The most famous of the classically organized motion picture production companies in Hong Kong, the Shaw Bros. Studio exerted an indelible influence on the film industry there and on filmmakers around the world. From the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, the Shaw Brothers successfully exploited the strength of the streamlined studio production model, and the studio held its own well into the 1980s, in spite of increasingly fierce competition. Crucial to its success was the studio’s string of classic martial arts films, which boasts an impressive array of stars—Di Long, David Jiang, Gordon Liu—and served as vehicles for such master filmmakers as Zhang Che, Chu Yuan and Lau Kar-leung.  At the same time Shaw Bros. produced a rich array of genres beyond their popular martial arts pictures, successfully producing accomplished melodramas, musicals, supernatural thrillers, epic costume dramas and filmed opera.

Besides the three martial arts giants listed above, the Shaws also hired famed filmmakers like the immortal King Hu (championed in Cahiers du Cinéma by Olivier Assayas) and Li Hanxiang, the Hong Kong counterpart of Vincente Minnelli or Luchino Visconti for his genius with mise en scène. With their eye always on the important international market, Shaw Bros. made a point of hiring directors from neighboring East Asian countries, such as Japan’s Umetsugu Inoue and South Korea's Chung Chang-wha.

The Shaw Bros. Studio’s films were seen worldwide, and became a significant part of global popular cinema, like the Hollywood classics or the “Bollywood” masala film. As such, they have been an important inspiration for contemporary filmmaking, from Wong Kar-wai to American big-budget studio action movies. Beyond that, these films (particularly the martial arts titles) are supremely beautiful examples of cinema as a medium of bodies in motion, transferring an almost kinetic charge to the audience in the theater.