As the "Lost in Thailand" sequel will come out in a few months, producers want to make sure of its success by considering viewers' choices for the right plot and actors.
Producers want the movie to become more interesting to the audience, so they are now mining the Internet for information about how people watch movies and what they react to.
With the ideas they will gather from viewers, producers will make changes to the film from the earliest script-writing stage to post production. They can pick actors or directors that are likely to draw a crowd, and suggest an ending the fans will love.
"Lost in Thailand," a Chinese slapstick comedy, revived hope for the country's film industry with its more than $208 million earnings, the highest-grossing record in town.
The film was "very funny, very well made, mass-market comedy, which is well scripted, has an exotic location," as described by Film Business Asia's chief executive Patrick Frater.
"The emotion of films cannot be digitalized. If the director wants to have a sad ending, but the big data tells you that the box office wouldn't be good with this ending, then how to choose? In my opinion, if the director makes the plot well and even those kinds of stories were not very common to see before, it will still attract an audience for sure. Then the movie eventually becomes the one that changes the data," said the highest-grossing movie's director Xu Zheng.
The sequel, "Lost in Hong Kong," is expected to be in theaters by Oct. 2015. The plot details are unknown at this time, but the trailer shows Xu Zheng teaming up with Vicky Zhao.