Hong Kong-based Celestial Pictures, which owns the world's largest Chinese-language film library, is expanding into online gaming through creating what it says will be the city's answer to Marvel Universe's comic superheroes.
The first step came last week with the launch of My Kingdom Game for the iPhone and iPod Touch, available for free on the company's website.
The move comes ahead of next month's release at local and regional cinemas of My Kingdom, a 70 million-yuan martial arts epic that it is co-producing with mainland studio Skyland Films (Beijing) and production company DW Films. The film was produced by industry veteran Andre Morgan and stars heartthrob Wu Chun and Han Geng.
A version of the game for the iPad is also on the way.
Celestial Pictures said it planned to go beyond film and TV productions by tapping into the gaming and animation business. It appointed Justin Weng as vice-president of game development and licensing in April, and is developing animated characters based on 100 action heroes selected from the 760 Shaw Brothers classics it owns.
'We are creating a universe in which they all interact. It's like a Shaw universe. No one has seen this before,' said Ross Pollack, chief executive of Celestial. Pollack said the characters would be similar to Marvel comic heroes like Spiderman and the Hulk.
'With these characters we can explore gaming and animation territories.' The company would adopt a 360-degree 'transmedia' approach across films, games and TV productions, where they are all related.