How Wanda's Chen Zhixi Cracked the Code for Theatrical in Asia

Back in 2010, Chinese actress Chen Zhixi was performing in a supporting role alongside Xu Zheng, one of China’s biggest comedy stars, in the popular period drama series Li Wei the Magistrate. The show was a hit and a significant role for her, but Chen already had grown restless with her acting work and was pondering other paths through the industry.

“Being an actor requires you to be a bit passive because you always have to just hope that you’ll get that callback,” she tells THR during a Zoom interview conducted with an interpreter. “I’m not the kind of person who likes to wait to be selected. I’d much prefer to be the one who makes the rules rather than follows them.”

In Zheng, she says she recognized a comedic visionary of still untapped potential. She suggested that they make a pact: One day, he would not only star in his work but also direct it — and she would produce him.

That partnership took shape in the buddy comedy Lost in Thailand, Zheng’s directorial debut and Chen’s first film as a producer. The movie opened in December 2012 and earned $208 million, more than any Chinese film ever had at the time — one of the first huge hits of China’s early box-office-boom era. It was a feat Chen would repeat several times over on her way to becoming one of her country’s most powerful film executives.

“If you look at the history of China’s film industry development, there are only a few filmmakers who began their careers as actors and transitioned to become successful directors,” notes Chen, who lives in Beijing with her husband, music producer-composer Guo Sida, and their daughter. “Identifying and scouting this talent is something I’m really proud of.”

She would go on to produce the blockbuster directorial debuts of popular actors Deng Chao (The Breakup Guru in 2014 with $111.4 million), Dong Chengpeng (2015’s Jian Bing Man, $187 million) and Chen Sicheng (2015’s Detective Chinatown, $126 million). But her talent-picking superpower arguably reached its zenith with female slapstick star Jia Ling’s first feature as a director, Hi, Mom. The heartwarming comedy earned an astonishing $841.7 million during China’s Lunar New Year holiday of 2021 — and it held the record as the world’s top-grossing film ever directed by a woman until Greta Gerwig’s Barbie arrived two years later.

Along the way, Chen was appointed president of China Ruyi Holdings, an entertainment conglomerate spanning film, streaming and gaming, with a market cap of $3.4 billion on the Hong Kong stock exchange. In late January, she became the CEO of Wanda Film, Chinese billionaire Wang Jianlin’s once-high-flying movie studio, when Ruyi, already a major shareholder, bought full control of the Beijing-based company by upping its stake in a deal valued at about $310 million. As the head of Wanda Film, one of China’s most recognizable movie brands, Chen, 42, is the exceedingly rare female movie mogul in the country, where many of the major legacy studios tend to be run by their older male founders. Wanda also is China’s largest exhibitor, with a footprint of 900 cinemas and more than 7,500 screens, as well as ownership of Hoyts, Australia’s largest movie theater chain (Ruyi’s deal for Wanda Film did not include Hollywood studio Legendary Entertainment, which the Wanda Group parent company divested of earlier this year in a deal with Legendary’s principals and private equity firm Apollo).

In recognition of these achievements and her savvy strategic moves since, Chen has been named The Hollywood Reporter‘s Asian Producer of the Year and will attend THR‘s annual Women in Entertainment breakfast gala, presented by Lifetime, on Dec. 4 in Beverly Hills.

Chen’s strong track record has continued in her first year at the helm at Wanda. “All of the projects we have been involved in this year have realized a profit,” she says.

As a producer, Wanda Film was behind China’s biggest hit of the summer, Successor, the comedy-drama from co-directors Yan Fei and Peng Damo about a wealthy husband and wife who spend years pretending to be poor so that their son will develop humble values and the skills necessary to take over their business empire. It earned an immodest $469.6 million. Other hits have included Zhang Yimou’s Article 20 ($337.6 million), the family animation sequel Boonie Bears: Time Twist ($275 million) and the crime thriller A Place Called Silence ($192.9 million).

In addition to its tentpoles, Wanda recently tried taking a page out of the Blumhouse playbook with Yuanyang Lou, an ultra-low-budget horror flick about a group of young people who accept a challenge to live in a spooky mansion to win a cash payout. Currently in release, the film has earned just shy of $15 million. “We controlled the budget very carefully on this project, so it has turned out to be very profitable,” Chen says.

The executive notes, however, that signs of trouble in the broader Chinese film industry have given Wanda a sense of urgency despite its winning streak. As of Nov. 25, total movie ticket revenue in China for 2024 was $5.6 billion, down a staggering 21 percent compared with the same period in 2023. The growing consensus among industry veterans is that young people — Gen Z and below — have started to retreat from the cinema, with their rates of moviegoing in freefall.

“We are losing the young audience in China,” Chen says. “Moviegoing is no longer a part of their lifestyle and consumption habits. This is something that has drawn a lot of my attention lately.”

Even though Wanda’s results have held up so far, Chen says she’s introducing various initiatives to counter the headwinds proactively.

“Wanda is such a strong brand in China’s film sector, but when I first got here, many of its business operations were quite isolated,” she explains. “So the first thing I did was to connect the dots and integrate all the resources we have together into an all-encompassing, integrated ecosystem — from product development all the way down to exhibition and ancillaries.”

Chen points out that in Hollywood, ticket sales at the box office are generally believed to make up no more than 50 percent of a blockbuster film title’s total revenue, with the rest generated by IP sales and merchandising.

“In China, these derivative revenue sources are estimated to generate less than 8 percent,” she says. “So there’s huge potential there, and we’ve started exploring this aggressively.”

Under Chen’s leadership, Wanda has begun developing and marketing merchandising lines for its most suitable film IP while also undertaking a massive renovation project at many of its multiplexes. The company plans to add exhibition, gaming and shopping spaces to its lobbies, along with improved food and beverage options.

“In a nutshell, we want our cinemas to be a very appealing cultural hub that incorporates various facets of young people’s lifestyles,” Chen says.

The executive says Wanda will continue to produce star-driven tentpole films, but the recent market trends make clear that the company needs to experiment boldly.

In September, Wanda partnered with Chinese gaming company HoYoverse for a location-based entertainment tie-up celebrating the four-year anniversary of the globally beloved fantasy role-playing game Genshin Impact. As part of the activation, select Wanda cinemas were transformed into Genshin Impact cosplay zones, with limited-edition merchandise for sale and a live concert performance of the game’s popular soundtrack screened in the cinemas’ Imax theaters. Wanda says the project was launched on a pilot scale at just a smattering of theaters, but it exceeded the company’s expectations, generating more than $1.4 million in ticket revenue from the concert screening. Perhaps more significantly, the event went viral on social media, boosting the share of tickets sold to Gen Z customers — from the usual single digits to more than 40 percent.

“One of our biggest priorities now is to continue developing initiatives that drive young audiences back into the cinema,” Chen says. “This is the future of our business.”

This story appeared in the Dec. 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.