He Junyi, CEO of Huaying Xinrong Films: Talent and content are a sword in the future capital market

Both stories require someone to do, but if most people's attention is on the former, an industry will lose its vitality, especially the cultural and creative industries.

In 2015, the box office of movies exceeded 44 billion yuan, an increase of 48.7% from 2014, accounting for 17.8% of the global total box office, ranking second in the world, and industry insiders collectively applauded. In the first quarter of this year, the national movie box office reached 14.493 billion yuan, a 50% increase year-on-year. The speed at which the film market is developing is surprising. The film market, which is inseparable from capital, is no longer the preserve of creators. Behind the astonishing box office figures, more and more superb financial promoters are emerging.

Regarding this phenomenon, He Junyi, CEO of Huaying Xinrong Films, said with a smile: "This reminds me of a joke a teacher of mine at the Film Academy posted in the circle of friends, saying that 'Chinese films' and films are gradually drifting away. The goal of 'Chinese filmmakers' is the new board, not the three major film festivals. Sooner or later, Chinese films will be transferred to the China Securities Regulatory Commission for management." Indeed, with the "help" of capital in recent years, movies and stars have suddenly become tools to make money in the capital market. Everyone has learned various financial methods to operate film and television companies and film and television projects. The importance of business plans has far exceeded the importance of scripts. After several years of "operation", the industry has gradually discovered some problems: everyone is telling stories, but few people produce stories. The previous story refers to the blueprint at the company level, and the latter story refers to the creation and production of content products. Both stories require someone to do, but if most people's attention is on the former, an industry will lose its vitality, especially the cultural and creative industries.

In fact, Huaying Xinrong Films also has a financial pedigree. In an era when capital is constantly injected into the film market and box office is booming,"moving forward" is a natural choice.

The current phenomenon of frequent "marriage" between the film industry and the financial industry is also the result of market choice. He Junyi believes that the reasons for this result are diverse, most of which are due to changes brought about by the demand for capital. Including the long investment cycle of film and television creation, the high risk of film and television financial investment, the large variables and uncertainties in film and television creation, and the relative concentration of resource channels. But one of the most important reasons is the scarcity of outstanding creative talents, including "famous directors","famous actors","famous screenwriters","famous producers" and so on. If you don't get the blessing of these "celebrities", the success rate of a movie is relatively low. This is also why everyone relies so much on the concept of "IP" now, because everyone is robbing a small number of "people", and there are too few verified people and content with so-called market appeal. "IP" has become a basic guarantee to ensure that future works have a certain market foundation.

Interview with He Junyi, CEO of Huaying Xinrong Pictures-

"There is a big difference between good 'IP' and good content. Good 'IP' emphasizes more on looking at the 'future' from 'history'; while good content requires us to focus more."

Reporter: IP is one of the hottest topics in the film and television industry right now. What do you think is the criterion for judging a good movie IP? Does your company make IP adaptations?

He Junyi: IP no longer simply refers to the concept of intellectual property rights. A certain hot social phenomenon and some famous people have been given the concept of "IP". If we only regard it as intellectual property, in the current market, I think the definition of a good IP should include three aspects: first, it has a high audience base, simply a familiar literary work; Second, it has a good foundation for film and television adaptation, including whether the story content is suitable for film and television adaptation, and whether the audience of the original work can be transformed into consumers of film and television products at a high proportion; The third is the sustainable development capabilities of IP itself, and whether more IP derivative value can be developed in the future, including sequels, movie peripheral products, games, commercial real estate, theme parks, etc.

Huaying Xinrong has also purchased the film and television adaptation rights of a number of novels, and is developing film adaptations of several of them this year. One is by Zijin Chen, known as "Keigo of Dongye of China" and the only suspense mystery novel "Crime Without Evidence" that has had more than 10 million clicks on Tianya in recent years; the other is "Warm String", which is also called the "Broken Mirror Reunion" with "Why Xiao Shengmo"; There is also a grown-up novel "My Boyfriend Says I Have Depression" that is very popular in Douban reading and is extremely contemporary and topical. Among these works, we are more interested in the content itself. The company's philosophy is to focus on creating high-quality content, strive to make new breakthroughs in this genre and set a higher benchmark for each work. Currently, several works are being polished repeatedly, and the online drama of "Crime without Evidence" is also under development and is expected to be available to the audience in 2017.

Reporter: While focusing on content, what are your expectations for the box office of the company's films? I heard from the introduction that Huaying Xinrong had launched the development of an artificial intelligence box office prediction system as early as 2011, but there are many questions about movie box office predictions. Controversial, what do you think about the deviation of the forecast results? What is the role of this system?

He Junyi: Well, the Huaying BRP system was put into research and development in 2011 and entered the public testing stage in 2013. We have cooperated with many large companies in the industry to forecast and analyze the box office of the film during the development and distribution stages of the project., helping producers and distributors make decisions. In addition, the system will also forecast all upcoming movies in the market and regularly publish the forecast results on our WeChat public account. All forecast data can now be seen there. As a result, as you said, the predictions of mature genre films and series films will be relatively accurate, while some films created by new team teams will have certain deviations. The reason for these deviations is that the amount of data is too thin and there is too much new data per test. However, after more than two years of testing and machine learning, the system is constantly upgrading automatically, and our accuracy has been greatly improved. On the one hand, its role can help producers match the right cast, provide analysis of schedule and genre, and control the cost ceiling; on the other hand, it can help distributors make a probabilistic estimate of the box office value of the film. Both aspects can be used to cooperate with us in making decisions based on data.

I understand that the controversy you are talking about should be a matter of judgment between humans and machines. As an art, movies cannot be completely predicted by machines, but at the same time, movies as a product also have market rules. But as far as "prediction" is concerned, it is true that not all films can make accurate predictions at this stage. As mentioned earlier, there are too many variables in the success or failure of a movie's box office, and the relationship is too subtle and complex. Therefore, for us, the prediction system is more of a tool and a reference for data. When you understand a system, you can see more from the results it gives. Every operation result of it has its potential truth. As for whether this truth is applicable to the current project situation, we need to interpret it.

Reporter: In addition to movies, the recent development of online film and television works is in an explosive period. What is Huaying Xinrong's development in this regard?

He Junyi: First of all, online audio-visual content is definitely a blue ocean, and the future prospects are huge. As a field with a relatively high threshold among audio-visual products, film still has its own vitality. Next, more and more high-quality audio-visual content for the Internet will emerge, including more big online movies similar to the concept of American B-class films, and online dramas similar to American TV dramas. Huaying Xinrong will also join forces with mainstream playback platforms to jointly launch a number of "super online dramas" to produce more refined content with higher standards. Again, as previously said, we will create full-port high-quality video content and set our standards.

Editor: yvonne