Chapter 534 Pre-production of the 2016 Summer Movie Season
Chapter 534 Pre-production of the 2016 Summer Movie Season
In fact, compared with Wang Hao's previous life, today, the IP wave in the cultural industry has entered the second half of online literature with online IP derivatives as the core, under the intentional or unintentional catalysis of the Galaxy Group.
Capital is profit-seeking, but also weak.
Faced with Galaxy Group's firm IP first-mover advantage, after initial testing, several major Internet capitals have clearly realized that it is not feasible to break through this area and engage in the kind of head-on confrontation with Galaxy Group that the industry initially predicted.
The IP moat of Galaxy Group is too deep and too thick. Just look at the works they have registered with copyright agencies and you can see that [Galaxy Cinematic Universe] is not all they have. Under this iceberg that has revealed most of its body, there is another thick and solid foundation.
Moreover, Galaxy Group does not even rely on these undeveloped IP works, and their own blood-making ability is also not bad.
What is limiting the development of Galaxy Group nowadays is not even themselves, but the fact that the domestic film and television market is not large enough. If there are too many IP adaptations on hand, it will easily cause indigestion.
As a result, several major domestic Internet capitals began to change their thinking and track and did not intend to compete head-on with Galaxy Group.
In April of this year, at the first China "Online Literature +" Conference, Alibaba Entertainment announced its latest strategic guidelines to the public.
That is, through new infrastructure such as content system construction, in-depth mining, user reach, commercial monetization, and the integration of online and offline, we will empower online literature, promote a new round of industrial upgrading, and create an "Ali big entertainment map" with a full industrial chain with IP as the core.
Tencent Entertainment was equally unwilling to be outdone, stating that while it would continue with its "pan-entertainment" strategy, it would not forget to protect creativity and high-quality works, and would place greater emphasis on a "people-oriented" approach.
As for Galaxy Group, its speech at the conference was quite standard, somewhere between Penguin and Alibaba. It said it would continue to play a leading role, deepening content creation on the one hand and expanding channels around the industry on the other. At the same time, it would provide a better experience for users and create a happy life with heart.
It can also be seen from this conference that misaligned competition has become the latest situation in the second half of the competition for online IPs, and this is also the result of different appearances presented by each company under the influence of its own genes.
For example, Alibaba Group is itself a traffic black hole and started the latest in IP literature. Although it owns channels such as Shuqi Novels, UC Novels, Taobao Reading, Youku Bookstore, and PP Bookstore, Alibaba Literature's market share is not high.
So they chose to leverage their online and offline advantages and focus on developing the entire industry chain around IP.
Tencent has Qidian Chinese Network in its hands. Although there is also Xingyue Chinese Network competing with it in the market, its ability to generate revenue is not weak. Now that the previous IP resources have been almost exhausted by Galaxy Group, discovering new authors, new works, and new IPs is undoubtedly the best choice.
Compared with the other two, the Galaxy Group is much more relaxed. Thanks to Wang Hao's foresight and long-term vision, they only need to proceed steadily and develop with peace of mind.
In this way, Tencent Entertainment has established a firm foothold in the production end of the upstream cultural industry, Alibaba Entertainment has launched an attack in the downstream cultural industry, and Galaxy Group has firmly occupied the entire cultural industry chain and at the same time extended its tentacles outside the industry chain.
The entanglement among the three companies has become the current competitive situation in China's cultural industry.
Among them, Galaxy Group even has a huge advantage and can use traditional industries to fight against the invasion of Internet capital. Wang Hao is much younger than Alibaba’s Ma and Tencent’s Ma, which is enough to show that Wang Hao, an international director, is equally outstanding in the business field.
Many people also believe that the next battle among the three companies will not be too far away. Whoever can grab the most time from young people in the future will inevitably become the key to the victory or defeat among the giants.
All parties are competing for this, but no matter how those economists and industry development experts on the Internet talk and analyze the pros and cons, or how strong the capital and talents of Internet companies such as Tencent and Alibaba are, Wang Hao is not worried at all.
His Galaxy Group is not a soft persimmon like Huayi and Guangguang in the entertainment industry. Although domestic Internet capital is powerful, Galaxy Group has always been benchmarking against international entertainment giants such as Hollywood Disney.
In the eyes of Wang Hao, who had already taken a head start in 05 and had the memory of the future as a guide, the mere Internet capital in the mainland is nothing to worry about.
And as the saying goes, it is impolite not to reciprocate, the Galaxy Group is not a gentle and harmless little lamb.
Internet capital wants to invade the cultural industry, but the cultural industry occupies the source of content and can also invade the Internet in turn.
For example, their Galaxy Group is currently vigorously developing the Tik Tok short video app. As for who will be able to grab the most time from young people in the future, Internet companies such as Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu are still making various attempts, but Wang Hao already knows the answer in advance.
And it’s not just Tik Tok.
"Mr. Wang, the investment contract with Pinduoduo has been signed."
Liu Yuan, the general manager in charge of the investment department of Galaxy Capital, took the documents, knocked on the door and walked into the chairman's office, and placed the contract in front of Wang Hao.
Wang Hao flipped through the contract, looked at the investment amount and shareholding ratio, and nodded with satisfaction.
Just in April last year, Huang Zheng selected more than 4 core employees from his own game company and used the money he had earned previously to incubate and launch the first social e-commerce application "Pinhaohuo" within the company.
The application focuses on group buying of fresh fruits and vegetables. Users can invite friends to group buy through social platforms such as WeChat groups and Moments. When the specified number of people is reached, the group buy will take effect and users can buy fresh fruits and vegetables at low prices.
Later in September, Huang Zheng's company turned the group-buying model into a platform called "Pinduoduo". After only two weeks online, the number of users exceeded one million.
As its business expanded, the Pinduoduo platform began to grow rapidly and entered the vision of Wang Hao, who had already paid attention to it.
As a reborn person, he certainly knows how powerful Pinduoduo will be in the e-commerce field in the future.
Especially in the economic downturn, it has even shaken the status of Taobao and JD.com by relying on its vast sinking market.
Just recently in February, Pinduoduo, which had only been in development for 2 months, achieved a monthly transaction volume of over 5 million and had 1000 million paying users.
Therefore, Galaxy Group also took decisive action and participated in Pinduoduo's Series A financing with US$300 million.
As for the fact that Wang Hao clearly knew the future achievements of Pinduoduo, why didn't he rely on Galaxy Group to incubate the company in advance?
The reason is very simple, that is, Pinduoduo's business model does not conform to the business philosophy of Galaxy Group. The business philosophy of Galaxy Group is to bring happiness to everyone, and this happiness is not only for their customers and fans, but also for their employees.
Pinduoduo's business model is destined to be deeply inward-looking, not only for the merchants that have settled in, but also for its own employees. This is obviously contrary to the Galaxy Group's relaxed, pleasant, happy and healthy business philosophy.
Moreover, although Pinduoduo has great development potential, in its early stages of operation, like other group buying platforms, it was also a big money burner.
As far as Wang Hao knows, Pinduoduo did not turn a profit until 2021. Before that, the fierce battle between it and Taobao and JD.com was not much better than the IP battle in the cultural industry, and it might even have won.
Although the Galaxy Group is not short of money, it is better to leave the task of spending money to cultivate the market to venture capital.
As for themselves, with the development of Douyin in the future, live streaming shopping malls and high-quality sales like Pangdonglai and Sam's Club will differentiate them from Pinduoduo and will be the best choice for Galaxy Group.
Of course, no matter what the future holds, at least investing in Pinduoduo now to trip up Alibaba, which wants to expand its territory in the entertainment industry, is a right thing to do.
In addition, for the Galaxy Group, the domestic market is like a battlefield, and the competition abroad is equally fierce.
As a large multinational cultural and entertainment company, Galaxy Group's business scope covers not only China, but also Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia around China, as well as further afield Europe, Canada and the United States.
After more than 10 years of hard work, Galaxy Cinematic Universe has gained a large number of enthusiastic fans overseas. In recent years, Galaxy Group has made more profits than losses from its cooperative investments with Hollywood companies overseas.
The Galaxy Group occupies a certain market share. Correspondingly, entertainment companies in other overseas countries naturally lose a little market share. They certainly don't have a good face towards the Galaxy Group that is snatching food from them.
That is to say, Galaxy Group has the Chinese market as bait behind it, and [Eastern Galaxy Cinema Metropolis] can provide assistance to those Hollywood film and television companies, as well as the overseas story line of [Galaxy Cinematic Universe] to paint a big pie, attracting several allies such as Sony Pictures, CJ Entertainment, Columbia Pictures and Legendary Pictures. Otherwise, Galaxy Group will also face multi-party encirclement and suppression overseas.
Of course, whether it is domestic or foreign competition, in the end it all comes down to strength and work.
At least now, the Galaxy Group’s core [Galaxy Cinematic Universe] is still full of vitality, and the whole story is full of vitality, so the overall situation it faces will not be bad.
In May, with the arrival of the May Day holiday, the trailer for the new film in the "Galaxy Cinematic Universe" series once again caused quite a stir on the Internet.
Based on the unstoppable box office success in 2015, as well as the frequent hits of TV series and variety shows, the media used the word "tragic" when predicting the upcoming summer season in 2016.
Whether it's movies or TV, this year everyone seems to be trying their best to compete:
More than 50 movies of various genres have chosen to be released in this period, TV series produced by big IPs have chosen to compete in the same period, and many new and old programs have also been released one after another.
Even though the schedule has just been warmed up, the fierce competition and fierce fighting are already predictable.
Especially during the previous Spring Festival, Wang Hao's "Ball Lightning" raked in 40 billion yuan at the box office. Although the movies chosen to be released in this summer season cannot say that they are better than "Ball Lightning", since the ceiling of the film market has been raised, they have more stories to imagine.
In May, many movies began to warm up for the summer season in advance. "Captain America 2.5", which was said to be "Avengers 3", staged a civil war of Marvel superheroes and detonated the movie market on the 6th.
The only pity is that because of Wang Hao’s intervention, Marvel failed to recover the copyright of the Spider-Man series from Sony Pictures, so there is no Spider-Man in "Captain America 3" this time.
However, fans of Spider-Man don't have to worry, because the ninth film in the Spider-Man Cinematic Universe, "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse", which was jointly invested and produced by Galaxy Group and Sony Pictures and provided with creativity and controlled by Wang Hao, will be released at the end of May, competing with "Captain America 9".
Although the civil war between heroes in "Captain America 3" and the parting of Iron Man and Captain America were quite eye-catching, the appearance of the three Spiders in "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" also made countless Spider-Man fans cheer and scream.
Moreover, in this movie, Sony Pictures' "Spider-Man Cinematic Universe" pioneered the concept of a parallel universe, which gave countless audiences new imaginations.
As reflected in the box office of the movies, both domestically and overseas, "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" and "Captain America 3" are catching up closely and it is difficult to widen the gap.
The competition between the two companies can be regarded as a good start for this summer season.
Each company has also put in a lot of effort in media promotion. For example, Enlight Pictures' "Big Fish and Begonia" is expected to surpass "The Return of the Great Sage".
"Legend of the Gods", jointly produced by Bona Film Group and China Star, carries the banner of traditional Chinese culture, compares itself to "Nezha: The Devil Child Comes into the World", and vows to create a magical industrial masterpiece.
Jackie Chan's "Skiptrace" was favored by some distributors because his previous film "The Foreigner" released by Galaxy Group made everyone realize his appeal and acting skills. It is said that this film has a guaranteed box office of 10 billion.
There are also products of the hot-selling formula of popular IP and young and handsome actors, such as "Grave Robbers' Chronicles", "So Young", and "A Love So Beautiful", which are also expected to become box office dark horses of this summer.
Plus other popular Hollywood sequels like "X-Men: Apocalypse", "Finding Dory", "Independence Day 2", "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2", and "Jason Bourne".
It can be said that this summer, a large number of hotly-anticipated works are ready to enter the market with lofty ambitions.
Of course, the biggest names, the most eye-catching ones, and the ones that are unanimously recognized by movie fans and the media as having the greatest box office potential are definitely the works of Galaxy Group.
Unlike in the past, this time they sent out a veteran.
Master Zhang Yimou, who has joined Galaxy Group, will release his new film, "The Great Wall", which belongs to the Galaxy Cinematic Universe series, in the summer of 2016.
(End of this chapter)