The story
Founded by Run Run Shaw on Dec 27, 1958, in Hong Kong.1
For list of films, please see List of Shaw Brothers films.
Prior to their involvement in the filmmaking business, the Shaw brothers were interested in opera and owned a theater in Shanghai; their father also owned a cinema. One of the plays in their theater, The Man from Shensi, was very popular. The Shaw brothers then bought their first camera, and Runje Shaw made this play into a silent film that turned out to be a success. Runje Shaw and his brothers Runde and Runme formed a film production company in 1925 in Shanghai called the Tianyi Film Company (also known as Unique). The company's earliest films, New Leaf (立地成佛) and Heroine Li Feifei (女侠李飛飛), were shown in Shanghai in 1925.
A rival studio, Mingxing Film Company, formed a syndicate with five other Shanghai companies to monopolize the distribution and exhibition markets in order to exclude Tianyi films from being shown in theater chains in Shanghai and Southeast Asia. The brothers therefore became interested in forming their own network, and Runme Shaw, who was then the distribution manager, traveled to Singapore to establish a movie distribution business for Southeast Asia. Runme incorporated the Hai Seng Co. (海星, which later became the Shaw Brothers Pte Ltd) to distribute films made by Tianyi and other studios. In 1927, they operated their own cinema in Tanjong Pagar in Singapore, expanded in Malaya, and opened four cinemas there. The number of cinemas owned by the Shaw chain in Southeast Asia would eventually reach 200 by the 1970s before it declined. In 1928, Run Run Shaw moved to Singapore to assist Runme.
In 1931, the Tianyi Studio in Shanghai produced what is considered by some to be the first sound-on-film Chinese talkie, Spring on Stage (歌場春色). In 1932, they teamed up with Cantonese opera singer Sit Gok-Sin (薛覺先) to make the first Cantonese talkie, White Golden Dragon (白金龍). This film proved to be very successful, and in 1934, they established the Tianyi Studio (Hong Kong) in Kowloon to make Cantonese films. The move to Hong Kong was accelerated as the Nanjing government had issued a ban on martial arts films as well as Cantonese films, and two years later, they moved the entire film production operation from Shanghai to Hong Kong. Tianyi was reorganized into Nanyang (南洋) Productions with Runde Shaw as the studio head. They also announced plan for their first film production studio in Singapore in 1937 to make films in Malay; a studio was built in 1940 to make Malay and Cantonese films, followed by another called Singapore Film Studios in 1941 on Jalan Ampas. It produced Malay films under the studio named Malay Film Productions (formally incorporated in 1949) which lasted until 1967. The most prominent Malay actor, director and producer of this period was P. Ramlee.
The Shaw Brothers continued to expand but suffered a setback during the Second World War when the Japanese occupied Malaya and Singapore. After the war, they began to rebuild. In the 1950s, Nanyang started to switch film production from Cantonese to Mandarin as the communist takeover of mainland China had cut off the supply of Mandarin films to overseas Chinese communities. In this period, Nanyang Studio operated under the company name of Shaw and Sons Ltd. The Mandarin films of the 1950s were primarily wenyi films (文藝片) in a contemporary setting as well as a few period dramas.
In 1957, Run Run Shaw moved to Hong Kong, set up a new company, Shaw Brothers (Hong Kong) Ltd., and built a new studio at Clearwater Bay, which officially opened in 1961 as Movietown. In the mid-1960s, Movietown was the largest and best-equipped studio in Chinese filmmaking as well as the largest privately owned studio in the world, with 15 stages, two permanent sets, state-of-the-art film-making equipment and facilities, and 1,300 employees. Period and music dramas were popular in the 1960s, and later in the decade Kung fu films also became popular. Some of Shaw Brothers' most notable films were made in this period, including The Magnificent Concubine, The Love Eterne, as well as One-Armed Swordsman, which broke the box office records and some spawned multiple sequels. The studio popularized the kung-fu genre of films, which included Five Fingers of Death and The 36th Chamber of Shaolin made in the 1970s. The 1960s was a period of intense rivalry between Shaw Brothers and Cathay Organisation, but eventually Shaw Brothers gained the upper hand and Cathay ceased film production in 1970. Sir Run Run Shaw became involved in television when TVB was launched in 1967. In 1969, Shaw Brothers (HK) issued shares and became a public listed company.
In the 1970s, Shaw Brothers faced a strong challenge from a new studio, Golden Harvest, which had considerable success internationally with the martial arts film, Enter the Dragon starring Bruce Lee. Shaw Brothers then also began to co-produce films with Western producers for the international market and invest in films such as Meteor and Blade Runner. However, Shaw Brothers ceased film production in 1986 because of competition from Golden Harvest and increasing piracy, focusing instead on TV production. In 1986, Movietown became TV City, which was leased to TVB for TV production. In 1988, the company was reorganized under the umbrella of the Shaw Organization. In the 1990s, Shaw again started making a few films, but no longer on the same scale as before. Shaw has since relocated to a new site in Tseung Kwan O, Hong Kong.
From Wikipedia’s article on Shaw Brothers Studio, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4