Actors rehearse on the set of a micro movie during a filming session at a hospital, in Zhengzhou, China on July 17.On a film set that resembles the medieval castle of a Chinese lord, Zhu Jian is busy disrupting the world’s second-largest movie industry.
The short-format videos are an increasingly potent competitor to China’s film industry, some experts say, which is second in size only to Hollywood and dominated by state-owned China Film Group. And the trend is already spreading to the United States, in a rare instance of Chinese cultural exports finding traction in the West.
Kuaishou vice president Chen Yiyi said at a media conference in January that the app featured 68 titles that notched more than 300 million views last year, with four of them watched over a billion times. Alongside other major Chinese social media apps like Instagram-like Xiaohongshu and YouTube competitor Bilibili , it has announced plans to make more.
Tales of how circumstances at birth are deterministic and can only be changed by near-miracles have struck a chord with viewers at a time when upward mobility in China is low and youth unemployment high. This has fuelled interest in stories about billionaires and wealthy families, she added: “Everyone desires power and wealth, so it is normal for these type of stories to be popular.”
Key to the commercial success of these films are plot twists that keep people paying as they scroll while commuting or in line at a grocery store. Episodes often end with a hook – such as a boyfriend walking in on his partner with another man – and viewers have to pay for the next episode to find out what happened.
In the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou, “Grandma’s Moon” is being made with a compressed budget and timeline. When Reuters visited the set in July, the filming day stretched until 2 a.m. The crew then moved to a new location and began shooting again at 7 a.m.
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