Cashing in on the cinematic view

Popular films driving tourism to the studios, locations and sets where they were filmed, Xu Fan reports.

Despite being a county-level city in Shandong province, Laoling attracts hordes of tourists for the time-travel-like experience it offers in the form of a visit to San Francisco's Chinatown at the turn of the 20th century.

The Laoling Film Studio, an emerging tourist attraction in the small city under the jurisdiction of Dezhou, received 150,000 visitors and earned over 90 million yuan ($12.39 million) during the weeklong Spring Festival holiday, according to statistics from Guangming Daily and Dazhong Daily.

The studio has become popular as the primary location for Detective Chinatown 1900, this year's second highest-grossing film in China, which has raked in over 3.4 billion yuan ($466.2 million) at the box office. The main set, a meticulous re-creation of San Francisco's Chinatown, covers a 200,000-square-meter plot and took seven months to complete.

During a recent event organized by the China Film Administration and the China Media Group, the studio was highlighted together with a number of film and TV production sites and historical cities that have served as inspiration for popular productions.