Nothing is ever left to chance when it comes to the Twins. Hong Kong's most marketable - and manufactured - Canto-pop creations have followed a carefully crafted career path from the moment they were brought together in the benevolent embrace of the all-powerful Emperor Group.
So it is with The Twins Effect, a $50 million fantasy-thriller-comedy starring the eponymous 'twins' - Charlene Choi Tsoek-jin, 20, and Gillian Chung Yan-tung, 22 - as two high-school vampire hunters. Consider the girls themselves.
'We are not that special or pretty,' Choi told the Hong Kong Economic Times last September. 'There was no confidence we would make it because other young duos have failed before. It is like a dream, even now.' But the dream has come true for Choi and Chung and for the Emperor Entertainment Group (EEG). For the first nine months of 2002 EEG recorded CD sales of $121 million, according to its accounts. And the Twins - believed to be the single most profitable group - made $30 million of it, a company source says. They became the youngest singers in Hong Kong to stage their debut concerts at the Coliseum in Hunghom, last September. They soon moved on to film, starring in Summer Breeze Of Love and Just One Look, made by the Emperor Multimedia Group. Now comes The Twins Effect.
WITH A MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR BUDGET, the film had to be made with one eye on the local market and a roving eye looking hopefully towards the rest of the world. Cut to the fact that the film has Cantonese and English dialogue; cue the vampire angle, which sees the Twins fighting off dark forces trying to take over the Earth and was incorporated with the overseas market in mind. 'We thought about using vampires, Chinese and Western versions, or werewolves,' says director Dante Lam Chiu-yin. 'But we wanted romance as well, and Western vampire films are popular and always romantic in a way.'
The overseas market was firmly in the film-makers' sights when Jackie Chan and Donnie Yen Ji-dan were brought on board: international superstar Chan for a 'special guest appearance' and Yen, one of the most sought after martial-arts choreographers around, to handle the action scenes.
Their presence resulted in the international rights for The Twins Effect being snapped up, for an undisclosed sum, by Universal Pictures International at this year's Cannes Film Festival, according to an industry insider. 'When it comes to international sales, people look at two things: the director and the star,' he says. 'And Jackie Chan and Donnie Yen are bankable overseas. So buyers know going in at least some of what they are getting with the film; they know these two will have an audience to begin with.'