What FILMART revealed about Asia’s next mid-budget project

You can usually tell what a market is trying to become by what it chooses to foreground.

Hong Kong FILMART 2026 did that quite plainly. The event drew about 8,000 industry participants, with more than 790 exhibitors from 38 countries and regions. But the more useful signal was not scale. It was structure.

The official programme kept returning to the same cluster of questions: how producers enter new markets, how business matching gets done, how one story extends across formats, how international co-productions are changing, and how films get financed in a harder market.

Markets do not just reflect industry priorities. They rehearse them. When a market places international market entry, IP extension, co-production, business matching, and financing at the centre of its programming, it is telling you what kinds of projects are becoming easier to back, package, and move.

The easiest lazy read here is that Asia wants more co-productions. True, but not useful enough. The more interesting read is that parts of the region are converging on a clearer project template for the mid-budget lane. Not simply local live action with patchwork financing. Not prestige for its own sake. But projects built to travel across territories, legible to multiple partners, and capable of extending beyond a single window or format.

You could see that template in the language of the programme itself. One session focused on producers entering new markets and working across borders, with examples ranging from Europe’s public funding systems to South Korea’s financing models and emerging opportunities in Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

Another centred on “One Story, New Forms”, framed explicitly around novels, films, animation, games, merchandise, and cross-platform development. Another examined international co-productions through the lens of arthouse, premium animation, commercial storytelling, and larger-scale international collaborations.

Even the financing workshop combined live-action and animation perspectives around packaging and funding mix.

This is why the real story out of FILMART is not simply “more dealmaking in Asia”. The story is that the region is getting sharper about the kind of IP that justifies dealmaking in the first place. The brief is becoming clearer. Can the project cross borders. Can it speak to more than one financing logic. Can it travel into adjacent forms. Can it create sequel, licensing, or franchise options before the first release window is even locked.

Animation sits right inside that shift.

That does not mean animation is the answer to everything in Asia. It does mean the commercial case for it has become much harder to dismiss. China’s 2025 box office gives that argument real weight. Official data reported annual ticket sales of about 51.83 billion yuan, up nearly 22% year on year. Animation accounted for 48.77% of the total box office. Four animated films landed in the year’s top 10. Ne Zha 2 alone reached 15.4 billion yuan on the mainland and 2.2 billion US dollars globally, becoming the world’s highest-grossing animated feature.

That does not prove animation dominates all of Asia. It does something more important. It changes boardroom behaviour. Once one of the region’s biggest markets posts a year where animation takes nearly half the box office, animation stops being a niche creative category and starts looking like a serious commercial instrument.

The reason is business design. Animation often travels better across language markets. It can extend more naturally into merchandise, games, and character licensing. It is less exposed to some of the cost inflation tied to cast-led packaging, even though it comes with its own production complexity and long lead times. And when buyers want worlds they can reopen rather than titles they can launch once, animation often offers cleaner sequel and franchise logic than the mid-budget live-action project sitting in the mushy middle.

That mushy middle is the part worth watching.

Premium live action is not going away. Auteur cinema is not going away. Big local stars will still anchor plenty of projects. But the traditional mid-budget live-action lane looks more exposed if it cannot explain why it deserves cross-border capital, or how it extends beyond a single release cycle. That is the squeeze beginning to show through this year’s FILMART signals. The market is getting less patient with projects that are culturally specific in the weakest possible way. Local enough to limit travel. Generic enough to avoid real edge. Too expensive to be easy. Too closed to become a system.

So what does Asia’s next mid-budget project look like.

There is no single template. It is more likely to be regionally financeable from the start. More likely to be designed with co-production or cross-border packaging logic in mind. More likely to have extension potential across format, platform, or licensing. More likely to think about animation, or at least animation-adjacent expansion, earlier in development rather than as an afterthought.

This has consequences for producers. “Universal” is becoming a lazy word. The better question is whether a project is legible across borders without sanding off the thing that makes it worth watching. A producer now has to think harder about partner fit, rights pathways, localisation friction, and extension logic earlier than before. That is a development issue, not a financing issue tacked on at the end.

It also has consequences for buyers and platforms. The old habit of treating co-production as a financing patch looks thinner in this market. The smarter use of co-production is slate design. Shared risk, yes. But also shared market access, audience expansion, and franchise construction. If the project cannot survive that conversation, it may still get made. It just becomes harder to argue it belongs in the growth lane.

That is why FILMART matters here.

Not because it proves where the whole region is going. Markets do not work like that. But because it revealed, quite cleanly, what parts of the region seem willing to organise around. Cross-border by design. Finance-aware from day one. IP-minded beyond the first format. And increasingly comfortable treating animation as a primary commercial lane rather than a side category.

Asia’s sharper competitive edge lies in its growing ability to design projects that can be financed across borders and monetised across forms.

FILMART did not invent that shift. This year, it put the brief on stage.

If this raised a question about a project you are working on, email me.

Sources

• Hong Kong FILMART official site and programme, including Producers Connect Programme Rundown. (HKTDC)

• HKTDC FILMART press releases page. (HKTDC)

• Xinhua reporting on China’s 2025 box office and animation share, citing China Film Administration data. (Xinhua News)

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