Seven Stars Entertainment, city of Tianjin launch 'Chinawood'

Seven Stars Entertainment, city of Tianjin launch ‘Chinawood’

April 30, 2012 11:45 AM PT

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In another sign of China’s growing appetite for the entertainment industry, Beijing-based Seven Stars Entertainment has announced a partnership with the Chinese government to open a new ‘entertainment and media hub’ in the world’s most populous country.

Seven Stars Entertainment, a production company owned by media entrepreneur Bruno Wu, and the city of Tianjin said they would invest more than $1.27 billion to build a new entertainment and media complex outside of Beijing. To be called ‘Chinawood,’ the facility is to serve as a base for Chinese co-productions with filmmakers from the U.S., European nations and other foreign countries.

The complex is to include a 114,000-square-foot facility, scheduled to open in October, and house a film studio and private equity group controlled by Wu, who said the new center will ‘dramatically benefit’ U.S. production partners. Co-productions are exempt from China’s quota system on foreign films allowed into the country.

‘With the East Asia film market on course to be worth $10 billion by 2015, of which China will account for 50%, and rapidly catching up to North America, it is crucial, as well as inevitable, that we offer the products and services to facilitate substantial cooperation between the two territories,’ Wu said in a statement. ‘This project is a significant step towards closing that gap by providing expertise and facilities in all areas of financing, legal, co-production, distribution, marketing, sales and infrastructure.’

-- Richard Verrier

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Richard Verrier

Richard Verrier is investigations editor for Arts and Entertainment at the Los Angeles Times. He has been with The Times since 2001 and has run our Company Town since 2016. After stints at the St. Petersburg Times and the Orlando Sentinel in Florida, Verrier joined the paper as a reporter, and for many years covered all aspects of the entertainment industry before turning to editing. He oversees the Company Town coverage while working to guide and edit investigative and enterprise reporting across the entertainment team, collaborating with writers and editors from all departments. He is a native of Montreal and a graduate from the University of Toronto and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.