THE country’s entertainment industry should be accorded support by the government in order to reach the levels of success or even surpass the achievements gained by other countries in the said field, Erwin Blanco, the head of Mavx Productions, said on Wednesday, October 19, 2022.
Blanco, the brains behind hit movies Kita Kita starring Empoy Marquez and Alexandra de Rossi as well as the recently trending Doll House led by actor Baron Geisler, said the Filipino’s interest in Korean telenovelas, more commonly known as K-dramas, “means that the local content does not meet their needs for entertainment.”
“The Filipino audience is considered the most ‘longed for’ audience in the entertainment industry because we ‘consume’ almost all kinds of content -- from English to Chinese, Korean and even Turkish,” he said in a statement.
“The Filipino audience has matured in such a way that their palate for entertainment is longing for something global. It is now in the hands of Filipino content makers to speed up and reinvent ourselves to cope with the growing demand of Filipino audiences in a more global fashion,” he added.
Blanco made the statement following the pronouncement of Senator Jinggoy Estrada that he is thinking of proposing to ban K-dramas in the Philippines in order for Filipinos to patronize more locally produced movies or shows.
Estrada, who is an actor himself, said it is frustrating to see that the country’s movie industry is continuously deteriorating due to a lack of support from the public while foreigners, especially Koreans, were hitting high notes.
Blanco welcomed Estrada’s statement as it helped open the topic to discuss a “mirage of issues” concerning the industry.
Blanco, however, said the Philippine film industry is incomparable with Korean entertainment, noting that when it was starting, it received all kinds of support from their government, especially on procedures, recognition and financial incentives.
He said the support from the Korean government helped the Korean content makers to have the confidence to spend and evolve their industry.
“Whatever the Koreans did we can do also and maybe even more. We believe in the creativity and craftsmanship of Filipino content makers. But we will be needing the help of the government, more so, our Filipino audience,” said Blanco.
The film producer highlighted the need for the government to end piracy, noting that “Filipino content makers cannot produce more quality films if by the end of the day the masterpiece they created will be pirated.”
“There are a lot of issues that the industry needs to address, and to fix it, it should start from us,” he added. (SunStar Philippines)