Entertainment: I just want to be the boss behind the scenes

Chapter 341 California Trip

Netflix's headquarters is located in Los Altos in the Silicon Valley Bay Area of California, an industrial park full of technology.

Welcoming the delegation from Strange TV and Arclight Pictures were Netflix Vice Presidents Youquan Kuo and Cindy Holland - the former is the managing director of the Asia-Pacific region and also Chinese; the latter is the person in charge of original content.

The person who came from Qiyi TV this time was Dai Ying. She had met Guo Youquan twice before and was quite familiar with him. She gestured to her side, smiled and said, "Mr. Guo, let me introduce you. This is the boss of Arclight Films, which produced "Day and Night Chase", Mr. Meng Bai."

Upon hearing this, Guo Youquan looked at the young man in front of him with surprise.

He had heard of Meng Bai's name when he was chatting with Qiyi TV before. Although Dai Ying told him at the time that the other party was a young man, he didn't expect him to be so young.

He looks only about 24 or 25 years old, which is a very exaggerated age even in Silicon Valley, where young geniuses are emerging in large numbers.

What's more, he knew that the other party was the founder of a film and television company valued at more than 2 billion US dollars.

"Mr. Meng, I've heard of your name for a long time." Guo Youquan said enthusiastically, "'Day and Night' is the highest-quality Chinese online drama we have watched in recent years. Even if it is put on our Netflix, it can be called a masterpiece."

"Mr. Guo, you are too kind." Meng Baiqian said with a smile: "The quality of domestic online dramas has increased rapidly in recent years, and many high-quality works have been produced. In comparison, the subject matter of "Day and Night Chase" is more appealing."

Guo Youquan smiled without comment. He has been with Netflix for many years and has been more influenced by European and American dramas. He attaches more importance to the "concept" of the series and does not think that the so-called "fairy tale dramas" and "palace dramas" in China are worth mentioning.

In comparison, some modern youth dramas or sweet idol dramas are quite good. At least they will still have a large audience after leaving the local market.

After all, youth, love and the like are one of the eternal topics for all human beings.

Guo Youquan took the visitors to visit the Netflix headquarters. Unlike domestic companies, the style of this place is closer to the traditional Internet companies in Silicon Valley, and the number of staff is not large.

Meng Bai asked around and found out that because housing prices around Silicon Valley are extremely high, most staff members live outside the Bay Area. In order to avoid wasting too much time on commuting, most people work online from home.

Those who need to come to the company are mainly management, administrative staff and technical personnel.

However, Meng Bai is not very interested in Netflix's corporate structure. ArcLight is a production company, not a streaming platform, and their industry needs are different.

What he is more concerned about is Netflix's topic planning for original content and the production process of film and television series.

"I wonder if Mr. Guo could introduce me to him?" Meng Bai asked.

"It's not inconvenient at all. Netflix is a listed company and many of our development plans are actually public," said Kuo You-Chuan.

As he spoke, he led everyone to the company's content department and gave a detailed introduction.

Meng Bai listened carefully for a long time, and then gradually frowned.

Previously, Guo Fan and several other directors visited Paramount and after returning, they highly praised Hollywood's industrialized production system.

Therefore, before coming here, Meng Bai was also looking forward to the production team that has produced a series of high-scoring dramas in recent years, including "House of Cards", "Black Mirror" and "Roma".

However, after listening to Guo Youquan's introduction, I found that in terms of original content production, Netflix actually does not have any particularly outstanding new models, and still uses the traditional film and television production process.

There are three main reasons why Netflix can keep producing masterpieces: money, massive volume, and freedom.

Needless to say, a lot of money was spent. When it came to "House of Cards", HBO, FOX, Disney+, and Amazon all took an interest in it. In the end, Netflix spent a huge sum of money to win the project.

Also, because HBO's "Westworld" has been a huge hit in recent years, "AI world" has become the hottest concept in the North American film and television market.

Some time ago, director Carl Eric Linsch simply proposed the concept of "artificial humans" without even a script outline, but he directly got a budget of nearly 2000 million US dollars from Netflix.

In fact, Arc Light can also get this kind of treatment in the domestic film and television market, but that is based on the historical achievements of more than a dozen successful works in the past few years.

Director Carl had only made one Japanese samurai film before, "47 Ronin". It had a cast of Keanu Reeves, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tadanobu Asano, and Kou Shibasaki, but the ratings were barely acceptable and the box office was a loss of over $ million.

But even with this achievement, it still managed to get a huge budget from Netflix. I don't know if it means they are spending a lot of money on horse bones or they have too much money to burn.

As for the huge volume, it mainly depends on their global market. Every year, production companies in every country put a large number of works on Netflix platform, which can be said to be mixed with good and bad.

The reason why I feel that all the dramas produced by Netflix are "super dramas" in China is just because they have been selected by Green Dad. It is impossible to watch them directly in China, so only those high-scoring masterpieces will be known by the audience.

In fact, if you experience the Netflix platform yourself, you will find that it is also full of bad movies and low-quality works.

The freedom is good. No matter how large the production is, Netflix, as the client, almost never interferes with the creative ideas of the main creators. No matter which country the work is from, it is produced by local creators, and they will only remind some elements that may not be suitable for overseas regions.

"American drama texture, local style" - this is Netflix's production idea.

Looking at Dai Ying and Qiyi TV who were listening with great interest, Meng Bai smiled bitterly.

This stuff should also be brought to Youku Video and Tencent Video for a listen. It has no practical value to ArcLight, the producer.

However, he understood why the film and television production markets in so many countries were so welcoming to Netflix's entry.

Who wouldn't like this kind of investor who gives money and resources without saying much?

But it's not all in vain. Netflix does have many new ways to choose themes.

The most important point is to use the background big data to accurately match the appropriate topic concepts according to the preferences of different markets and different audiences.

For example, for the Asia-Pacific market, the background shows that most viewers are interested in "Battle Royale", "AI World", "Political Conspiracy" and the like, so Netflix will increase its investment share in related concept themes in this market next.

Meng Bai thought to himself, why do I always feel that Netflix is like an Internet company? Isn’t this similar to ByteDance’s concept of “information distribution”, except that it has changed from news to film and television dramas?

However, for Arclight, this is indeed a new planning direction.

At present, most of ArcLight’s projects still have a project establishment mechanism similar to that of the traditional film and television industry, relying mainly on the creators’ inspiration and creativity to polish them into scripts, and then filming and production.

Whether the audience likes this story or accepts it depends entirely on the creative team of the production team.

In this case, why not study what the audience wants to see from the beginning and then produce it accordingly?
But then again, relying solely on data doesn't seem very reliable.

Just like the previous movie "Eternal Love", Alibaba Pictures relied on big data to calculate the IP with the highest traffic, selected the male and female actors with the highest audience recommendations, and put in the plots that the audience most demanded, but it ended in a miserable failure.

From this perspective, it seems unreliable to completely break away from the inspiration of the creator.

For this problem, the platform can trade quantity for quality, but the producers cannot.

It seems that this problem needs to be carefully considered. Meng Bai and his team stayed in California for two days. In addition to visiting, they also talked about other possible cooperative projects.

Kuo You-Chuan told Meng Bai that Netflix was very interested in the entire "Green Ivy Detective Universe". He said that previous works, such as "Criminal Minds", "Forensic Qin Ming" and "Detective Chinatown", could be sent to Meng Bai to see if they were suitable.

Overall, this trip to California was fruitful and Meng Bai was very satisfied.

After the observation, Liu Jun returned to China first with other ArcLight staff, while Meng Bai flew east to New York with Hua Yan and several assistants.

The film crew of "Detective Chinatown 2" is currently filming here.
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The Global Detective Alliance is a non-governmental organization spontaneously established by detective mystery enthusiasts around the world. The main communication activities between alliance members are carried out on a community APP called Crimaster (Crime Master).

Everyone uploads difficult cases in their area to each other, helping each other find clues and deduce the truth. At the same time, there is also a very difficult reasoning question in the community, and members can get points by answering the questions and strive for ranking.

“The app is still in production, this is a first version demo.”

Chen Sicheng clicked on an app with a detective avatar, and a blue-black cold-toned interface popped up on the screen: "It's still just an internal preliminary version, and the functions are very simple."

Meng Bai looked at the screen and found that, just as Chen Sicheng had said, there were only four sections on the entire interface.

The first one is the "Detective Community", and there are only two pieces of news when you click on it. One is the report on the start of filming of "Detective Chinatown 2", and the other is a promotional photo, which is obviously provided by the crew for testing.

This section will have two main functions in the future. One is to release official news about the "Detective Chinatown" series, and the other is chat and comment between users.

The second one is the "Crime Database", which has a blank page. This section is actually those "reasoning questions" that allow viewers to answer questions to earn points and rush to rank. However, the question bank has not been entered yet, so it is empty.

Next is the "Detective Ranking", which contains the overall ranking of all the "detectives" in the world. This is not blank, the first one is "Q", followed by "Qin Feng Tang Ren" and "Noda Hao".

Further down there are "Lin Mo", "Kiko", "Buffalo Billy", "Jack Jia" and so on, all of which are characters that will appear in movies and web dramas.

After this application is actually launched, real-life users can also compete with the characters in the drama for the top of the list, which can be regarded as a special kind of plot interaction.

The last section is the general "Settings", which basically contains the functions that every application has.

The Crimaster application was an idea that Meng Bai and Chen Sicheng came up with to connect with the plot. The main purpose is to enhance the stickiness of fans by "breaking the dimensional wall".

"It's pretty good. It looks pretty decent." Meng Bai looked at the interface of the application and praised it. "It's just..."

"What's wrong?" Seeing his frowning expression, Chen Sicheng couldn't help but ask, "Is there any problem?"

"There's nothing wrong with that, but I just feel that it's a bit of a waste to develop an app that only has these few promotional and interactive functions."

"Waste?" Chen Sicheng thought for a moment, "It's okay, it was originally for the 'Tang Detective Series', what else do you want to add?"

Meng Bai stroked his chin and said, "Brother Chen, do you know the mystery variety show "Celebrity Detective" that Haoran participated in?"

"I know."

"In fact, the program team has discussed this before. They want to develop a similar 'script-killing' game, which is similar to 'Werewolf'." Meng Bai said: "I was thinking, is it possible for us to cooperate with Mango TV to develop applications and explore social and game functions."

"This... sounds like there is some hope." Chen Sicheng said thoughtfully.

Because Liu Haoran is a regular member, and the show is all about "mystery", he is also familiar with the show "Star Detective".

Although the show performed well in its first season, it was only popular among a small circle of viewers. It received high reviews, but its popularity was average.

The second season started out similarly, but soon, as two episodes of "Horror Nursery Rhymes" broke the circle, the traffic and popularity of the entire program skyrocketed.

Mango TV struck while the iron was hot and directly launched the third season last month, which is equivalent to two seasons in one year.

With the popularity accumulated in the previous period, various data, hot searches and discussions have grown rapidly since the third season started. The show has just aired four episodes and the number of views has exceeded 10 billion, crushing all the recent online variety shows.

According to this broadcast cycle, the fourth season should also be in the fourth quarter of next year, which is similar to the release schedule of "Detective Chinatown 2".

Both are "mystery themes" and have Liu Haoran as a common member. Their popularity and influence are also at the same level. If they can be linked together, it might really be a good gimmick.

Especially since one is a movie and the other is a variety show, they do not steal each other's track and audience, which is simply a perfect combination.

"Will Mango TV agree?" Chen Sicheng asked.

"How would I know? It just suddenly occurred to me." Meng Bai spread his hands. "I'll ask them when I get back. Or, when you finish filming here and come back to China, we can go together."

"That's fine." Chen Sicheng said, "I've already finished one-third of the filming, and I expect it to be finished before the end of the year. Baoqiang's 'Journey to the West: Conquering India' happens to be on the Spring Festival schedule, so I have to go back to do the roadshow before then."

"The Spring Festival period..." Meng Bai frowned. They had seen the finished film before, and the quality was hard to describe.

It was Wang Baoqiang’s first time as a director and he wanted too many things, so he ended up turning the whole film into a farce.

However, there shouldn't be any problem with the box office. After all, his box office appeal is there, and with the gimmick of being a "first-time director", at least he won't lose money.

As for how much it can earn, it depends on the quality of other films during this Spring Festival.

"By the way, what's the current status of Brother Baoqiang's divorce case?" Meng Bai asked casually.

Chen Sicheng shook his head. "We are still going through the legal process. The other party is suspected of transferring property and embezzlement. The criminal and civil cases are combined, which is quite complicated. The first trial will be held after the Chinese New Year, but I don't think we will get anything out of it. It will take a year or so."

After that, he patted Meng Bai's shoulder with an experienced tone and said, "It's good to get married later. For example, your current company is all pre-marital property. It will save a lot of trouble if you make an agreement later."

"Brother, I have to record what you said and show it to me." Meng Bai joked.

Chen Sicheng waved his hand nonchalantly: "It's okay, your sister Yaya can't be as bad as Ma Rong."

Meng Bai nodded. This was indeed the truth. There were probably not many people in the entire circle who could do something so ruthless.

"Well, it's hard to say." Chen Sicheng suddenly showed a gossipy smile, "Didn't you see the gossip that just broke out yesterday?"

"What gossip?" Meng Bai was puzzled. "I've been abroad recently and haven't read much domestic news."

"Oh, no wonder you didn't know." Chen Sicheng smiled and said, "It's actually very simple. It's just an accident about 'hairdressing'."

(End of this chapter)