Latest update December 15th, 2015 10:12 PM
Big Data Goes To Films
SHANGHAI June 15, 2025 - Film industry, like most industries, has more data at its fingertips than ever before and film studios have been using aggregated data as a de facto way to select what they should be interested in and how to market it, said Zhu Huilong, CEO of Heyi Pictures and Senior Vice President of Youku Tudou Inc.
Zhu and five other panelists discussed the uses of big data, including President of Ant Financial Group Fan Zhiming, head of Asian Business Development at United Talent Agency Max Michael, CEO of Weibo Wang Gaofei, actor and director Xu Zheng and Senior Vice President of iQIYI Yang Xianghua. Reported by Hua Yang from the 18th Shanghai International Film Festival.
Internet databases on films
Akin to a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook, Weibo is one of the most popular sites in China. According to Wang, film has been the most popular topic on Weibo: “Among 200 million monthly active users, 80 million have talked about films. And over 200 movie stars have more than 10 million followers. Those numbers make up a database. Weibo will try to connect films and their fans by cooperating with Ant Financial and Yulebao.
As for the partnership, Fan said with the data from Weibo, Taobao and Aliplay would utilize the LBS positioning system to connect data and theaters in the future.
At the same time, iQIYI, one of the leading online video players in China, is also utilizing its in house database to serve its film production. “We are trying to base our film choices on a box office prediction. But it will take some time to reach a high-level accuracy. At the moment, the prediction is only 80 percent accurate,” Yang said.
However, Zhu stated that, in their experience, it makes more sense to compare two films rather than analyzing a single one. “Last year, TINY TIMES 3 and THE CONTINENT were released in theaters during the same period. But after data analysis, we realized that THE CONTINENT was more popular in certain cities. So we went to these cities to promote the film. And it succeeded,” Zhu explained.
Michael, on the other hand, introduced the film database system in the US. “There are two kinds of film data in the US. One is film tracking, such as tracking polls made by Nielsen. They will ask questions to people coming out of the theater. The tracking is only accurate about 30 days in advance of the film’s release. That gives companies a sense of how the box office will be. The other is the celebrity popularity. On the Internet, you can track things like how popular a celebrity is to a point,” he said.
Michael also revealed that in order to take a earlier step in the decision making, UTA has developed a software called PreAct to tracks the hype on social media surrounding a specific film.
Related:
Big Data in the Chinese Film Industry
CEO Zhu Huilong Talks about Heyi Film
iQIYI Motion Pictures Presented by President Li Yansong
Vision remains the key
While the use of data has been widely adopted, one question was raised: will the artistic vision be replaced with market optimization?
Zhu pointed out that at the end of day, it’s up to the human beings to make decisions. “Even though data is rational, it is not everything. We cannot just look at the numbers,” Zhu said.
Wang also believed there’s no use in putting all the faith in data. “Social Media like Weibo can only magnify the influence. But if you don’t have any value at the beginning, there is nothing we could do. We can help films locate their audience. But if they are not good enough, there will not be audience at all,” Wang explained.
“Content wins all the time. The artistic vision and creativity can grasp things that data doesn’t understand. We need to follow our heart sometimes,” Xu added.
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