LeEco Tried to Build a Super IP Out of the Magic of a Classic Song, *Brother in the Upper Bunk*. How Did That Go?

What audiences didn't get was the one thing they wanted: a better film.

On March 25, Lao Lang went on I Am a Singer and sang Brother in the Upper Bunk (《睡在我上铺的兄弟》). Twenty-two years ago he was the first to record this campus folk song. That night the man who wrote the words and music, Gao Xiaosong, came out on stage too, and even rapped a verse alongside him. The show's young audience found it funny and strange.

The happiest person watching was probably Huang Ziyan, vice president of marketing at Le Vision Pictures. The duet on that hit show was, in fact, something Le Vision had helped stage. A week later a film of the same name, financed by Le Vision, would open in theaters.

What pleased Huang Ziyan was that the title of this old campus song, after two years of their tending, seemed to be gaining exactly the new pull they had hoped for. And Gao Xiaosong, the man who had signed over the film rights to Brother in the Upper Bunk, was going along with the publicity to an unusual degree. When the adaptation was announced last May, he said: "When we recorded Brother in the Upper Bunk the budget was tight, there was no money for a music video, and I kept thinking I had to make up for that someday."

While Gao Xiaosong and Lao Lang were on I Am a Singer, director Zhang Qi and the film's leads — Chen Xiao, Li Xian and others — were taking Brother in the Upper Bunk on a road show through 41 universities. That is far more than comparable youth films managed: Fleet of Time did 31 stops, The Left Ear 16. Huang Ziyan said they had spent as much promoting Brother in the Upper Bunk as was spent on Tiny Times.

Zhang Qi noticed something at those screenings. He had planted fewer than ten jokes in the film, but by the crew's count the audience laughed 30 to 40 times. When the big brawl at the end was over, the whole room applauded.

Before the opening, Le Vision put out a long infographic headlined "The Birth of a Super IP: Milestones of Brother in the Upper Bunk." Naming a film after a classic song was something almost no film company had tried, Le Vision included — and they had also made a web series under the same title and wrapped the whole thing in a large marketing campaign.

LeEco believed that remaking the model from top to bottom improved their odds of winning. They were, of course, hoping for a hit.

"Gao Xiaosong Is Enough"

In early 2015, Le Vision Pictures came across a screenplay called Crazy for Graduation (《我为毕业狂》), about four boys in the weeks around graduation. They then went to Gao Xiaosong, who wrote Brother in the Upper Bunk, and closed a deal about a month later; the price of the rights was not disclosed. The screenplay was renamed Brother in the Upper Bunk.

Both the producers and the financiers treated the original creator's opinion as important. Gao Xiaosong was the film's executive producer and music director. He sat in on the discussions and decided many of the creative calls in the production and the promotion, and he took a cameo role. Two of his students, Yin Yue and Qian Lei, wrote several of the songs on the soundtrack.

To audiences he was also, lead actors included, very nearly the most famous person attached to the picture. As Huang Ziyan saw it, "Gao Xiaosong is enough."

There was an internal screening when the rough cut was finished. A third of the way through, Gao Xiaosong suddenly called for a stop. Zhang Qi and the Le Vision executives in the room froze, afraid he hated the film. Then he said: "I'm going to the toilet. Wait for me — don't run it until I'm back, it's only a few minutes." They relaxed.

Before LeEco brought in Gao Xiaosong, the screenwriter of Crazy for Graduation was Zhang Qi, who now directs the film. He had three theatrical features behind him: Deadly Heartbeat (《夺命心跳》), Save Me (《救我》) and Hold On to Love (《HOLD 住爱》). His idea dated to June 2013. He wanted to make a youth film unlike the others: not nostalgic but set in the present, and realistic. It would cover the stretch just before graduation and tell a story about young men and their hot blood.

There was evidence that stories like this sold tickets. That April, So Young, directed by Vicki Zhao, had opened and made its name as a youth film, finally taking more than 700 million yuan and finishing third at the Chinese box office that year. Wanting to make a different kind of youth film at that moment was plainly a commercial calculation.

Zhang Qi's first draft was ready in May 2014, under the title Adult Guide (《成人指南》). The name left room for a little flirtation with sexual awakening, but the censors came back saying it tended toward vulgarity, and it did not pass. The script took the title Crazy for Graduation and went from one film company to another looking for money. It ended up at Le Vision Pictures.

Zhang Zhao, Le Vision's CEO, liked the script and thought the core of the story was good. He is about 50, and he remembered a campus folk song that had been popular in the 1990s: Brother in the Upper Bunk. He asked Zhang Qi whether he would be interested in joining Crazy for Graduation to Brother in the Upper Bunk. By Zhang Qi's account, part of the reason Zhang Zhao raised it was that Le Vision happened to be discussing collaborations with Gao Xiaosong, so there was an opening to tie the film to the music.

A change like that was less a suggestion than a condition from the people with the money. Huang Ziyan said so flatly: on the script alone, she did not think LeEco would "win." Combined with Brother in the Upper Bunk, "this film could be something else." Everyone had once known the song, and its words point straight at campus, youth and growing up.

It could be sold as a film about hot-blooded brotherhood. Now it had a difference and a name, and so it had a chance of winning. For Le Vision, that made it worth the investment.

Zhang Qi had his doubts.

When he wrote the script, he had not wanted a nostalgic story. Brother in the Upper Bunk was obviously very nostalgic. And for the teenagers who make up most of the film market, billing a picture as an adaptation of a song from the last century did not look like much of a draw. One web series viewer, who asked not to be named, told QDaily that the title did make the show feel familiar, but after watching it what stayed with them was the series itself; the song stirred nothing extra.

Zhang Zhao told Zhang Qi that the nostalgia problem could be handled by the marketing themes during the release. The balance between friendship and romance, though, had to change. Under the differentiation strategy for youth films, the friendship half of the story should carry more weight. In the end, in the cut of the film, Le Vision took another 20 minutes of romance between the two leads out, which left some viewers feeling the love story had almost no build-up and moved very fast.

Zhang Qi was in no position to refuse. With the name Brother in the Upper Bunk on it, the film would draw attention from the first day of shooting.

Shooting the Series and the Film at the Same Time

In May 2015, Le Vision took Gao Xiaosong to Tsinghua University to announce that Brother in the Upper Bunk would become a film. Every major outlet carried the news that day. Whether people thought it absurd or worth waiting for, the announcement did its job.

At the same press conference Le Vision named the cast. Chen Xiao and Qin Lan were the known quantities; the rest were young unknowns. To dull the song's nostalgia and win over younger viewers, LeEco said it would also run campus singing contests at universities around the country under an "old songs, new versions" banner, and send the film's actors onto the Le Sports channel during live broadcasts.

Turnout was poor. In the Brother in the Upper Bunk campus music contest, 300 events over two months produced just over 10 million video plays in total — an average of about 30,000 plays per event.

The online video company also announced that it would shoot a web series with the same title and the same characters alongside the film.

This is standard practice for incubating an IP: a series warms the audience up for the film and, with luck, brings in real advertising and licensing money of its own. It can also use extra plotlines to fill out the characters and their world. The film Brother in the Upper Bunk covers the three months before graduation; the 13-episode series chose to follow the same group from freshman to senior year.

Zhang Qi and his team had to write it fast. Shooting was already fixed for June, and the scripts had to be finished before that. At their usual pace, 13 episodes would take six months; they did it in four. Zhang Qi also felt that having written the film script first boxed him in.

The ambition to incubate an IP taught Zhang Qi, step by step, what compromise costs. He wanted the same actors in both the film and the series, which the actors found hard to get used to — it nearly doubled the time they had to give. Before the shoot he had wanted to film the two separately, but neither the locations nor the actors' schedules allowed it. In the end the series and the film were shot together over four months.

Their budgets and their shooting methods, though, are nothing alike. A simple example: the crew borrowed a school auditorium over a holiday, so every auditorium scene had to be finished inside that window. That is how a television series is normally shot, and it was now carried over to the film. To protect image quality, Zhang Qi insisted the crew use film cameras with prime lenses throughout, not zooms. Primes are steadier, but they have to be taken off and put back on constantly. A dozen days or so before the shoot wrapped, the assistant director fell out with Zhang Qi and walked off with the directing staff. Zhang Qi had to switch to zoom lenses.

Neither Zhang Qi nor his crew was sure how much the series would do for the film. But they were clearly aiming at a hit.

The film's English title came out as Who Sleeps My Bro? — which reads back in Chinese as "Who slept with my brother?" The series takes in romance, sexual awakening, fights and a certain heat between the male characters, and it ran on Le.com in the slot left by another boldly made in-house drama, Go Princess Go. Viewers who liked it said it was "a bit filthy, but innocent and full of heat." The gags threaded through the plot avoid the obvious ones; they work when friends are watching together.

LeEco's plan put the series in the winter holidays, to sit as close as possible to its target viewers — the students on campus facing graduation and the job market. But the film would not open until April 1, and the gap after the series ended could not be too long, or enthusiasm would cool. To stretch the run, LeEco split the planned 13 episodes into 26, then stretched it further by changing how viewers could watch.

One viewer, who asked not to be named, said that after the first 13 episodes went up there was a long wait for the rest, and LeEco never announced the schedule in time, which spoiled the experience. The series finished with 400 million plays in all. Go Princess Go, by comparison, passed 2.6 billion by the end of its run.

Zhang Qi puts this down to nobody having done a project like this before; they were still feeling their way. Even so, he thinks the series was worth shooting. Because of it, not only Chen Xiao and Qin Lan but newcomers like Li Xian, Du Tianhao and Liu Ruilin arrived at the campus road shows with fans of their own. Huang Ziyan estimates that 75% of the people at those events had seen the series.

The plainest sign of it: before the series aired, posts on the Weibo account of Li Xian, who plays Xie Xun, were usually shared a few dozen times, sometimes only a handful. Afterward, they were shared hundreds or thousands of times.

Audiences Didn't Get What They Wanted

On March 25, the duet of Brother in the Upper Bunk by Lao Lang and Gao Xiaosong placed seventh in the elimination round of I Am a Singer. Lao Lang, last in the standings, was knocked out. The classic campus song of the 1990s does not seem to have touched the people in the studio.

A week later, on April 1, the film finally opened.

One moviegoer, who asked not to be named, came out disappointed. The film was less fun than the series. Perhaps because of the running time, the middle felt rushed and the ending dragged. Several of her friends went because of Gao Xiaosong, but his two scenes "were painful to sit through."

The film critic who writes as Taotao Loves Movies gave this verdict: "A film entirely by the numbers, and dull, with no characters you could call types. And for a film about sleeping brothers, it doesn't actually put brotherhood at the center — only a few symbols of it — and sinks instead into the tired clichés of a love story. As for those lines you shout from the roof at the end: do you believe them yourselves?" At 3 p.m. on April 7 the film's rating on Douban was 5.3.

Le Vision is probably less interested in reviews than in what the super IP does for ticket sales.

Over its first three days, Brother in the Upper Bunk held at roughly 20 million yuan a day, with about 20 people in the room per screening. Against The Left Ear, the youth film that opened in April 2015, both numbers are about half. It also ran into stiff comic competition — Chongqing Hot Pot and My Beloved Bodyguard opened at the same time. After three days, the film's takings began to fall.

So far Brother in the Upper Bunk has not reached 100 million yuan. And since it opened, neither Le Vision, nor the film's official Weibo account, nor the director and the leads have said a word on Weibo about how it is doing at the box office.

The super IP did not, in the end, add a milestone worth much. Le Vision's plan had been this: use marketing to turn Brother in the Upper Bunk from a warm, nostalgic song into a hot-blooded film and television product of the present day, aimed above all at the students now on campus. The casting, the crew, the content, the release channels, the promotion — all of it followed that plan.

What audiences didn't get was the one thing they wanted: a better film.

Images: film stills and production publicity photos