This may explain America's long-standing fascination with kungfu films. The raw spectacle of martial arts films combined with Chinese characters, settings and costumes satisfies the audiences' "Orientalistic interest" without challenging their underlying perceptions about China. Kungfu films also have the added advantage of bypassing Americans' infamous aversion to subtitles.

"For foreign audiences, kungfu is magical, but above all, they don't need to read subtitles to understand the film, which is a very important factor given the current quality of translations," Huang Huilin, Director of the Academy for International Communication of Chinese Culture (AICCC) at Beijing Normal University, told the Global Times.

According to Rosen, however, market saturation has meant that the box office success of martial arts films have petered out since Jet Li's 2006 film Fearless.

A balancing act

Therefore, Chinese filmmakers seem to be walking on a knife's edge. In order to appeal to American audiences, they must ensure that their films are neither too foreign nor too familiar. Too foreign, and the film will alienate American viewers. Too familiar, however, and Americans will write the film off as a poor Hollywood substitute.

Lost in Thailand, for example, which grossed a record-breaking $192 million in China, was viewed in North America as a rip-off of the lucrative The Hangover franchise, and could only manage a measly $60,000 at the U.S. box office. Similarly, last year's romantic comedy Finding Mr. Right bore a striking resemblance to the Hollywood classic, Sleepless in Seattle.

Grace O'neill, a former employee of the independent film distributor Hopscotch, said that Chinese filmmakers therefore face a hugely difficult balancing act of being "both uniquely Chinese and internationally accessible." If filmmakers can pull off this tightrope act, however, then reports suggest that international audiences are likely to respond.

A study conducted by the Los Angeles Times found that while the U.S. box office receipts of summer 2013 were up by 14 percent from the year prior, this improvement was largely driven by the success of smaller-scale films like Despicable Me 2 rather than the so-called "tent-pole blockbusters" that Hollywood has come to rely upon.

O'neill believes that with more and more Hollywood studios relying on the "out-of-the-box, cookie-cutter" blockbusters that are assembled "with the same narratives, the same actors," producers are starting to see a backlash, with audiences craving a bit more diversity in their cinematic diet.

Chinese filmmakers, therefore, may have a unique opportunity to step up and be counted in the American box office. And while Rosen notes that Chinese films cannot hope to compete with the likes of Despicable Me 2, the 3-billion-dollar question still remains: How do Chinese filmmakers break into the North American market? And can another Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ever be uncovered?

Hollywood's rather uninspired answer has been to cut and trim foreign pictures to make them more palatable for American audiences. While Rosen believes that these truncations are sometimes a necessary evil, such cuts often detract from the artistic integrity of the films themselves.

Author and critic Peter Biskind describes this process as "boning foreign films into easily digestible fillets", depriving them of the essential feature that attracts Americans to foreign films: They are a "window onto unfamiliar worlds." Hollywood, it seems, does not have all the answers.

Accordingly, the need for Chinese producers and filmmakers to find fresh ideas will certainly be an uphill battle. A report published by the AICCC at Beijing Normal University in mid-2013, however, provides some much-needed food for thought.

A recurring theme of the report is that filmmakers willing to challenge the traditional channels of production and distribution could find success on the international market. Non-government distributors were the most promising success story of 2012, with the Huayi Brothers, for instance, accounting for almost 25 percent of China's overseas revenue.

Many of these independent distributors were able to find success by appealing to audiences in their modus operandi: the Internet. With 58 percent of surveyed participants finding and viewing Chinese films online, the Internet offers fertile, albeit challenging, ground for Chinese filmmakers to exploit.

Filmmakers have also attempted to overcome the major obstacles of poor translations and unclear stories, identified by the AICCC report, by forming partnerships with Hollywood production companies.

While genuine co-productions are notoriously hit-and-miss affairs, they provide a host of benefits for Chinese filmmakers. These include Hollywood screenwriters, postproduction techniques, big-budget special effects and, of course, that all-important foot in the door.

As Yin Hong, Vice President of the School of Journalism and Communication at Tsinghua University, told the Global Times, "genuine" co-productions is what Chinese cinema needs, and not simply Chinese input into Hollywood films, as was the case with Iron Man 3 and Looper.

"Many of them [co-productions] fail because they merely mix money, stars and marketing," he said.

By combining the professionalism of Hollywood with the cultural flair of Chinese cinema, perhaps the magic that made Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon so irresistible for American audiences could be re-discovered.

Yet even if the days of mega-blockbusters like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are, as Rosen fears, behind us, it seems clear that the story of Li Mubai won't be the last that Hollywood hears from the Chinese film industry.

The author is an intern at Beijing Review

Email us at: liuyunyun@bjreview.com