Latest update October 21st, 2015 12:41 PM
China’s “Fans” Economy
A new generation of young idols has been enjoying extreme popularity in China, among which Chinese Korean-Wave Stars like Lu Han and Kris Wu are key figures.
The consumption abilities of fans of these wildly popular young heartthrobs have shocked the market over the past year: film studios began to take notice of these market forces, leading to a new type of movies tailored for their fans. Such “fans movies” rely on fans to pay for their beloved stars, with different channels and ways of consumption.
Unprecedented Popularity
While the Chinese post-80s generation re-tweet black humor puns, the post-90s and -00s generations have contributed hundreds of thousands of, or even over a million comments to Korean-wave stars’ Weibo post, including former EXO members Lu Han and Kris Wu, and Victoria Song, leader of the girl band f(x).
Lu Han’s Weibo account “M Lu” boasts 8.9 million followers, overshadowed by super stars with tens of millions of followers. However, whatever he posts always attracts over 200,000 of comments and re-tweets, and a whopping 600 to 700 thousands of favorites.
For the record, Weibo accounts of stars with more than 50 million followers typically get as many as tens of thousands of re-tweets.
Wu and Song receive fewer comments per Weibo post than Lu, but almost all over 20,000. And any topic about these stars ranks among the most discussed topics thanks to their fans.
Turn Into A Movie Star
These Chinese Korean-wave stars gradually choose to start a career back home in acting, which makes better sense in view of the depressed music record industry and exponential growth of movie industry.
New blood like Wu and Lu also provides a solution to the lack of young and fresh new faces on the big screen. Meanwhile, many Chines directors and producers nowadays are afraid to lose young audiences, thus casting idols popular among the post-90s and -00s generations could be a guaranteed approach to them.
So far they haven’t let the film studios down. SOMEWHERE ONLY WE KNOW starring Wu and 20 ONCE AGAIN staring Lu have easily taken in more than $45 million in 2015. Both of them have a slate of films lining up, including Guan Hu’s MR. SIX, Ahn Sang-hoon’s THE WITNESS and Zhou Tuoru’s NEVER GONE.
This has triggered another phenomenon – any movie press conference attended by those idols would be overcrowded to such an extent that movie companies have to strengthen security, despite that the ticket price has usually been bid up to thousands of yuan by fans.
The fans clubs are well organized and cover almost everything related to the stars. Take the press conference of THE GREAT WALL for example, dozens of Lu Han’s fans were waiting outside and they even prepared gifts for all reporters.
Before the release of 20 ONCE AGAIN, the Weibo account of “Lu Han Movie Fans Club” posted detailed guidelines: boosting opening day sales, filling empty seats instead of booking whole theaters, saving online ticket stubs, giving high ratings, spreading positive ratings with short comments online, etc.
While making movies, Wu and Lu haven’t totally abandoned their music careers. Wu was invited by Guo Jingming, director of young adult movie TINY TIMES franchise, to perform the series’ theme song TIME BOILS RAIN, and successfully attracted public attention owing to the wide popularity of the movie. He also personally created a theme song for SOMEWHERE ONLY WE KNOW, exceeding 1 million plays within 50 minutes.
OUR TOMORROW, the theme song of 20 ONCE AGAIN performed by Lu, landed champion on major music charts the second it was released. Its MV exceeded 1 million plays within only 47 minutes, breaking the record of 3 hours set by FLEET OF TIME, the theme song of FLEET OF TIME performed by Chinese diva Faye Wong.
Though “fans economy” could drive box office up to some point, it is high-quality productions that endure the test of time. Anything overdone spells banality.
Related articles
More in this category
