario Galaxy Movie with $4.7M (HK$37M), Toy Story 5, Hoppers and The Devil Wears Prada 2. 

“The summer film season has just begun with many family-friendly offerings; the latter half of the year will also boast many high-quality domestic and international movies,” said Hong Kong’s Motion Picture Industry Association (MPIA), which operates Hong Kong Box Office. “It is hoped that the summer season and the second half of the year will sustain the strong momentum seen in the first half.”

MPIA chairman Crucindo Hung noted that box office receipts for local films had increased by 40% year-on-year. In total, 142 films were released during the six month period, of which 17 were local productions. 

He also said that Chinese film Dear You has grossed $1.5M (HK$12M) in Hong Kong, a decent result for a mainland production in a market where local and Hollywood films tend to perform more strongly. The relatively low-budget Teochew-language film is the second highest grossing film of the year in mainland China with an astounding $285M (RMB1.94BN). 

Hong Kong box office slumped by 16% in the first six months of 2025, compared to the same period in 2024, while the year as a whole was down by 15% year-on-year to $154M (HK$1.21bn).

Renny Harlin has a hard and fast rule for winning over actors on his movie sets: Preparation, preparation, preparation.

The veteran filmmaker sat for a masterclass conversation last week at Malta’s Mediterrane Film Festival in Valletta, during which he opened up on the creative process he’s leaned on to make nearly four dozen films over five decades while working with some of the biggest movie stars on the planet, from Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson to Sylvester Stallone and Val Kilmer.

“It’s all about preparation. Preparation costs nothing,” Harlin told moderator Steven Weintraub of Collider. But for Harlin, his prep goes beyond scripts and storyboards. He said he also learns how to do the grueling stunts his films require. “Whether I’m doing Cliffhanger in the mountains, Die Hard 2 in airplanes or Deep Blue Sea in water tanks, I learned how to mountain climb, I learned how to scuba dive, I learned how airplanes worked. Even for Cliffhanger, I learned how to fly a helicopter. For me, the preparation is the most valuable way to spend your time and that’s where you really make yourself ready.”

It had an added bonus of allowing him to win over some of the “toughest actors in the business, and I’ve worked with some really experienced and hard-nosed actors,” Harlin said. “That’s the way I won them over, whether it was Sylvester Stallone or Bruce Willis or Samuel Jackson or Sir Ben Kingsley and so on. Or, Val Kilmer, who had a reputation for not being the easiest.”

“But I’ve always managed to win them over by the fact that when I show up for the movie, I’m prepared and they can ask me any question about anything and I know exactly how these things are done technically and how they work,” Harlin continued. “I tell them exactly what equipment they need, how they need to use it, and I win their trust. It’s not a secret, but many actors are insecure because they put themselves out there. They go in front of the camera in front of the world and they expose themselves and many actors are also extremely intelligent. And if they feel that they know the movie and their character better than the director, then they tend to take over because they feel that their responsibility to protect themselves is to take control. That’s when you get those horror stories where actors run all over the directors and the whole thing ends up in chaos.”

He avoided chaos once while working with Kilmer on 2004’s Mindhunters, co-starring LL Cool J and Christian Slater.

“Bless his soul. We became good friends,” Harlin said of the legendary star who passed away at age 65 in 2025. “Val was famous for testing directors always because he was a Mensa member, a highly, highly intelligent man and very talented. His style was to test the director early enough [in the project] to see who was the smartest guy in the room. I think he was quite insecure also and felt that if he doesn’t feel like he can respect the director, then he has to take over because otherwise it’s going to be a disaster.”

Harlin then recalled a tense moment on Mindhunters, which followed a group of FBI trainees who are taken to a remote island for simulation training. Once there, they realize that they are being hunted by a serial killer. Kilmer played an FBI instructor named Jake Harris.

“We had shot one scene for one day already and everything went fine,” Harlin recalled. “Then it was the second day of the same sequence and I’m ready to say ‘action.’ [Val was] studying the script and he has [a pair of glasses] on and he’s looking at the script. The first assistant director said, ‘OK, we’re ready to go, everybody please take your places.’ Val goes to his mark and camera is ready to roll. He puts his script away, and he still has his glasses on. I said, ‘Hey, Val, just take the glasses off. We are ready to go.’ He looks at me and says, ‘No.’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean no?’ He says, ‘Well, I thought about my character last night and he’s really quite a studious type. I think it was a mistake that I didn’t have the glasses yesterday. So I got these glasses this morning and I’m going to wear them from now on.’”

Harlin was quick to say that they had already shot half of the scene with Kilmer not wearing glasses, so for continuity’s sake, he couldn’t all of a sudden be wearing spectacles. To which Kilmer replied, “‘Well, I guess then we have to reshoot what we shot yesterday, but I’m going to wear glasses from now on.’”

Harlin wasn’t having it. “I just went right to his face in front of everybody — cameras are ready to roll and the whole cast is there — and I looked him in the eyes and I said, ‘Val, take off the fucking glasses now.’ It was a test and he looked at me really seriously while everyone was on pins and needles, wondering if it was going to be a physical fight or what would happen. He took the glasses off and flashed that Iceman smile from Top Gun, and said, ‘It was worth trying.’”

Jodie Foster touched down in Colorado to spend some time with media executive and former Sony boss Michael Lynton, discussing who owns the future of Hollywood during a session at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

As part of their Tuesday conversation, they talked about the forces reshaping the film business and how the pandemic, labor strikes and audience habits have also had an impact. And they also examined the most urgent topic that nearly everyone in town is talking about these days: artificial intelligence.

“If we are able to dominate AI consistently over time, yes, we will make things that reflect us and we can make things better,” Foster told Lynton in front of a live audience. “Will we be able to dominate technology? That particular technology longer than a couple of years? I don’t know.”

Lynton then said he wasn’t sure either before asking Foster whether she believed AI could actually replace writers or actors. “We’re already doing that,” Foster said of actors. “Face-swapping and all the things you guys can do on your iPhone, we can do them even better with real fancy people.”

Foster, an Academy Award-winning actress who has also worked as a filmmaker and producer, then continued the thought by explaining how she often thinks of “movies that are already out there” and how those titles seemingly have been crafted by AI. She used Joseph Kosinski’s F1 starring Brad Pitt as an example.

“I don’t say this disparagingly, how could I? This movie went on to make millions of dollars but look at a movie like F1. I’m, like, F1 was made by AI,” she said. “Wasn’t it? The structure was exactly the structure that you would learn in school. The actors say the lines exactly the way it would be written if a computer was writing exactly what would be the right thing for that time. And they were able to dominate the technology to make something big and beautiful and, potentially, where a lot of the information comes from other places.”

Foster seemed to be using F1 as an example rather than claiming it was actually created by AI, but it’s a curious sentiment nonetheless, as the film has an impressive pedigree. It was nominated for four Academy Awards, including best picture, and it won an Oscar for best sound. Kosinski wrote the screenplay alongside Oscar-nominated scribe Ehren Kruger, and the film was produced by an A-list roster that includes Jerry Bruckheimer, Kosinski, Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Lewis Hamilton and Chad Oman.

In a making of the film feature, THR’s Beatrice Verhoeven reported that Koskinski and his team “relied as much as possible on practical effects” while leaning on digital magic for certain sequences. Said VFX supervisor Ryan Tudhope: “We had two or three of our APXGP cars on the track, so in visual effects, we would replace those and add other cars in the background to make it feel like they were within the race.” Other times, they replaced cars on the tracks to avoid major accidents. “Some damage was too risky,” Tudhope said. “So we’d use a smaller vehicle, an F3 car, and a stunt driver would do the stunt and we would later replace that with our APXGP car.”

See Foster’s appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival below.