How it started
History
In March 2014, Alibaba Group bought a 60% stake in ChinaVision Media for $805 million. Alibaba initially registered a film company in the following April with the name Alibaba Films Group before changing it to Alibaba Pictures Group later in the month. Two heads from ChinaVision were listed as directors of Alibaba Pictures. In June 2014, ChinaVision Media was officially renamed to be Alibaba Pictures Group. The following July, Zhang Qiang resigned as vice president of China Film Group to become the head of Alibaba Pictures. Later in the month, Alibaba Pictures entered agreements with filmmakers and film companies, including director Wong Kar Wai and the Hong Kong-based film production company Block 2.
The company purchased Yueke and at the end of 2015, Taobao Movie and Yulebao. On October 9, 2016, Amblin Partners struck a deal with Alibaba, in which Alibaba acquired a minority equity stake in the company and will handle marketing, distribution, and merchandising of Amblin Partners films in China in addition to co-financing Amblin and DreamWorks films worldwide. As described by the Financial Times, "Amblin Partners and Alibaba Pictures teamed up to "finance, produce, market and distribute films in China and globally." Alibaba Pictures released the projection in February 2017 that its unaudited 2016 losses could be over US$140 million. The company stated the losses resulted from a promotion known as Tao Piao Piao, where theater tickets are subsidized.
In July 2017, Alibaba increased its stake in Tao Piao Piao, an online ticketing platform, from 87.6% to 96.7%, for 1.3 billion yuan.
Alibaba Pictures has become a giant in film production and finance. Its success is not limited just to mainland China. Through its first domestic release See You Tomorrow, the company combined both mainland Chinese and Hong Kong values, reaching both audiences in new ways. The installment also saw "the ongoing mainlandization of Hong Kong filmmaking practice and the corresponding Hong Kongification of contemporary Chinese popular cinema," according to Mark Gallagher, author of "Alibaba Goes to the Movies."
Alibaba Pictures' mid-2010s expansion was not limited only to Hong Kong however.
From Wikipedia’s article on Damai Entertainment, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2