Internet helps Chinese film industry grow bigger

China has the fastest-growing film market in the world, with the box office revenue increasing by 48 percent year-on-year in the first half of 2015. [Photo/IC]

LOS ANGELES - "Film used to be B2C (Business of Customer) business, but now Internet allows the industry focus on customers", Michael Ellis, Asia-Pacific President and Managing Director of the Motion Picture Association, said Thursday.

Ellis made the statement at the 2015 US-China Film Summit held here by Asia Society Southern California.

"With 480 million online people access in videos, the influence of big internet companies like Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent are important in film and television industry," Ellis said, predicting that China's office box sales will surpass that of the United States by 2017.

China has the fastest-growing film market in the world, with the box office revenue increasing by 48 percent year-on-year in the first half of 2015. The figure reached the 2014 sum of $4.8 million as of early September and is expected to hit around $6.5 billion at the year-end.

The Baidu-owned Iqiyi Motion Pictures, for example, has already invested or participated in over 40 movies in its less than two years of establishment.

According to Li Yansong, president of Iqiyi, 50 percent of the ticket sales this year have so far been from online e-ticket sales, exhibiting a trend that moviegoers tend to get film information through the Internet, which helps them to decide whether to watch a movie or not.

On film promotion, Li noted that in the past few years, about 80 to 90 percent of the promotion budget had been used for outdoor advertisements, but right now most companies put half of their promotion budgets in online advertisements.

To Gao Qunyao, Vice President of Wanda Cultural Industry Group which runs the AMC cinema chain in the United States, the Internet has been a "revolutionary" force that has changed the original B2C model of China's film and television industry, and has made people in the business focus more on their consumers, whom they never paid attention to before.

"For Wanda cinemas, if you look at the 'Golden Week' in October, more than 17 percent of the movie tickets are sold online via mobile devices," said Gao.