Wang Zhongjun, an accidental film-maker with new-found patriotism

Wang Zhongjun, co-founder of China’s oldest and most influential private film studio Huayi Brothers, likes to joke that making movies was “purely accidental” and that his real passion is collecting and creating art.

“I rarely go to the office,” he once said. “My art studio is my office.”

But a cash crisis for Huayi, which began in 2018 and worsened this year after the pandemic shuttered Chinese cinemas, has forced Mr Wang — a self-described “uber-collector” who once splashed millions on Van Gogh and Picasso paintings — to change his tune. Last year, he began to sell some of his art to raise capital. “For the safety of the company, anything can be up for sale,” Mr Wang said last August when he first revealed the sales.

This week, though, the box office takings of Huayi’s The Eight Hundred, a patriotic war epic, made it the world’s top grossing film globally, overtaking Sony’s Bad Boy’s for Life. Helped by official endorsements that the film encouraged “patriotism” among viewers, it had grossed Rmb2.97bn ($436m) as of Friday, according to industry tracker Maoyan. Its roaring success gives Mr Wang his best chance yet to turn round the company that he and his younger brother Wang Zhonglei founded in 1994. By pipping Hollywood blockbusters, it is also the latest sign of China’s global rise and its relative success in taming coronavirus.

Born into a Beijing military family in 1960, as a teenager Mr Wang looked set to follow a traditional army career when he enlisted at 16, but he soon left to work in publishing. In 1989, he went to study in the US, returning to Beijing five years later to found an advertising business with his brother. 

In Mr Wang’s telling, the company only stumbled into television and film. Even so, Huayi quickly became an industry powerhouse, churning out a series of hits in the early 2000s, such as A World Without Thieves. The company listed in Shenzhen in 2009, doubling its share price in the first day.

Citing Disney as inspiration, the brothers’ ambitions grew and Huayi, with Mr Wang’s wife Liu Xiaomei a board member, invested in animation, theme parks and video games. Mr Wang also began to build a significant art collection, buying Van Gogh's Still Life, Vase With Daisies And Poppies for $61m in 2014, Picasso’s Femme au chignon dans un fauteuil for $30m in 2015, and numerous Chinese works, including an 11th-century letter by scholar Zeng Gong for $32m in 2016.

Huayi’s success has been built in part upon Mr Wang’s unshakeable friendship with Feng Xiaogang, a well-known director. To get Huayi off the ground, the brothers borrowed money from Mr Feng’s family; the films he has since directed, from commercial comedies to heartstring-tugging historical dramas, are invariably big earners.

Still, that interdependence became a liability in 2018 when Mr Feng — and by extension Huayi — were caught up in a 2018 tax evasion scandal centred on China’s best-known actress, Fan Bingbing. Cell phone 2, a Mr Feng-directed blockbuster starring Ms Fan, was pulled. Huayi’s crisis only deepened in 2019 when authorities delayed the release of The Eight Hundred.

As Huayi reported record losses of $565m (Rmb4bn), Mr Wang sold down his artwork, a Hong Kong mansion and even part of his controlling stake. Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of Alibaba, also loaned the studio $103m through his company’s entertainment arm. Even so, the group remained at risk of being kicked off the stock market. The pandemic made matters worse: Huayi lost Rmb231m in the first half of 2020. Then The Eight Hundred rode to its rescue.

Film critic Gao Wei said the film hit a sweet spot by debuting in late August, just as Chinese cinemagoers were putting Covid-19 behind them and starting to hanker for big-budget films on the big screen. “The spirit of the film, its focus on a heroic struggle, gave the story resonance,” he said.

The $80m war epic is based on real events in 1937 Shanghai when a Chinese platoon held off Japanese invaders long enough to allow the rest of the army to retreat to safety. The film was deemed politically controversial from the outset, because the fighters depicted are from the nationalist Kuomintang army instead of the Chinese Communist party.

Set for release in the summer of 2019, it was pulled at the last minute for “technical reasons”, often a euphemism for official censors’ displeasure. Mr Wang scrambled to mend relations. Despite his military background and party membership, Huayi has often fallen foul of authorities for films that touch on sensitive subjects, such as China’s 1979 war with Vietnam.

So Huayi launched a new Communist party committee to ensure a “correct political orientation”. Mr Wang said the move would “mix the core socialist values of the party deeper into the company’s blood”.

The efforts appeared to pay off. The film was dubbed a “patriotic” flick and described by state media as embodying the “heroism” that spurs China to defeat its enemies, be that 20th-century aggressors or a novel coronavirus.

Local Communist party committees across the country even organised group screenings. Last week, Mr Wang nodded to the party’s embrace of the film in an interview, when he thanked officialdom for supporting the film.

christian.shepherd@ft.com