The secret science behind hit Chinese movies
Formula can determine which leading actor and actress will make the most appealing screen couple, according to investor Mason Xu Liang
No one can deny the huge potential in mainland China’s mammoth movie market. Box-office takings in the world’s second-largest economy have been soaring by nearly 30 per cent annually since 2011. However, the 30 billion yuan (HK$38 billionUS$5 billion) market in China as of last year still looks small compared with the United States, which generated US$10 billion of ticket revenue in 2014. Mason Xu Liang is a former chief financial officer at the Bona Film Group, China’s major film distributor. He set up a private equity firm last year, Heyi Capital, with two partners, hoping to invest in the burgeoning but chaotic film industry in China using “scientific methods”: quantitative analysis and data utilisation. Along with other backers, they hope to invest 2 billion yuan in the sector.
Q: What kind of movies will you invest in?
We’ll invest in genre films targeting niche markets on the mainland, i.e. romance, comedy, horror and other kinds of movies. China’s moviemakers used to like putting all various elements into one movie, trying to please all kinds of audience. However, box office big performers have been genre movies which devote themselves to a particular formula. For example, Lost in Thailand. It strictly follows the Hollywood formula for a road comedy, booked 1.26 billion yuan in ticket revenue in 47 days starting from December 12, 2012, hitting a record high in the history of Chinese-language movies. It was a huge success given its production cost of 20 million yuan. We will target segmented audiences to achieve our financial goal, with investments of between 10 million yuan and 60 million yuan to achieve box office takings of over 200 million yuan.
Q: Who will be the main audience for your films?
We will only target audiences who are younger than 40. Our research has found that most audiences of Chinese films are young people, with the majority young women. So a film targeting middle-aged or elderly men can hardly succeed commercially in China’s market. There are many examples of box office failures, with some the works of well-known directors. I don’t want to single them out, but it’s a fact that many Chinese filmmakers just act upon intuition, instead of basing decisions on research and analysis.
Q: How does your company differ from others with a “traditional” Chinese film-making mindset and practice?
We define our target audience at the very beginning and make it clear certain genre films are tailored for such an audience. Then we compile a portfolio of directors and leading actors, compare each portfolio and pick the one which is expected to excel. For example, we look into fans’ preferences for leading actors and actresses based on social media data. In order to attract as big an audience as we can, we don’t choose pairs of actors who share a highly overlapping group of fans. Also, we don’t choose couples whose fans are completely different because that suggests fans probably won’t envisage the pair acting together. Our model shows a 20 per cent 30 per cent overlap of fans makes the perfect screen couple. In addition, we use data from search engines to predict first-week and life-cycle box office takings.