Online TV drama a huge hit even without major stars
BEIJING: Even without a cast of major stars, Story of Yanxi Palace has been streamed more than 15 billion times.
The 70-episode drama coproduced by and streamed on iQiyi, China’s version of Netflix, emerged as a surprising summer hit with a mostly young, lesserknown cast. A Qing dynasty tale of scheming concubines, the drama has been a runaway hit.
The success of the drama “brings a new turning point and new opportunities to the industry that has been pressured by excessive compensation for celebrities,” iQiyi CEO Gong Yu said in Beijing. “The industry should stop overcompensating celebrities in low-quality productions just because they have huge fan bases.”
Gong’s streaming platform was among a group of film and TV companies that issued a joint statement saying they would work together to resist overpaying top talent and devote more resources to better productions.
Over time, this will lead to a reduction in shoddy productions and give the industry an opportunity to focus on quality, said Yin Hong, a professor of TV and film studies at Tsinghua University.
Only about half of the 800 or so films made by Chinese studios last year made it to a cinema and among those 400, fewer than a quarter sold at least 100 million yuan (RM59.5 million) in tickets. That’s in a market where the threshold for a hit is considered about one billion yuan in sales.
“The industry is undergoing a lot of pain right now,” Yin said. “But if dealt properly, it will be a good opportunity.”
A shift away from star-driven fare would come just as China’s cinema boom is regaining momentum, fuelled by local hits steadily displacing Hollywood blockbusters. But underneath that healthy gloss, top Chinese studios including Huayi Brothers Media Corp. and Zhejiang Huace Film & TV Co. Ltd. said in annual reports that higher celebrity pay is threatening profit margins.
Said Stanley Rosen, a University of Southern California political science professor who studies China and its film industry: “Social media and public opinion, as you know, are important drivers of policies in this area, particularly when it comes to perceived inequalities, the super-rich, and cheating.”
The industry should stop overcompensating celebrities in low-quality productions just because they have huge fan bases. Gong Yu, iQiyi CEO