Internet giants in scramble to grab space on big screen

A scene from the upcoming fantasy epic, Warcraft.

Cheng says investors are now competing for quality IP content and copyrights.

Meanwhile, Tencent, with its literary unit having 4 million online writers and 10 million online works of fiction, seems to have a large number of options when it comes to screenplays.

But a look at forthcoming films and their makers shows that the Internet giant is taking shortcuts.

It seems to prefer to recruit veteran talent from the traditional movie industry and combine their efforts with Tencent's gaming sector.

And as evidence of this trend, Chen Hongwei, one of the producers of last year's Oscar-aspirant, Go Away, Mr Tumor, is now in charge of three films with close links to computer games.

Among them is Dianjing Kuangchao (Crazy for E-sports), a documentary about video game competitions and Weiwei Yixiao Hen Qingcheng (When a Smile Makes the World Crumble), the adaptation of a best-selling novel about a college romance sprouting from a martial arts-themed online game.

The third film, based on Taiwan wuxia (martial arts) author Gu Long's classic novel Moonlight Blade, now adapted into a Tencent computer game, is to be made into a namesake action movie directed by Xu Haofeng, known for his last year's hit Master.

Separately, Guo Jingming, a best-selling novelist and the director of China's highest-grossing franchise, Tiny Times, is teaming up with Tencent to develop his novel Legend of Ravaging Dynasties into a movie, a TV series, an animated production and games.

Explaining why film industry veterans are teaming up with Internet giants, Chen Yingjie, head of the Black Body Studio, which is affiliated to Tencent Pictures, says: "The movie industry is not short of money or talent. So the reason Guo has chosen Tencent Pictures is because Tencent has wide reach."