TIFFCOM: China’s Linmon Pictures Unveils TV Drama Slate Targeting International Markets

Shanghai-based Linmon Pictures is hoping another ambitious slate of high-end period dramas will give a boost to its expanding international business. 

On the second day of Tokyo’s TIFFCOM entertainment market, which runs in parallel with the Tokyo International Film Festival, gave an update on its ongoing mission to diversify beyond the domestic China market. The company touted a slew of new period dramas it has planned for 2025 and 2026, as well as projects in other genres. 

The company’s slate includes four costume dramas spanning various hybrid genres. Moonlit Reunion is a fantasy drama starring Xu Kai and Tian Xiwei, set “in an interwoven world of demons and Chang’an city, creating a distinctive supernatural atmosphere.” A Dream within a Dream will be a period romantic comedy featuring Yitong Li and Yuning Liu, “combining traditional Wei and Jin aesthetics with cyberpunk elements to fuse ancient culture with futuristic mechanical design.” Additional forthcoming projects include romantic comedy dramas In the Moonlight and A Journey to Glow, which have yet to reveal their cast of key concepts. 

Linmon is a rare mainland TV producer to acheive considerable success both at home and abroad. The company previously sold two seasons of its romantic drama series Twenty Your Life On to Netflix for distribution in territories outside mainland China. The show proved a hit in Chinese-speaking territories, ranking in Netflix’s top 10 in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao, as well as in countries in Southeast Asia with large Chinese diaspora populations. Netflix also scooped up Linmon’s period drama Legend of Fu Yao, which landed in the streamer’s top 10 in Korea. Disney+, meanwhile, acquired the company’s romance show A Little Mood for Love to stream in Southeast Asian markets. In recent years, the company also has expanded into production in various markets across Asia, remaking its biggest Chinese titles as local-language shows. 

The company’s executives are in Tokyo this week to pitch their projects to regional buyers, as well as to support Taiwanese-Burmese director Midi Z’s arthouse drama The Unseen Sister, which is making its international premiere in the Tokyo festival’s main competition. The studio also revealed that it has greenlit a second season of the crime thriller show Under the Skin. 

“As one of China’s most popular suspense dramas in 2022, the first season also become the project with the highest completion rate on Tencent Video in that year,” says Roy Lu, GM of Linmon International. 

“As one of China’s leading film and television production companies, Linmon Pictures has, over the past decade, consistently delivered premium content to audiences worldwide,” Zhou Yuan, co-founder and executive vp of Linmon Media, said at the company’s TIFFCOM Seminar Thursday. “Alongside high-rating modern dramas like Nothing But Thirty and A Little Reunion, Linmon has dedicated significant efforts to producing period dramas with deep cultural resonance and high production standards.”

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday, Zhou spoke more in-depth about Linmon’s international strategy as well as Z’s The Unseen Sister, which is in competition at the Tokyo Film Festival.

The Unseen Sister seems more like a film that will play well internationally, as you’re showing it at festivals. It seems built to travel?

The story is obviously very global, and the message itself is very universal. This is a story about the suppression that women are facing and how they fight against it and how they struggle with that. That message is very universal and people from different cultural backgrounds can understand it and relate to it. It can happen anywhere in the world can happen in Hong Kong, it can happen overseas, it can happen in Europe, anywhere.

But you want to push it this film outside the home market, because there’s been a tendency for Chinese films to only focus on the domestic market.

Yes, definitely that is the goal he really wants to push The Unseen Sister forward to overseas and reach a broader audience, especially the people that are not very familiar with Chinese movies, that is the target audience. We want to bring this movie to outsiders so that they can see what China is like, what Chinese people are going through.

Let’s zoom out a little. You can correct me, but there’s been a sort of insularity with the Chinese film industry over the last five years. Hollywood films no longer seem to be popular, and local content is dominating. Is that fair? Are audiences not interested in outside product anymore?

I think that [the lack of interest in Hollywood product] is temporary, looking from the perspective of the audience. For example, The Unseen Sister is being released theatrically in China over the weekend, and at the same time, there is Venom 3 being released in China as well. And you know, Venom is also doing pretty well over there. So people are still going to the theaters for overseas, for foreign films. The issue is that a lot of the Hollywood movies over the last couple of years are very, very commercial, and there are not a lot of new things happening. It’s all the same thing, the same formula, all very franchise driven. That’s why people are getting tired of it. [The Chinese audience] want to see more diverse and more different original content from around the world, not just Hollywood and not just that type of superhero movies. The taste of the Chinese audience — they have taste for much broader and much more diverse content now than they did before.

A quick question about TIFFCOM and the Tokyo Film Festival, how important is the market and the festival to your company?

It’s definitely important to be here, because it is still a very big market in Asia. There’s a lot of history to this market and a lot of people show up, and it’s literally a party for all the people within our industry. It’s also a business opportunity to come out here to meet all of these different people as well as to meet up with the people that we work with, the people that we want to work with and to really build connections. It’s probably just as important as [Hong Kong] Filmart and Singapore [ATF] for us. And Tokyo Film Festival, I think, is definitely one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world, especially for the Asian film market. [There’s a lot of big name filmmakers] here, a lot of young filmmakers. For a lot of young filmmakers, going to Tokyo is the first step to reach the global market.