A Group of Weibo “Big Vs” Built an App to Talk Seriously About Film. Who Will Pay for Its Future?

Pulling together a group of “professional and passionate” people to run an official account — or even an app — was once seen as a way out for writers on the arts beat. Anyone still drawn to that path should first look at what happened to Serendipity Film.

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Jiang Weimin is 37. In 2013 he quit a job at a media outlet and spent two years as a freelance writer. He felt that “if I keep holed up like this, I'm going to fall apart,” so he decided to do something.

He counts as a Weibo “Big V,” a verified account with a following of its own: his “Times Cinema Club” has more than 70,000 followers. In his early years Jiang wrote cultural criticism on NetEase's forums and got to know people there, including Wang Xiaoshan, now CEO of Xingzhi Pictures, who has 1.96 million Weibo followers — though those people probably came to him for his old reputation as a web writer and film critic.

When Wang Xiaoshan was an editor at Southern Metropolis Daily, he commissioned a piece from Times Cinema Club: an introduction to the American director Stanley Kubrick. Back then online film “resources” did not exist, and even pirated discs were hard to buy. If you had watched all of Kubrick — 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket — you could be called a serious film buff.

Jiang Weimin certainly qualified as one. In the years when BBS forums and print magazines flourished, Tianya, Xicihutong, and NetEase were full of film-buff writers like him, and they all became “grassroots film critics.”

Jiang found that these people were all busy with their own things now. The critic Zhou Liming started out posting on NetEase's forums, then wrote a column for Kan Dianying (“Watch Movies”) magazine, winning the respect of readers and of the industry alike; he is still writing criticism and has judged the Beijing and Shanghai film festivals. When Tiny Times was in theaters, the actor Lin Gengxin attacked Zhou Liming on Weibo and was promptly slammed by Big Vs and ordinary users.

Some critics went into the film industry itself and did well there: the screenwriter Gu Xiaobai, or Wei Junzi, who founded the company Jizhi Films, or Li Xiaofeng, who directed Nezha (《少女哪吒》). Even the director Lu Chuan got his start on film forums.

With these people in mind, Jiang — wanting to “do something” — decided to start a film official account, and sent a private message to Zhang Zongqian, the critic and Weibo Big V behind “Blasphemous Cinema.”

The account, “Serendipity Film,” launched in June 2015. It was not a good moment. WeChat's official-account platform had appeared in August 2012. By June 2014 there were 8 million official accounts, growing by 15,000 a day. By June 2015 WeChat had passed 500 million monthly active users and 10 million official accounts, and yet fewer than 0.3% of those accounts had more than 100,000 followers — the chance of “standing out” kept shrinking. People called it the end of the official account's golden age.

Jiang knew he was late. Still, actually starting took some getting over. “Writing an official account is unpaid labor. You're better off publishing in print, where you get anywhere from a few hundred to a thousand yuan per thousand words,” Jiang said. Leaving the clear, straightforward life of a professional writer paid by the word was as much of a challenge as leaving behind the innocent film-buff life of his youth.

Zhang Zongqian, the man Jiang approached, had a personality nothing like his own.

On Weibo, Zhang was the more famous of the two: “Blasphemous Cinema” had more than 580,000 followers. Born after 1985, Zhang joined Weibo in 2009 and made his name by sharing film “resources.” He was known for obscure, niche picks, and liked to sell them with phrases like “overlooked gem” and “seriously high-brow.”

Still, it was Jiang who drove the run of changes that followed. Zhang's assessment of him: “worldly, sharp, experienced — and handsome,” plus one crucial thing, “no social awkwardness.” Zhang said the writers Serendipity later gathered were all lined up by “the Club President,” which is what they call Jiang Weimin.

Gao Da is another person who calls Jiang “Club President.” When the two met last December, Gao said it felt as though they should have met years earlier. He is the current “moderator” of another film account on WeChat, “Rear Window Cinema,” which agreed at the time to join Serendipity Film's roster of writers. Four users from the Xicihutong forum founded it. The other three are all considerable figures in film now: Wei Xidi judges the Golden Horse Awards; Yang Cheng is a producer and general manager of the film company Tianhua Huatian (River Road); and Shuiguai programs film festivals.

As Gao sees it, this group “gave the best years of their youth to film, in every way possible.” They know exactly “what the market looks like now,” and “which direction we can push our own abilities further.”

By the time Jiang finally decided to step out of the house and act, he understood clearly what the so-called we-media accounts were doing.

Readers were no longer what they had been. A former editor at Kan Dianying said that after 2010 one shift was obvious: ordinary readers were steadily less interested in “serious film criticism.” Audiences who could look up “Kubrick” in a second no longer needed an article to supply scarce knowledge; they wanted entertainment, something to pass the time. Kan Dianying had been a biweekly built on film features, reporting, and reviews; around 2005 it sold more than 600,000 copies an issue nationwide. Now it too was looking to “transform.”

Weibo's joke writers and WeChat's big accounts tend to fit that kind of demand better. “Poison Tongue Movies,” running since 2013, now has more than a million followers. Its lead writer, “Poison Sir,” once worked at NetEase Entertainment and knows how to serve mass taste: headlines with a hook, lively and provocative language, short paragraphs, plenty of reaction images. Almost every article passes 100,000 reads, which brings in real money — a lead ad slot goes for about 200,000 yuan.

Jiang understood all this, but he had no intention of making his own product copy Poison Tongue Movies' success. In fact he did not even admire its style. He defined “Poison Tongue” as a “gossip account” — “acting shameless, playing cute, that sort of thing.” The writing he and his fellow enthusiasts liked was the opposite: orderly, no reaction images, niche subjects — the character of print media, kept intact.

“If you want to run a popular film account you have to chase every hot topic — which blockbuster just opened, which famous director just died... But I really don't want to write about things I'm not interested in.” The critic Muweier feels the same way: they write on what interests them, the way columnists do. Muweier's account, “Muweier's Miscellany,” also joined Serendipity Film; his latest pieces are “22 Films With the Taste of Spring, So You Can Feel Spring Without Leaving the House” and “He's Never Been to Cannes, and He's Still Following Cannes 2016”...

“Muweier's Miscellany” has only a few thousand followers — “a tiny little account.” Once these tiny accounts came together the way Jiang imagined, he believed, their old influence would return and something would change in kind: it would pull in more “mid-to-high-end readers” with the same tastes. “Interesting people are bound to meet.” That is the slogan Jiang wrote in the inaugural note he drafted on the founders' behalf for the Serendipity Film app.

The “Serendipity Film” account has only 80,000 followers. In a March interview with QDaily, Jiang blamed the platform itself: as readers grew used to light, fragmented articles, niche writers found it harder and harder to be noticed among millions of accounts. On February 1, 2016, the “Serendipity Film” app arrived on the App Store.

The app updates with a dozen or so articles a day, selected and republished from more than 40 film accounts. Its position is very clear. In the app's inaugural note Jiang wrote: “People need things to talk about, so official-account traffic tilts toward fashion, gossip, entertainment, and current affairs. That leaves little room for the people who write film accounts.” His first thought was for writers like himself; he wanted to build a new base. And inside that base, there would not be much room left for most readers.

The launch screen used three reasonably mainstream posters: The Hateful Eight, The Martian, and The 400 Blows. Bold white type on them read “Film Stories,” “Featured Topics,” and “Discover Film” — the app's three content sections.

But different readers will have very different experiences using it. If you are a film buff — the sort who gets a year-end viewing report from Douban Movies — you may well want to open a few of the long pieces on the home page: a lost scene from Days of Being Wild, an interview with Hou Hsiao-hsien, a group buy for a licensed Blu-ray of A Brighter Summer Day. Even the account and writer names that look unwieldy at first — Da Qite, Yao Lingyao, Tübingen Carpenter, Wenbai, Dianying Shanhaijing, Watch Movies Till You Die — start to roll off the tongue.

But if you only watch commercial blockbusters with stars in them and have little interest in “the 100 greatest films ever made,” even the headlines may puzzle you. Take the March 21 piece “Lou Reed's Widow Made a Film About Dogs, and CC Bought It.” Who is Lou Reed? What is CC? (The answers: the late frontman of the punk band the Velvet Underground, and the abbreviation for the well-known American DVD label the Criterion Collection.)

In truth, not many people need to know any of this. But Jiang Weimin got “lucky” and found someone willing to back him.

In mid-2015, as he started running the “Serendipity Film” account, Jiang took a full-time job: content director at Life Star, a Shenzhen company. Its chairman, Zhu Lin, also ran a travel agency called Dream Road Travel.

At first they planned a lifestyle app, but it was going badly. In a meeting near the end of the year it suddenly struck Jiang that he could turn his own account, “Serendipity Film,” into the app Zhu Lin had in mind — except that the direction would still be his to set: invite a group of people onto one platform, and still talk about film.

It is hard to imagine quite how Zhu Lin was persuaded. Perhaps the pull of the film market was enough on its own. According to figures from the film regulator SAPPRFT, China's total box office in 2015 came to 44.069 billion yuan, up 48.7% year on year, with 8,035 screens added over the year — an average of 22 a day. In a March interview with QDaily, the travel agency's chairman said he was a Serendipity reader himself. Jiang, appointed content director, agreed to let the app use the name of his personal “Serendipity Film” account, but “out of trust” he signed no licensing agreement with the company; his so-called “content stake” never became ownership of the app. Matters like these, the ones that come with running a startup, were not his strength.

What Jiang was good at was gathering these “grassroots film critics.” As he had with Zhang Zongqian, he sent invitations to many accounts. There was no pay, yet plenty of the people running them accepted happily. Some were already online friends. Others did not mind being “republished.” “Why not? I never say no to anyone — my articles just get put on an app. And it might even win me followers, right?” said An Dangdang, who runs the account “Camera, Action!” She had also signed up with platforms like Juzi Entertainment and Baidu Baijia.

Most of these accounts were non-profit. Jiang looked for accounts with good content and not enough promotion; he believed those writers lacked influence for the same reason “Serendipity Film” did — they had no more professional platform to stand on. They set up a WeChat group, talked constantly, and “policed” one another's updates. An Dangdang works in film marketing by day and squeezes out time to post every day, almost compulsively. She said Lu Zhiyu of “Watch Movies Till You Die” was her “motivation to keep typing” — “because he's busy at work too, and he still updates every single day.”

A similar group of critics formed in July 2015: Magasa, editor-in-chief of the film magazine Iris; Taotao Linlin, founder of the account “Taotao Movies”; and Yunzhong, co-founder of “Movie High Class,” jointly launched a column called “Film Weathervane,” which scores the films opening in theaters each week. Its predecessor was a scoring section on Cinephilia, a cinephile site Magasa and other critics started in 2010. Their aim was to build a clearing house for critics' opinions, like America's Rotten Tomatoes.

“Serendipity Film” and “Film Weathervane” overlap to a degree as well. Some writers — Da Qite and Yao Lingyao among them — joined both.

“Serious film buffs” are easier to gather, and they spur each other on. Jiang believes there are plenty of “artsy young people” and “film buffs” outside this particular circle too. The Weibo user Treebeard, for instance, is an “ideal reader.” He wrote, tagging @SerendipityFilm: “My phone's broken, and the thing that really wears me out is not being able to read Serendipity's articles...”

Users like that could bring “Serendipity Film” advertising revenue, and Jiang planned to split all of that income among his team members and the writers on the platform. He leads a 20-person team in Shenzhen — technical, operations, and editorial staff.

But making money is not easy, and Serendipity's partner “Rear Window” saw the contradiction long ago. In 2013 “Rear Window Cinema” set up the “Rear Window Screenings” brand in Nanjing, an organization that promotes art-house film and works with dozens of theaters nationwide to curate art-film festivals. But in art-film exhibition, grassroots organizations are hemmed in by policy, especially on importing foreign films, and Gao Da said commercial operation is very hard to pull off.

Both the “Rear Window Screenings” brand and the “Rear Window Cinema” account are non-profit. They rest on a company, Nanjing Rear Window Culture Communication Co., Ltd., an agency whose main business is marketing planning and event services; its revenue subsidizes the screenings in turn.

“Rear Window Screenings, the WeChat we-media account — these are only one part of the Rear Window company,” Gao said. “And this is exactly the part that holds this group of us together, our passion and our drive. Reality is cruel. We have to make choices, and put in the effort, to stay alive. Isn't that so?”

Jiang soon found that if “Serendipity Film” was going to stay alive, he too would have to make choices and put in effort. What he had wanted was to see how many people the content he championed could “hold on to in the end, and how far it could go.” April was supposed to bring real progress: Zhang Zongqian had planned to leave Jinhua, in Zhejiang, for Shenzhen and start working full-time. On April 10 the Blu-ray of A Brighter Summer Day was due to arrive in Shenzhen from the United States.

But in early April, Zhu Lin told him he would not allow the project to keep developing down such a “niche” path. The Android version launched on March 21, and users reached 10,000. Even so, iOS and Android downloads together came to fewer than 30,000. The original target was 200,000 by July or August of this year.

Zhu Lin was getting impatient. He thought the account as it stood would never reach its profit targets, and that popular short videos in the style of Papi Jiang looked like the real “trend of the times.” But on stripping the film DNA out of the “Serendipity” app altogether, he and Jiang could not agree.

Jiang's own picture of the app's future may have started to waver too. In an April 13 interview he changed his line on the account versus the app: in talks with other investors, the advice was to drop the app, because it costs too much, and stay with the account — “what matters is the content; the channel is secondary.”

One likely reason he said this: the “Serendipity Film” account had found a place to make money, a cash flow. Not from sponsored posts or ads, but from side business.

Earlier, Jiang had recruited a “Serendipity Film Subtitle Group,” more than 100 part-time translators working in different languages. The group could usually translate one or two films a week, but always as free “resources.” Lately, though, distributors of foreign films already cleared for import have come to them to translate subtitles, for a fee. In the future Jiang hopes Serendipity can import and distribute art-house films; then the “Serendipity Subtitle Group” could put licensed film subtitles on the app. The subtitle group may well become the main source of revenue for the “Serendipity” account.

Both the “Serendipity Film” account and the app are updating as usual. In the last interview, on April 21, Jiang told QDaily that his talks with Zhu Lin had ended, for now, with the app continuing to operate, but with “some changes to the equity and the specific structure.” In May, he said, the “Serendipity Film” account would also take funding from a certain fund. Would he and “Blasphemous Cinema” shift their focus back to the account? What would become of the app's content? He did not say.

Images from: Weibo, WeChat official accounts, the Serendipity app, and film stills