Chapter 341: California Trip
Netflix's headquarters is located in Los Altos, Silicon Valley Bay Area, California, an industrial park full of technology. The
people who welcomed the delegation from Qiyi TV and Arclight Films were Netflix Vice Presidents Guo Youquan and Cindy Holland - the former is the managing director of the Asia-Pacific region and is 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 and smiled at him and said, "Mr. Guo, let me introduce you. This is the boss of Arclight Films, who produced "Day and Night Chase", Meng Bai, Mr. Meng." Hearing this
, Guo Youquan looked at the young man in front of him in surprise.
He had heard of Meng Bai's name when he talked to Qiyi TV before. Although Dai Ying told him that the other party was a young man at the time, he didn't expect him to be so young.
He looked at his age of only twenty-four or twenty-five, which was a very exaggerated age even in Silicon Valley, where young geniuses are born in large numbers.
What's more, he knew that the other party was the founder of a film and television company with a valuation of 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 Chase' is the highest-quality Chinese web drama we have watched in recent years. Even if it is placed in our Netflix, it can be called a masterpiece."
"Mr. Guo, you are too kind." Meng Baiqian smiled and said: "The quality of domestic web dramas has grown rapidly in recent years, and many high-quality works have been produced. In comparison, 'Day and Night Chase' is more pleasing in terms of subject matter."
Guo Youquan smiled without commenting. 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 drama and does not think that the so-called "fairy-tale dramas" and "palace dramas" in China are worth talking about.
In contrast, some modern youth dramas or idol dramas are not bad. At least they will still have a lot of audiences after leaving the local market.
After all, youth, love and the like are one of the eternal topics of all human beings.
Guo Youquan took the people who came to observe to visit the Netflix headquarters. It is different from the style of domestic companies. It is closer to the traditional Internet enterprise style of Silicon Valley, and the number of staff is not large.
Meng Bai asked and found out that because the housing prices around Silicon Valley are very expensive, most of the staff 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 the industry needs of each are different.
He is more concerned about Netflix's topic planning for original content and the production process of film and television series.
"I wonder if Mr. Guo can introduce it?" Meng Bai asked.
"It's not inconvenient. Our Netflix is a listed company, and many development plans are actually public." Guo Youquan said.
As he said that, he led everyone to the company's content department and introduced it in detail.
Meng Bai listened carefully for a long time, and then gradually frowned.
Before, Guo Fan and several other directors visited Paramount once, and after returning, they highly praised Hollywood's industrialized production system.
Therefore, before coming here, Meng Bai was also looking forward to this production team that produced a series of high-scoring dramas in recent years, such as "House of Cards", "Black Mirror" and "Rome".
However, after listening to Guo Youquan's introduction, he found that in terms of original content production, Netflix actually did not have any particularly outstanding new models, and still adopted the traditional film and television production process.
The reason why Netflix can always produce masterpieces is mainly due to three points: spending money, massive and freedom.
Needless to say, spending money was naturally needed. The original "House of Cards" was all favored by platforms such as HBO, FOX, Disney+, and Amazon, and in the end Netflix spent a lot of money to win the project.
In addition, because HBO's "Westworld" has been a big 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 only proposed the concept of "artificial man" without even a script outline, and directly got a budget of nearly 20 million US dollars from Netflix.
This kind of treatment can actually be obtained by Arclight 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 a Japanese samurai film called "47 Ronin" before. With a lineup of Keanu Reeves, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tadanobu Asano, and Kou Shibasaki, the ratings were just passing, and the box office lost hundreds of millions of dollars.
But even with this result, Netflix still got a huge budget. I don't know if they are spending a lot of money on horse bones, or if they have too much money to burn.
As for the huge amount, it mainly depends on their global market. Every year, production companies in every country will put a large number of works on the Netflix platform, which can be said to be mixed with good and bad.
The reason why I feel that Netflix's productions are all "god dramas" in China is just because they have been selected by the green daddy. There is no way to watch them directly in China, so only those high-scoring masterpieces will be known to 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 degree of freedom is good. No matter how large the production is, Netflix, the client, almost never interferes with the creative ideas of the main creators. Regardless of 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 relish, Meng Bai smiled bitterly.
This stuff should be let Youku Video and Tencent Video listen to it. It has no practical value for Arclight, the producer.
However, he understands why the film and television production markets in so many countries are so welcoming to Netflix.
Give money, resources, and not much noise, who would not like this kind of investor.
But it is not without gain. In terms of how to choose the subject matter, Netflix does have many new methods.
The most important point is to accurately match the appropriate topic concepts according to the preferences of different markets and different audience groups through the background big data.
For example, for the Asia-Pacific market, the background shows that most viewers are interested in "Battle Royale", "AI World" and "Political Conspiracy", so Netflix will increase the investment share of related concept themes in this market next.
Meng Bai thought to himself, otherwise I always feel that Netflix is like an Internet company. Isn't this similar to the concept of "information distribution" of ByteDance, 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 are still similar to the project establishment mechanism of the traditional film and television industry. They mainly rely on the creators' inspiration and creativity to polish into scripts, and then shoot and produce. Whether
the audience likes this theme story or not, whether they accept it or not, depends entirely on the crew's creators to figure it out.
In this case, why not study what the audience wants to see from the beginning, and then produce it in a targeted manner?
But then again, relying entirely on data does not seem to be very reliable.
Just like the previous movie "Three Lives, Three Worlds, Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms", Alibaba Pictures used big data to calculate the IP with the highest traffic, selected the male and female actors with the highest audience recommendation, and put in the plot that the audience had the most calls for, but in the end it ended in failure.
From this point of view, it seems unreliable to completely break away from the inspiration of the creators.
The platform can exchange quantity for quality on this issue, but the producers cannot.
It seems that this issue 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 projects for cooperation.
Guo Youquan told Meng Bai that Netflix is very interested in the entire "Green Ivy Detective Universe". Several previous works, such as "Psychological Crime", "Forensic Qin Ming" and "Chinatown Detective", can be sent to see if they are suitable.
In general, this trip to California can be regarded as a gain, and Meng Bai is still very satisfied.
After the observation, Liu Jun and other staff members of Arc Light returned to China first, and Meng Bai took Hua Yan and several assistants and flew east to New York.
The film crew of "Chinatown Detective 2" is filming here.
——Global
Detective Alliance, a non-governmental organization spontaneously established by global detective reasoning enthusiasts. The main communication activities between alliance members are all carried out on a community APP called Crimaster (Crime Master).
Everyone uploads difficult cases in their area to each other, helps 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 questions and then strive for ranking.
"The application is still in production, this is a first version of the demo."
Chen Sicheng clicked on an application with a detective avatar, and a blue and black cold-toned interface popped up on the screen: "It's still just an internal first version, and the functions are very simple."
Meng Bai looked at the screen, and indeed as Chen Sicheng said, there are only four sections on the entire interface.
The first is the "Detective Community", and there are only two messages when you click in. One is the report on the start of the filming of "Detective Chinatown 2", and the other is the promotional stills, which are 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 comments between users, etc.
The second is the "Crime Library", which has only a blank page after entering. This section is actually those "reasoning questions" that allow audience users to answer questions and accumulate points to rush the ranking. It's just that the question bank has not been entered yet, so it is empty.
The next one is the "Detective Ranking", which contains the total ranking of all the "detectives" in the world. This one 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 appear in movies and web dramas.
After this app is actually launched, real users can also compete with the characters in the drama for the list, which is a special kind of plot interaction.
The last section is the conventional "settings", which are basically the functions that every app has.
This Crimaster app is an idea that Meng Bai and Chen Sicheng discussed to link with the plot. The main purpose is to enhance the stickiness of fans through this "breaking the dimensional wall" method.
"It's pretty good, and it looks decent." Meng Bai looked at the interface of the application and praised it, "It's..."
"What's wrong?" Seeing his frowning expression, Chen Sicheng couldn't help asking, "Any questions?"
"No problem, but I feel that it's a bit of a waste to develop such an APP with only these promotional and interactive functions."
"Waste?" Chen Sicheng thought about it, "It's okay, it was originally for the 'Tang Detective Series', what else do you want to add?"
Meng Bai stroked his chin: "Brother Chen, do you know the reasoning variety show 'Celebrity Detective' that Haoran participated in?"
"Yes."
"In fact, the program team has talked about it before, and wants to develop a similar form of 'script killing' game, which is similar to 'Werewolf Killing'." Meng Bai said: "I was thinking, is it possible for us to do a linkage with Mango TV, cooperate in developing applications, and explore social and game functions."
"This... sounds like it has some potential." Chen Sicheng said thoughtfully.
Because Liu Haoran is a regular member, and the theme is "reasoning", he has also learned about the program "Celebrity Detective".
Although the show performed well in the first season, it was only popular in a small circle of viewers. The evaluation was high, but the popularity was average.
The second season started similarly, but soon, with the two episodes of "Horror Nursery Rhymes" breaking the circle, the traffic and popularity of the entire show soared.
Mango TV struck while the iron was hot and directly launched the third season last month, which is equivalent to two seasons in a year.
With the popularity accumulated in the previous period, as soon as the third season started, various data, hot searches and discussions increased rapidly. The show has just aired four episodes, and the number of views has exceeded 1 billion, crushing all the recent online variety shows.
According to this broadcast cycle, the fourth season of next year should also be in the fourth quarter, 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, it may really be a good gimmick.
Especially since one of them is a movie and the other is a variety show, they do not compete with each other's track and audience. It is simply a perfect combination.
"Can Mango TV agree?" Chen Sicheng asked.
"How would I know? It just occurred to me." Meng Bai spread his hands. "I'll ask them when I get back. Or, when you finish filming and come back to China, we can go together."
"That's fine." Chen Sicheng said, "I've already filmed one-third of the way here, and it's estimated to be finished before the end of the year. Baoqiang's "Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons" happens to be on the Spring Festival schedule, so I have to go back to do road shows before then."
"Spring Festival schedule..." Meng Bai frowned. They had seen the finished film before, and the quality was hard to describe.
Wang Baoqiang was directing for the first time, and he wanted too many things, but he turned the whole film into a farce.
But there should be no problem with the box office. After all, his box office appeal is there, and with the gimmick of "first-time director", at least he won't lose money.
As for how much money can be made, it depends on the quality of other films in this Spring Festival schedule.
"By the way, how is Brother Baoqiang's divorce case going now?" 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 the tone of an experienced person: "Or say that there are advantages to getting married late. For example, your current company is all pre-marital property. It will save a lot of trouble to make an agreement later."
"Brother, I have to record what you said and show it to my sister." 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 is the truth. There are probably not many people in the whole circle who can do such a thing.
"Well, it's hard to say." Chen Sicheng suddenly showed a gossipy smile, "Didn't you see the melon that just broke out yesterday?"
"What melon?" Meng Bai was puzzled, "I have been abroad recently and haven't watched much domestic news."
"Oh, no wonder you don't know." Chen Sicheng smiled and said: "It's actually simple, it's just an accident about 'hairdressing'."
(End of this chapter)
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