Chinese Streamer iQiyi Increases Profits in First Quarter

Peak television was officially declared dead earlier this year when FX boss John Landgraf revealed that the number of scripted series on air in 2023 dropped 12% from the previous year – the first reduction in over a decade.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Shanghai International Film Festival has unveiled a selection that is weighted heavily to world premieres and Chinese, local titles. That gives the festival showcase screenings for the newest works by established Chinese directors Gu Changwei (“Peacock, “Till Death Do Us Part”), Wei Shujun (“Only the River Flows,” “Striding Into the Wind”) and Guan Hu (“Old Fish”). Guan was rewarded in Cannes only last week for his Un Certain Regard-winning picture “Black Dog,” but will unveil his next effort “The Hedgehog in Shanghai’s main competition.

EXCLUSIVE: Jewish streamer ChaiFlicks has struck its first deal for Yiddish programing including an oral history project with Leonard Nimoy.

Blue Sun Palace was one of the prize winners at the recently concluded Cannes Film Festival where it took the French Touch award of the Cannes Critics week selections (Simon Of The Mountains took the Grand Prize, the other major award from the section). French “Touch” is an ironic name for an award to a film where “touch” is key in several scenes depicted in the massage parlor setting where much of the movie takes place.

Chinese director Hu Guan’s drama Black Dog won the top Cannes Un Certain Regard Prize on Friday evening.

Joe Leydon Film Critic Call “Sight” a stealth faith-based movie and you won’t be far off the mark. For the most part, it’s a respectful but unremarkable biopic about Dr.

Alissa Simon Film Critic The intimate and naturalistic Mandarin-language drama “Blue Sun Palace” has nabbed the French Touch prize from the Cannes Critics’ Week jury, putting Chinese-American writer-director Constance Tsang on the map as a talent to watch after her feature debut. Certain to see future festival action, the drama about three working-class Chinese immigrants in Flushing, NY, the film succeeds with touching performances from Ke-Xi Wu (“Nina Wu”), Lee Kang Sheng (Tsai Ming Liang’s iconic actor) and Haixpeng Xu (“Where Echoes Never End”) that could tempt distributors in the coming months.

When Netflix released its latest major data set on Thursday — its second under the name of What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report — animated features continued to demonstrate a major impact for the streamer. Of the top 100 most viewed titles in the period of review, from July to December 2023, 33 were animated, bringing in a total of 1,087,600,000 views.

Chinese writer and director Jing Zou’s feature film project A Girl Unknown has won the top prize at the Next Step initiative of Cannes Critics’ Week, aimed at supporting filmmakers as they make the move from short films to their first feature.

Twenty-five years ago, Ghostly International was born inside a University of Michigan dorm room. Sam Valenti IV was a 19-year-old art history major studying Jackson Pollock by day and DJing warehouses by night; in between, he pressed records and drove around the city to different record stores, selling them copies from the back of his car.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief First-time feature director Constance Tsang makes a splash in Cannes with “Blue Sun Palace,” the first U.S. film in Critics Week that is in the Mandarin Chinese language. Set in a massage parlor, staffed with Chinese immigrants, in Queens, New York, the melodramatic film tells of how the romantic relationship between a man and a woman is disrupted by a sudden disappearance. Tsang was careful to avoid stereotypes and to be true to the community that she grew up in and observing. But the feature effort was also a big step up from the short films she cut her teeth on. Underlining that point, she amassed a powerful cast of leading Chinese-speaking actors, including Lee Kang-sheng (“What Time Is It There” and a dozen Tsai Ming-liang films), Wu Ke-xi (“Nina Wu,” “The Road to Mandalay”) and rising Mainland China star Xu Haipeng.How did you jump from a succession of short films into your first feature? I would say that jumping into the feature is exactly what happened.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Tencent, the Chinese social media, gaming and streaming giant, enjoyed a 62% gain in profits, earned from a 6% revenue improvement in the first quarter of the year. Profits between January and March reached RMB42.6 billion ($5.92 billion). That figure also represented a 55% quarter on quarter gain.

Naman Ramachandran ProSiebenSat.1 Group, which owns one of Germany’s leading broadcasters and one of its top streaming platforms, has had an encouraging start to 2024 after a rough 2023 financial year that saw revenues dip by 7%. Financial results for the first quarter of 2024, reported on Tuesday, reveal that group revenues increased by 6% to €867 million ($935 million) in the first quarter of 2024 and adjusted EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization) grew by 35% to €72 million ($77.6 million) despite higher programming expenses. The group said that in addition to revenue growth, the positive numbers are due to the cost control program implemented in the previous year.

Naman Ramachandran ProSiebenSat.1 Group, which owns one of Germany’s leading broadcasters and one of its top streaming platforms, has had an encouraging start to 2024 after a rough 2023 financial year that saw revenues dip by 7%. Financial results for the first quarter of 2024, reported on Tuesday, reveal that group revenues increased by 6% to €867 million ($935 million) in the first quarter of 2024 and adjusted EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization) grew by 35% to €72 million ($77.6 million) despite higher programming expenses. The group said that in addition to revenue growth, the positive numbers are due to the cost program implemented in the previous year.

EXCLUSIVE: Disney+ is moving into originals in the Central and Eastern Europe region with a green light for Polish drama Breslau (working title). The drama will follow a police officer investigating an horrific killing and production is underway, Deadline has learned.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Tencent Music Entertainment, China’s largest online music corporation, got smaller but more profitable in the first quarter of 2024. That continued a trend seen previously in the company’s 2023 accounts. Revenues in the January to March quarter weighed in at $937 million (RMB6.77 billion), a 3% decrease compared with the same quarter last year. But profits after tax increased 28% to $212 million (RMB1.53 billion). Monthly active users across its free and paid for tiers decreased by 2% to 592 million.

Michael Schneider Variety Editor at Large Hulu comedy head Billy Rosenberg is exiting the streamer after more than seven years. Rosenberg, who most recently served as senior VP of comedy for Hulu Originals, has not yet been replaced.

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer Nebula is aiming to break into the big-league movie biz with the launch of Nebula Motion Pictures, the new studio arm of the creator-community-focused indie streaming service, and tapping director and cinematographer Valentina Vee as the company’s director of motion pictures. Under her new overall deal, which marks the first pact of this kind for Nebula, Vee will move in-house at Nebula and focus on the formation of the new film studio alongside Nebula Production vice president Trenton Waterson, an alum of Marvel Studios, to build and scale Nebula Pictures.

EXCLUSIVE: Buenos Aires-based sales FilmSharks has taken international sales rights to the Chinese animated film A Hero’s Journey to the West.

EXCLUSIVE: Chinese streaming giant iQIYI is involved in a legal row after featuring Korean masterpiece Oldboy in its library for at least six years without a proper license.