Victor Koo renames Youku parent firm Heyi Group. (Photo : Reuters)
According to Allen Zhu, the chief executive of Heyi, this year is the "year of genre films" and, accordingly, most of the nascent company's six feature films that are slated for the course of 2015 are genre films.
According to the official press release, the list of feature projects reflects Heyi's underlying strategy to introduce "successful Intellectual Properties (IP) across the online and offline worlds" to the cinema audiences of China. As of Feb. 4, 2015, the six IPs that have been picked up by Heyi have accumulated six billion total video views/impressions in China.
This week's feature-film announcement from Heyi consists of the following:
- "Surprise," a highly popular online comedy that has been viewed over 1.6 billion time video since it was first uploaded in 2013.
- A popular Chinese romance series, also from 2013, called "Let's Get Married" with over 4 billion cumulative views on the Internet.
- "You've Got to Have a Dream, What If It Comes True?" is a best-selling comic book that is especially popular on Weibo following and was used by Alibaba founder Jack Ma as the title for his IPO speech in September last year.
- The fourth title, "Gardenia Blossom," is actually a song that was embraced by graduating Chinese students after its release in 2004.
- "How Much Love Can Be Played" is a small stage production which has been shown over 3,000 times in China's theaters since 2006.
- And finally, "A Teacher's Diary" is a romance movie that was released last year 2014 and was a major hit in Thailand.
Alibaba is particularly relevant to Heyi Film as the e-commerce giant owns an 18.5-percent stake in the Youku Tudou subsidiary, which was launched in Aug. 2014.
China's most prominent online video company announced that it wants to make an impact with Heyi because it is officially China's first online and offline production company.
The new film company is wholly owned by Youku Tudou and, in addition to Zhu, Victor Koo is the chairman, which was added to his responsibility as the chairman and CEO of the online video parent entity.
