Chinese Cinema's Oddball: How Much Has *Tiny Times* Changed the Film Industry?

A run of hugely profitable films, a director with no film experience, a phenomenon that changed how we talk about culture... How much has Tiny Times changed our era?

Say goodbye to Tiny Times.

Over the past week its share of screenings has fallen from 48% on opening day to 29% the day before yesterday, and to 5% today. We can now bid farewell to this film, or rather to this series.

Many people will add the word "finally." A film that tested so many people's lowest standards for taste and storytelling (the crueler description is "a feature-length PowerPoint") is leaving the screens, and audiences no longer have to stare at naked money: the money on screen, and the money the films made.

In its first week, Tiny Times 4 took 457 million yuan at the box office. Two years ago, Tiny Times 1 caused an uproar when it opened. Everyone except fans of the novels heaped abuse on it, veteran directors felt the whole industry had been insulted, and the film regulator even summoned people for a talk. None of it stopped the film from selling: amid the insults, it took a hefty 484 million yuan.

Four Tiny Times films came out within two years. Critics thought no better of them as art, but their box-office success made every profit-seeking film company want a piece of the action, and the companies that couldn't get in have studied and copied them in all sorts of ways.

In 2014, for example, a wave of films about "youth" and "girlfriends" appeared, and So Young and Tiny Times deserve much of the credit. The "sisters" of Tiny Times and the "fresh meat" (young, pretty male idols who all seem to look alike) now turn up more and more often on other films' cast lists. And more and more films mock Tiny Times as a 90-minute music video while doing exactly the same thing: when promoting a film, they bring in different singers and release theme-song music videos.

Tiny Times gave the industry more than 1.7 billion yuan at the box office and endless gossip. Like it or not, it also changed the industry in quite a few ways.

Tiny Times is the biggest moneymaker of recent years, and people study how it did it, not why

No one denies that Tiny Times is the most "successful" film series of recent years. Given how thin its storytelling is, "success" here means making money.

Tiny Times 1, released in 2013, took 488 million yuan, eighth among all Chinese films released that year, ahead of Man of Steel and Switch, among others. Tiny Times 2: Age of Wood, released the same year, took 296 million yuan, enough for 11th place on that year's chart of Chinese films.

The next two films kept up the streak. Tiny Times 3: Age of Gold Stamping took 521 million yuan in 2014. Tiny Times 4: End of the Soul has taken 457 million yuan so far, after little more than a week in theaters.

The four films have grossed more than 1.7 billion yuan in total on a combined investment of only about 220 million yuan, a return of more than 250%.

The series looks lavish, but it cost far less to make than it appears. It needed neither the sets of a costume drama nor the expensive effects of a visual-effects blockbuster. When shooting began, actors such as Chen Xuedong and Guo Biting were newcomers, so their fees were low.

Yang Mi, the biggest name in the series, was not a top-tier film actress either. TV dramas such as Palace and Chinese Paladin 3 had made her very popular, but she had little film experience, so her fee was not especially high.

The shoot itself was organized as back-to-back filming. In 79 days (roughly the shooting schedule of a single film), Guo Jingming shot all the footage, then cut it in post-production into two separate films: Tiny Times and Tiny Times 2: Age of Wood. He shot two films for the cost of one and collected two films' worth of box office, which is good cost control. He used the same method again for Tiny Times 3: Age of Gold Stamping and Tiny Times 4: End of the Soul.

Sponsors also covered much of the production cost. Some of the dazzling array of clothes in the films were sample garments the art director, Huang Wei, borrowed from VOGUE Taiwan. The films' styling director, Xie Lijun, also revealed that many international luxury brands offered to support the shoot.

An Xiaofen, one of the producers of Tiny Times, said that the advertising, sponsorship and locations sponsors provided were worth 70-80 million yuan in total. These savings made Tiny Times one of the best-value, highest-return films of recent years.

The young cast of Tiny Times became everyone's yardstick for fame

Once Tiny Times took off, it made stars of a group of young actors.

The biggest name was Yang Mi, and even she was not a top-tier film star. Ke Zhendong had gained some fame on the mainland through You Are the Apple of My Eye. Guo Caijie, Xie Yilin and the others were not well known, and Chen Xuedong and Guo Biting were complete newcomers.

Now they are all "stars." The most successful is probably Chen Xuedong. In just two years he went from nobody to a Weibo celebrity with 18.91 million followers. After serving as a trainee homeroom teacher on Hunan TV's reality show Grade One, he settled firmly into the image of the "warm guy." After Tiny Times, Zhang Yimou also recruited him for a role in his new film, The Great Wall.

Guo Caijie is doing well too. Besides Tiny Times, three more films starring her are due out in 2015: Surprises All the Way at the start of the year, Say I Love You to the Wind in the summer season, and Paris Holiday.

But her biggest source of income is still advertising. Last year, in a Taiwanese media ranking of female singers' endorsement deals, Guo Caijie came second, with 12 endorsements worth nearly NT$160 million. This year she has added several more, including Lay's potato chips and Pepsi, so she will surely earn more.

Then there is Xie Yilin, known as "Hold-It-Together Sister," who made a guest appearance on Running Man and took part in Qinghai TV's I Am a Legend. She has also played supporting roles in several films, including Pang Ho-cheung's Women Who Flirt and My Sunshine, released over the May Day holiday.

Tiny Times didn't invent youth, but since it came out, everyone knows how much "youth" and young bodies can sell for

One effect Tiny Times had on the film industry was a burst of youth films, especially ones selling "fresh meat" and "girlfriends." These are the two most distinctive ingredients of Tiny Times. Chen Xuedong, one of the leads, is a model of "fresh meat," and the scheming among Lin Xiao, Gu Li, Nan Xiang and Tang Wanru is the films' biggest selling point.

Those two ingredients were a large part of why Tiny Times succeeded, so youth films with similar ingredients came out one after another.

The most obvious example is Girls, whose Chinese title means "girlfriends." The way the characters stand and dress on its poster looks very much like a Tiny Times poster. Its plot, a tangle of love and hatred among three young women, also looks a lot like Tiny Times. Besides Girls, nine more films with "girlfriends" in their Chinese titles have appeared since Tiny Times.

"Fresh meat" has also become a key test for many films when casting male roles. Zhang Yimou's The Great Wall made Chen Xuedong one of its leads. Films such as 20 Once Again and Somewhere Only We Know cast Lu Han and Wu Yifan, who, like Chen Xuedong, are classed as "fresh-meat actors," in their lead roles. The fresh-meat craze that Tiny Times set off has had a considerable effect on the film industry.

Tiny Times made Guo Jingming a CEO, not just a director; he may never have seen it as merely a film

China's film industry runs on a "director-centered system," and directors enjoy supreme status. Only people with a full grounding in film knowledge and technique are supposed to sit in the director's chair, and once you are the director, your authority over the project is absolute.

Guo Jingming's arrival, and especially his commercial success, posed a real threat to that "authority." After the first Tiny Times did well at the box office, directors including Gao Qunshu and Feng Xiaogang attacked him publicly. Guo Jingming hit back that their old ways were outdated, and at one point the Film Bureau called everyone together to "calm down."

Other "new" directors, such as Zhao Wei and Xu Zheng, had spent years in the industry and had at least some grounding in theory and filmmaking. Guo Jingming crossed over from another field with no experience at all, and his already contested reputation made him the spark that inflamed the conflict.

However much the films' backers stressed how quickly and diligently Guo Jingming learned to direct, viewers could see once Tiny Times came out that you cannot pick up a competent command of film language on the job. Guo Jingming's cleverness lay elsewhere: he perfected the production process as far as he could, so that his weakness as a director mattered less to the project.

For the investors, the deal was done as long as the film came out on schedule. By the time they chose Guo Jingming to direct, they no longer much cared how good the film was.

Schedules for everything were Guo Jingming's main tool for getting his films released. After feeling his way through the first film, on Tiny Times 3 he took the process further than anyone had before.

According to the head of marketing for Tiny Times 3, every major milestone was fixed before shooting began, including the shooting schedule and the production and release dates of every kind of promotional material. Some were fixed down to the minute, such as releasing material when Weibo was most active.

The CEO of Mai Te Culture, the marketing company for the Tiny Times series, was struck by how Guo Jingming "managed everything, big and small," from choosing the marketing strategy down to the font and placement of text on the posters. In the month or two before release there were meetings of two to five hours every day, and between meetings Guo Jingming kept "giving orders" in WeChat groups or dealing with sudden problems.

This attention to and control over the production process made Tiny Times one of the most profitable film projects of the past few years. It also fits the trend toward a "producer-centered system." Young directors including Xu Zheng, Zhao Wei and Guo Jingming have all stressed on various occasions how much an "industrialized production process" matters to a film. It may not guarantee a great film, but it can at least ensure a result the director is satisfied with, within the limits of his or her ability.

That is why Tiny Times could teach the film world so many promotional tricks: without polished marketing, a film for fans would never become a topic for the whole country

All of the Tiny Times material and major announcements went out through Guo Jingming's Weibo account. Making a creator's personal Weibo the marketing hub of a film was arguably the series' biggest innovation.

This "innovation" suited a changing market. The internet was becoming ever more important in film marketing, and compared with buying ads offline and staging events on the ground, social networks like Weibo gave marketers a cheaper way to reach more viewers (potential customers) at once.

Before the first Tiny Times came out, some films had already started using Weibo in planned marketing campaigns. The usual method was to open an official Weibo account for the film to publish news, which the stars then reposted, spreading the news and drawing followers to the official account.

Anyone who ran one of these film accounts in the early days will tell you it was thankless work. "A few hundred thousand followers counts as very good, but they aren't actually that active, and you always have to come up with new tricks to keep them. It's exhausting," the head of one of China's first new-media marketing companies told QDaily.

What set Tiny Times apart was that its director, Guo Jingming, had spent the previous decade building his own fan base. He already had a personal Weibo account with more than 10 million followers, and letting it serve as the film's official account gave the project a big head start.

Those 10-million-plus followers, now 39 million, were of course also a major reason Guo Jingming got to direct. The official line was that he knew the series best, so he should direct it, and so his Weibo should be its window to the world. But everyone tacitly understood that this was simply the cheapest and most effective approach.

From the moment a film was announced, the film "requisitioned" Guo Jingming's Weibo. During that time, apart from occasional favors such as reposting to support friends' films or variety shows, he rarely posted anything unrelated to the film in progress. Instead he posted a steady stream of production updates and, at the right moments, all kinds of images and videos.

Guo Jingming and his partners called this "front-loaded marketing." The usual practice is to start promoting a film only a few months before release. Guo Jingming believed his approach held viewers' attention throughout, so that buying a ticket at the end would come naturally.

Take Tiny Times 3, the most complete and elaborate campaign. On November 24, 2013, Guo Jingming posted the first Weibo about the new film, announcing that Tiny Times 3: Age of Gold Stamping would start production in December, along with a "scalpel" poster.

Over the following months of preparation and shooting he posted dozens more. Anyone following them learned what the leads would look like, who the new characters were, how they related to the leads, how far shooting had got, and whose scenes had wrapped. These "secrets," which studios usually guard closely, became bait for fans. But the method only works for films with a strong fan base: "Ordinary people, first, don't care, and second, would have got sick of it long ago."

Producing and using huge amounts of material, and turning the posters and videos themselves into talking points, was another trend Tiny Times set off.

The print material for Tiny Times 3 included 167 posters and more than 300 stills. The posters took many forms and came out at different stages. When the project had just started, there was the "scalpel" concept poster. When new cast members joined, a round of posters to show them off. Had the original cast all returned? Another round. At 100 days before release, keyword posters; each male and female lead also got a character poster; and when the posters ran out, there were "the most beautiful stills." Whatever you can think of, they did.

Another important change in film marketing over the past few years is that video has gone mainstream. The "love declaration" for Eternal Moment and the "heartbreak stories" for Love Is Not Blind both showed that videos shared on social networks can transform a film's fortunes.

Guo Jingming saw this change, seized it, and pushed it harder than anyone. A film usually releases no more than 10 promotional videos; Tiny Times 3 made 29: two trailers, six music videos, and 21 making-of features and behind-the-scenes clips.

Every release set off a round of heated discussion among fans, with Weibo reposts running several times, even dozens of times, the usual level. Competitors quickly copied tricks such as music-video releases; Han Han, for example, used the same move for The Continent, to good effect.

Many want to copy Tiny Times, but even Guo Jingming may not manage it

While Tiny Times 4 was in theaters, Guo Jingming was on set shooting Legend of Ravaging Dynasties, another film adapted from his own book of the same name. It is set on the fictional continent of Ordin and tells of a power struggle among people called "Kings" and "Apostles."

Few people probably care how much Guo Jingming's directing has improved, but everyone in the film industry wants to know whether he can repeat the success of Tiny Times.

On paper, at least, Legend of Ravaging Dynasties has a stronger cast than Tiny Times. Besides Yang Mi, Guo Caijie and Chen Xuedong, who return as top-tier film actors, it has signed Wang Yuan of TFBOYS and Wu Yifan, formerly of EXO, and its biggest star is Fan Bingbing.

Guo Jingming also has stronger partners. Alibaba's Yulebao had helped raise money for and market the earlier Tiny Times films, and by Tiny Times 4 Alibaba had moved into online distribution.

According to Lu Anhui, general manager of Taobao's film distribution business, Tiny Times 4 was Alibaba's first online distribution project. Through data-driven cross-promotion with Taobao's e-commerce business, advance sales of presale codes and online seat selection, Alibaba hoped to help Tiny Times 4 with its two biggest problems: winning screenings against fierce competition, and keeping the box office from plunging after a strong opening day.

As it turned out, Tiny Times 4 got 46% of screenings on its first day and held a fairly steady box-office trend over the next few days (though it still fell sharply). After this groundwork, Guo Jingming will probably be glad to discuss working with Alibaba on his new film.

Of course, just as Tiny Times 4 slumped suddenly after a strong first few days, the risk that Legend of Ravaging Dynasties fails is also higher.

The investment has gone up, as the returns on the last two Tiny Times films make plain. Few fantasy films have done standout business in recent years, and plenty have flopped, either because the effects were shoddy or because the story was bad.

More important, relying entirely on his existing fans may no longer be enough to cover the cost of a big project or earn a decent commercial return. Guo Jingming needs to draw in people beyond his fans to buy what he makes, and that won't be easy.