2015 in Review: TV Dramas Go Big | The 2015 "Getting Younger" Series

This is part of QDaily's year-end "Getting Younger" series. Here we look at the biggest change in the TV drama business this year.

A year after the "one drama, two satellites" policy took effect, China's TV drama market is unrecognizable.

On November 16, two months into filming, the crew of Ice Fantasy hosted a large media set visit. Throughout the tour, staff kept pointing things out: "Look, this one chandelier costs 80,000 yuan." "This prop tree costs 20,000 yuan." "One studio costs one to two million." In the short time since cameras started rolling, the green-screen cloth for special effects alone had cost several million yuan. Even the most basic materials, such as the magnesium sulfate used to fake snow, had already run to 500 tons...

While still shooting, Ice Fantasy was already eager to tell viewers that it was a big-budget production. The crew even announced that the producers had set no upper limit on what they would spend.

Ice Fantasy runs 60 episodes and cost more than 300 million yuan. Much of that bill comes from its fantasy genre: 70% to 80% of the series uses special effects. So unlike most TV dramas, where actors' fees are the biggest expense, Ice Fantasy spent only a third of its budget on the cast, while costumes, makeup, props and effects took three fifths.

Concept art for a scene in Ice Fantasy

This breakdown comes from the drama's producer, and his arithmetic is rough. Still, it shows that the producers put far more money into this series than dramas used to get.

Feng Shaofeng, who had already moved into film, not only came back to play Kaso, one of the male leads, but also signed on as supervising producer. Interviewed during the set visit, he said: "Two years ago, nobody would have dared to imagine making a TV drama like Ice Fantasy. It's not only about technology and money. The market has changed, and that is what gives a drama like this a chance to be made now."

The lamp on the Ice Fantasy set that the crew says costs 80,000 yuan apiece

In fact, many people have predicted that after "one drama, two satellites," the market will eventually move to "one drama, one satellite," with dramas made to order. That would mean even fiercer competition, and more and more big-budget dramas.

Here is how "one drama, two satellites" works. In the past, up to four satellite channels could jointly buy a drama's first-run broadcast rights. Now, "in prime time each night, a TV drama may air on at most two satellite general-interest channels."

Put more simply, the policy means more dramas now air at the same time in prime time every night.

In other words, more dramas compete for the same slot. With more competition, bigger productions with better visuals and bigger-name stars naturally draw more attention. That is the logic viewers follow as they flip channels, and it is the logic TV stations follow when they buy dramas. Stations rarely watch a drama before buying it; they buy before it has even been made.

Before the policy, four stations could jointly buy a drama's first-run rights. If a drama they liked carried a high price, splitting it four ways brought each share down. With less pressure on any one buyer, deals were more likely to close. After the policy, that changed sharply: a single station now pays more for a drama it wants.

That makes stations more cautious. On top of that, the dramas they buy must compete with more rivals in the same slot. Within their budgets, they have little choice but to pick bigger, more polished productions, because those stand a better chance of high ratings.

In turn, as stations grow pickier, competition among drama producers has intensified. Producers lean toward the dramas with the best odds of winning.

The clearest example is the period drama Nirvana in Fire, which aired this September. With popular actors, a seasoned production team and costly period sets, it cost about 110 million yuan to make. It reportedly sold to TV stations for about 6 million yuan an episode, so the 54-episode series earned 300 million yuan from a single round of broadcast rights. Add online and overseas rights, and revenue far exceeds cost.

A still from Nirvana in Fire

Nirvana in Fire was made by Daylight Entertainment. Its earlier dramas include Chuang Guandong, A Wenzhou Family and Parents' Love, so it was already a company that liked to spend heavily. This year the market happened to want big-budget dramas, and the company won both fame and fortune.

"Only a truly good drama earns better returns," Hou Hongliang, the producer of Nirvana in Fire, told QDaily. He said "one drama, two satellites" will, to some extent, raise the rerun rate of good dramas. Good dramas will be rerun more often and live longer, while the ones that flop are finished after the first run. And every rerun means buying the rights again, which is all income.

Nirvana in Fire is not the only drama that used a big budget to secure quality and, with it, strong returns. One could even say that every one of this year's hottest dramas was a big-budget production, and every one of them made good money.

The Empress of China, which Fan Bingbing starred in and co-financed early this year, reportedly cost 300 million yuan. Its first-run broadcast rights alone sold for 268 million yuan, and exclusive streaming rights sold to LeTV brought in another 78 million.

A key costume in The Empress of China is billed as worth 500,000 yuan

Next came the xianxia fantasy The Journey of Flower, starring Zhao Liying and Wallace Huo. Its total budget reached 105 million yuan. By July 2015, it had already brought Ciwen Media nearly 200 million yuan in revenue.

Producer Tang Lijun has said that because they spent so much on actors, they had to cut the effects budget for small scenes in the first half of the series. Many viewers at first mocked its "fifty-cent special effects," but that did not stop its ratings from becoming the year's biggest TV drama story.

Making the character Tangbao costs 4,000 yuan per second of footage

When The Journey of Flower premiered on June 9, its rating barely broke 1, at 1.009%, with a 6.028% share of its time slot. By the finale on September 7, its rating was 2.784% and its share 15.628%. Along the way, some episodes even broke 3. By September 9, after the broadcast ended, its online views had passed 20 billion.

The Journey of Flower crowded out not only a crop of urban dramas airing at the same time, such as Empty-Nest Grandpa, Love in the Obstetrics Ward and Twin Flowers, but also the xianxia drama Hua Xu Yin: City of Absolute Love, which began airing in July and was panned for crude production and unattractive leads.

Then there is the closely watched costume epic The Legend of Mi Yue, which began airing on November 30. It was made by the original team behind Empresses in the Palace, with Sun Li again in the lead. Empresses in the Palace cost 70 million yuan; The Legend of Mi Yue cost far more, close to 300 million by the official count. Even so, rumor has it that because production costs were so high and the budget so tight, the director had Sun Li take the role at a "friendship price."

In The Legend of Mi Yue, Sun Li has 80 costumes

But even at a friendship price, Sun Li would not have turned it down. With a top production team and a bigger budget, the drama had a very good chance of high ratings. So, like the dramas above, the big-spending The Legend of Mi Yue is earning its money back very fast. Its producer, Cao Ping, said the drama had recouped its entire cost by the time filming began.

When the "one drama, two satellites" policy was first issued, everyone congratulated the video sites: the "two satellites" limit applies only to TV stations, not to streaming. In fact, drama production companies were relieved too.

Under the policy, selling a drama to two stations at once certainly earns less than selling it to four. Fees from video sites fill the gap, letting producers put money into scripts they believe in with more confidence.

Judged by the incentives it creates, "one drama, two satellites" forces TV dramas to be more polished and more expensive. For producers, video sites can directly drive the making of big-budget series.

Take The Legend of Mi Yue. On TV it airs on Dragon TV and Beijing Satellite TV; online it streams on LeTV and Tencent Video. That split is a bit of a surprise. The TV side is normal: two major stations landed the big drama. The surprise is that, besides LeTV, the streaming side also includes Tencent.

The drama was produced by Huaer Film & TV, which LeTV bought outright in 2013. Yet a drama that was a hit before it even aired was not kept exclusive to LeTV; it was shared with Tencent Video.

A LeTV employee told QDaily that the reasons are hard to talk about. But Huaer Film & TV is, after all, still run day to day by director Zheng Xiaolong. Nobody said it outright, but it is easy to guess that a key reason for choosing a deep-pocketed site like Tencent Video was money. A broadcast rights contract signed when filming began can cover a large share of the production costs for a drama this big.

It is not the only drama to lean on video sites to recoup costs. Take Ice Fantasy, from the start of this story. Its producer, Luo Gang, told QDaily plainly that the drama had earned back its cost before filming was even finished. Luo openly admitted that they care more about earning from video sites than from TV stations. And in fact, video sites did bring in more.

Five companies, iQiyi, Youku, Tencent, PPTV and Sohu, jointly bought Ice Fantasy. This was not one company buying and then sub-licensing; all five bought it together, a first for the industry. The difference matters. With sub-licensing, the money the other four pay goes to the first buyer. With a joint purchase, all of it goes to the drama's producer.

The Ice Fantasy trailer was first shown at Tencent Video's 2016 presentation

So although the broadcast rights went to Hunan Satellite TV's summer Diamond Theater slot, Ice Fantasy still earned more from video sites.

One figure for reference: a publicist at a TV drama production company told QDaily that a drama sold exclusively to Hunan Satellite TV generally goes for about 2 to 3 million yuan an episode. Ice Fantasy's script ran 40 episodes, but it was sold on the basis of the 60 episodes after editing.

At market rates, then, Ice Fantasy should have sold to Hunan Satellite TV for 120 to 180 million yuan. And video sites often pay more for a drama than TV stations do. So the money from selling it to several video sites must be far higher than "120 to 180 million yuan."

Video sites support big-budget dramas in another way, too: they have widened the audience. People who watch dramas on TV are mostly families, and they skew older. Viewers on video sites watch as individuals, and they are clearly younger.

That seems unrelated to big budgets, but it indirectly funds them. Young viewers mean spending power, and that draws advertisers with more commercial value.

This November, a drama called Big Yangko has drawn very good ratings. It premiered on Tianjin Satellite TV and Jiangsu Satellite TV, airing opposite the much-discussed Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou Don't Believe in Tears, and it still regularly ranks first or second among prime-time dramas in its slot.

The look of the anti-Japanese war drama Big Yangko

Big Yangko was not cheap either. It was directed by Guo Jingyu, maker of well-regarded dramas such as The Dog-Beating Stick, and its 79 episodes cost 208 million yuan to produce. Yet while its ratings are high, hardly anyone is talking about it.

The reason is simple: it is pitched as an anti-Japanese war drama, a genre young people rarely watch. And although its high ratings have brought in plenty of advertising, a producer at a TV drama company told QDaily that its commercial value is far lower than that of dramas aimed at the young. Its viewers are mostly older, and they are neither eager nor able to spend much.

Unlike the makers of Big Yangko, sharper-eyed people have already seen what the market now demands for a return. After years in which domestic family melodramas ruled the TV schedule, young people are finally about to make a comeback.

Soon we will publish our second year-end review of the 2015 TV drama business: TV dramas getting younger. There we will look at how, over the past year, TV dramas have increasingly catered to young people's tastes.