Within the half year between the 2006 Christmas season and the 2007 summer season, Chow appeared in two blockbusters, the Chineselanguage film Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) and the English-language film Pirates of the Caribbean III: At World's End (2007, hereafter referred to as At World's End). With 360 million RMB investments, Curse of the Golden Flower was, from the very beginning of its production, marketed as the most expensive Chinese-language film ever made to date (Li 2006). In a similar manner, At World's End was also rumoured to be the most expensive film in Hollywood history at the time. Clearly targeted at a global film market from their inception, both films were promoted as ‘event films’ with large casts.

Chow's star presence in both films illustrated the shifting global marketing strategies of the Hollywood and Chinese film industries. In order to expand its overseas markets and consolidate its dominant position within the global commercial film market, Hollywood has a tradition of recruiting foreign stars, such as Spanish stars Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz, Australian stars Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, and French stars Juliette Binoche, Audrey Tautou and Jean Reno, to name just a few. Together with the ascendency of Asian film markets in Hollywood's global strategy, an increasing number of Chinese stars have joined this list since the 1990s (as discussed in Chapter 5). Meanwhile, Chinese cinema has shown growing ambition to enter the global commercial film markets, many of which were and still are dominated by Hollywood films. Both industries’ new global strategies have facilitated the creation of so-called ‘global’, ‘international’ or ‘transnational’ Chinese stars, whose names are assumed to attract audiences beyond the domestic film market.

To understand Chow's stardom in the global film market, this chapter once again adopts a comparative approach. In addition to industry-produced promotional materials for Pirates of the Caribbean and Curse of the Golden Flower, this chapter focuses in particular on the Internet publicity for these two films in both Chinese- and English-speaking markets. As many film scholars have already pointed out, the Internet has had a considerable impact on the star system (Redmond and Holmes 2007b: 309, 311; McDonald 2000: 105–6).