Tencent: Express your feelings with movie emojis

Nov 21, 2025 CFM Case Study, Daily, Film x Internet, Industry 0

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When encountering a movie to your taste, perhaps you would like to present it to your friends, or express yourself with some of its elements.

Tencent’s instant messenger QQ and 20th Century Fox are ready to make it happen. Log into your QQ account and you can find a potato-planting emoji from the emoji pack of “QQ, Departure from Mars”. Starting with THE MARTIAN, 20th Century Fox will present popular elements in some of its next blockbusters in the form of virtual goods in QQ, while the image of QQ will be placed in the studio’s popular sci-fi movies.

In fact, it is not a novel idea to develop virtual goods based on hit movies or add certain elements to them. What differs now is that Tencent and 20th Century Fox are going to do this together. Considering the nearly 100 percent user adoption rate of Tencent’s instant messaging products among Chinese netizens, and the consistent support to the studio’s big budget productions from young movie goers, the cooperation of the two companies in developing and promoting popular elements naturally affects a huge pool of users.

Next year, 20th Century Fox will release a slate of big-budget films including X-men: Apocalypse, Independence Day: Resurgence, Ice Age: Collision Course, and Deadpool. Popular elements in all above big budget movies are expected to appear in QQ in the form of personalized signature, chat background, incoming call flash, Qzone background and emojis.

“Movies are not simply movies anymore, but a dynamic element in social networks,” said Cussion Pang, vice-president of Tencent, when describing their cooperation with Fox, underlying that it is a bold attempt at creating entertainment social networks that allow consumers to extend happiness brought by movies to every scenario.

For Fox, the objective is simple too. According to Sirena Liu, Managing Director of China Office, they can stop worrying about publicity if QQ delivers information of their coming releases to over 800 million monthly active users. In the future, 20th Century Fox will not only add Chinese elements but also QQ elements to their productions.

Fox has been quite active in partnering with Chinese companies recently. And it is not the only major Hollywood studio that has been on to it. More deals are expected to come up as long as the Chinese film market continues to grow.

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