Who are you calling "little fresh meat"? I'm the king.

Chapter 925 Division of Labor
Edko Films, Jiang Zhiqiang, was once hailed as Asia's number one producer!
That was quite bold—when Ang Lee was looking for investment for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," the producer was his longtime collaborator, Hsu Li-kung. Hsu Li-kung quickly brought in an investor: Chen Tai-ming, the boss of Taiwan's Yageo Electronics. The film's budget was US$1500 million, and Mr. Chen readily agreed.

Ang Lee then assembled a film crew and searched for location shooting.

However, things took an unexpected turn. At the time, Southeast Asia was experiencing a financial crisis, and Mr. Chen lost a lot of money, so he withdrew his investment.

After losing his investment, Xu Ligong searched all over Southeast Asia for someone to take over his investment, but to no avail—even the landlord's family had no surplus grain.

Then, Xu Ligong suffered a stroke due to a sudden attack of anger, while Ang Lee and his crew were left speechless and bewildered at the filming location in XJ.

Desperate, Ang Lee turned to Jiang Zhiqiang.

Jiang Zhiqiang took over and quickly reached an investment agreement with Sony Columbia, one of the eight major American film companies.

Sony, which had promised to invest, was very cunning. It took a year to pay the money, forcing the production team to fend for themselves first.

That year, Jiang Zhiqiang used his own money to support the film crew, and was so enraged that he even considered jumping off a building.

Financial crisis!
After the huge success of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," he approached Zhang Yimou to work on three more films: "Hero," "House of Flying Daggers," and "Curse of the Golden Flower."

He also collaborated with Li Lianjie on "Fearless"...

By the way, he was also the executive producer of "Mulan"—in 15, news came out that a live-action "Mulan" remake was about to be made, and at that time, all the news about Disney's casting process showed that the finalists were basically Koreans and Japanese.

Mulan in Once Upon a Time was played by a Korean actress—Jamie Chung!
—Once Upon a Time is a television series produced by ABC, which is owned by Disney.

Actually, the casting requirements for "Mulan" are 18 to 25 years old!
Liu Yifei has exceeded the limit...

Regarding Liu Yifei landing the role of Mulan, a Disney executive stated: "Our Chinese producer, Mr. Jiang Zhiqiang, strongly recommended her."

However, Shen Yan doesn't have much contact with him. His partners in Hong Kong are Shaw Brothers and Silver Screen!
He doesn't even bother with the Emperor!

As for Monster Hunt 2…

Why make such a big fuss?
Because... many licensed brands have an additional condition when signing contracts: the box office must exceed 20 billion!
Otherwise, they will try to get the licensing fee back!

Well... in order to guarantee the box office success of a mediocre movie, the only option is to go all out with promotion!
Shen Yan withdrew his investment and left "Monster Hunt 2"... it really was just a disagreement between the two parties.

He felt that "Monster Hunt 2," as a sequel, should revolve around the world of humans and monsters, with Huba serving as the thread and driving force of the entire story. As the orphan of the former monster king, Huba possesses the power to change the world…

Let's focus on this then!
Then, the real Huba in "Monster Hunt 2" has no personality at all except for being cute.

Oh, and the screenwriter changed too, from Yuan Jinlin in the first season to Wu Weilun…

Wu Weilun is Dante Lam's go-to screenwriter—the vast majority of Lam's films are based on his screenplays. Looking at Wu Weilun's films, the dialogue is overly formal, the plots are riddled with holes, the logic is severely lacking, and the characters lack depth…

This is probably why "Monster Hunt 1" had a decent logical concept, but "Monster Hunt 2" plummeted into a terrible movie at a precipitous speed!

……

There are usually two ways to shoot patriotic films with a main theme.

One type of filmmaking is a documentary-style film: it uses a grand and serious style to depict national achievements and showcase the demeanor of great figures. The viewing experience is similar to a television news documentary, but it does not delve deeper into the stories and characters and lacks a cinematic feel.

Both "The Founding of a Republic" and "The Founding of the Party" are of this type;
Another approach is to make films based on genre. These films tell a tense and exciting story within a specific genre, giving the audience the impact of commercial films, but their core message is always about national sentiment, with the genre story serving the national narrative.

"The Climbers" is a typical example of this.

Actually, it's not easy to make patriotic films.

Too serious, and the audience won't buy it; too formulaic, and the leaders won't be satisfied.

Before "My People, My Country," all patriotic films were somewhat "awkward," unable to find the optimal balance. We can call this the "1.0 era of patriotic films." The commonalities of this 1.0 era also included the following: in terms of values, they either praised great figures, heroism that sacrificed the individual for the collective, or the good life of the people. While the message was positive, it fell into clichés and lacked sophistication.

"My People, My Country" breaks away from the conventional thinking of similar films...

Platter!

To paraphrase many marketing articles: no longer relying on grand narratives of the times…

Actually, no!

It still relies heavily on the times—almost every period has historical turning points and major events!

Of the original versions of "My People, My Country," the worst is undoubtedly "The Day the Meteor Fell," but actually, "The Return" and "The Escort" were also quite mediocre...

Especially "Return"!
It's so messy...

There are too many main characters.

Flag raiser Zhu Tao trained diligently without slacking off; female police officer Sister Lian worked conscientiously to safeguard peace; diplomat An Wenbin negotiated with the British for 16 rounds without yielding a second; and watch shop owner Brother Hua used his superb skills to ensure that the watches of the Chinese and British representatives and the female police officer were accurately matched.

Chinese diplomats, honor guard soldiers, Hong Kong police officers, and watchmakers may have different identities, but they share a common wish—to raise the five-star red flag precisely at 00:00 on July 1st.

They did their utmost in their respective positions to ensure that Hong Kong's return to China was "not a second off".

It's a great topic, but due to space constraints, I was only given 20 minutes...

This resulted in a disjointed structure, poorly developed characters, and an unclear plot.

It feels more like it's telling the story of an event from different angles. Although the event itself is very important, it doesn't really say anything about what happened around it.

Spending all the time on any one of the four main characters would probably be more effective than it is now.

Of course, with "Daytime Meteor" at the bottom... "Volver" is at least passable!
"Daytime Meteor" is terrible...

Perhaps it's because it's a set essay topic: poverty alleviation and aerospace are two really hard topics to connect...

Even the little genius couldn't have imagined it, so they went for a surreal romantic style!

The entire play is closely connected to reality, and you suddenly throw in a touch of surreal romanticism...

Then it received unanimous negative reviews: the script was detached from reality, the conflicts were handled awkwardly, the setup was too long, and the plot twists were too abrupt. There were also melodramatic and wishful thinking elements. It's fair to say it lacked the elements of a good movie but almost had all the elements of a bad one.

By the way, Shen Yan has decided to film a documentary on the theme of "poverty alleviation".

"The aerospace industry should be handed over to Lao Guo?"

"Sure, I have no objection!"

"Remember, each person only gets 20 minutes. We have seven directors, each getting 20 minutes, plus the opening and closing credits, it'll be at least 150 minutes..."

The Olympic bidder interjected, "How am I supposed to approach the theme of the atomic bomb explosion?"

Han Yandao said, "You can interpret it from an international political perspective... for example, the 1964 Sino-Soviet border negotiations..."

Lu Yang asked in surprise, "Is it allowed to take pictures of this?"

Shen Yan shook his head
(End of this chapter)