Foreign competition tarnished the luster of domestic films in 2012. What will this year bring? Raymond Zhou looks deeper.

The year 2012 has been a tumultuous one for China's film industry. It started with doom and gloom as the government took the abrupt action to open the market in February by raising the import quota from 20 to 33, with the new movies exclusively IMAX or 3-D features.

The first battalion of domestic films fell victim to two "unsinkable" Hollywood vessels, Battleship and Titanic 3-D, plus the assorted weaponry of The Avengers. However, these superheroes from across the Pacific did not fare as well, as they bumped into the invisible walls of import blackout months or head-to-head collisions, ensured by Chinese distributors or regulators.