Billionaire Wang Jianlin signs Leo DiCaprio and Nicole Kidman to create world's biggest film studio
Source: The Independent
Jianlin has signed a 50 billion yuan deal to build China's version of Hollywood
China’s richest man claims to have signed up Nicole Kidman and Leonardo DiCaprio for a 50 billion yuan (£5 billion) plan to build a massive, state-of-the-art studio complex which will be the country's version of Hollywood.
Wang Jianlin said his Dalian Wanda Group, which operates cinemas, hotels and department stores in China, will construct the world’s biggest movie facility in the eastern seaside city of Qingdao.
The Qingdao Oriental Movie Metropolis’s 20 studios will include a permanent underwater studio and a 10,000 square-metre (108,000 square feet) lot, large enough to recreate entire towns from the Chinese Ming and Qing dynasties.
The complex, an attempt to dominate China’s rapidly growing film market, will nestle under a Chinese adaptation of the Hollywood sign.
Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/the-rise-of-chollywood-billionaire-wang-jianlin-signs-leonardo-dicaprio-and-nicole-kidman-to-create-worlds-biggest-film-studio-8834953.html
The Guardian on this...
China's richest man starts to build world's most costly film studio
It's a uniquely Chinese equation: take a government that's increasingly obsessed with its image abroad, add a wildly ambitious property tycoon, and you get a business announcement so elaborate that Leonardo DiCaprio will fly halfway across the world to bear witness to it.
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When the Qingdao Oriental Movie Metropolis opens in 2017, according to Wang's speech at the ceremony, it will cover more than 500 hectares (two square miles) and include a studio for filming underwater, a permanent car show, seven resort hotels, an indoor amusement park, a 300-berth yacht club, 20 sound stages and a hospital.
DiCaprio, John Travolta, Nicole Kidman, Catherine Zeta Jones, Jet Li and Ewan McGregor were all at the launch, alongside a host of other celebrities.
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Wang is suffused with optimism: he told reporters that he expected China's cinema audience, currently the world's second largest, to take the top spot from the US by 2018. "With the huge potential that comes with a population of 1.3 billion, the global film industry will recognise that the sooner you partner with China, the sooner you make more money," he said, according to the state news agency, Xinhua.
More: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/23/china-richest-man-building-film-studio
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“When I was a carpenter, I once worked with this Russian lady architect. I would tell her, ‘Look, I’m terribly sorry, but I want to change that a half inch,’ and she would say, ‘No limit for better.’ I think that is a worthy credo. You keep on going until you get it as close to being right as the time and patience of others will allow.”