On Friday, China's richest man bought part-ownership of Sony Pictures, one of the Big Six movie studios that dominate Hollywood. He's the same man who last year bought Hoyts with its 450 screens in Australia.
In fact, after buying America's AMC cinema chain for $US2.6 billion, Wang Jianlin is the world's biggest cinema operator. But he's still only getting started.
The new power of Chinese cinema has already had some attention. The Chinese Communist Party allows only 34 foreign movies a year to be shown in China, the world's fastest-growing movie market.
As Forbes magazine's Dan Bigman observed: "Where moviemakers were once just terrified of their films being pirated by audiences in China, now they're scared of audiences not seeing their films at all."
But this is nothing compared to Wang's stated ambition: "A few American movie companies have these commanding heights of the movie industry in the world. We want to change this situation and the landscape."
After 17 years in the People's Army, Wang moved into the property business as China's development was booming. Today his company, Dalian Wanda, is the world's largest private property development company.
With a personal net worth of $US30 billion, according to Forbes, Wang is now aiming to establish control of 20 per cent of the global movie business. Not content to own more screens than anyone else, Wang wants to own the movies that are played on them.
That would make him the global behemoth, bigger than Disney, the biggest US studio. In January, he paid $US3.5 billion for the US filmmaker Legendary Entertainment, one of the producers behind the mega franchises Dark Knight, Jurassic Park and Godzilla.
He's in the market to buy Europe's biggest cinema chain and his US cinema business is pursuing a merger with another major US operator.
He's in it for the money, of course, but he has other aims, too. In announcing its tie-up with Sony, his company said that it would "strive to highlight the China element" in Sony films from now on. Wang is a champion of Chinese national greatness and an agent of it, too: "I want to change the world where rules are set by foreigners," he said in a Chinese interview last year.
On Friday, China's richest man bought part-ownership of Sony Pictures, one of the Big Six movie studios that dominate Hollywood. He's the same man who last year bought Hoyts with its 450 screens in Australia.
After 17 years in the People's Army, Wang moved into the property business as China's development was booming. Today his company, Dalian Wanda, is the world's largest private property development company.
