Film | World’s biggest movie hub opens in Qingdao to woo Hollywood

Wanda’s billionaire chairman Wang Jianlin

Four gigantic, Chinese characters are aligned on a hill overlooking a seaside film studio complex, in a nod to the fabled Hollywood sign, the American cultural icon in Los Angeles.

Except this is northern China’s port city of Qingdao, where Dalian Wanda Group Co., a real-estate, retail and entertainment conglomerate, is opening its doors to an audacious 50 billion yuan (USD7.9 billion) world-class film production hub, called the Oriental Movie Metropolis, or Dong Fang Ying Du.

The project boasts the world’s largest studios, a commercial complex covered with giant portraits of Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe and Bruce Lee. There’s also a reclaimed island full of hotels, condos, two theaters and a yacht club.

It all adds up to China’s largest and glitziest effort yet to attract Hollywood filmmakers to work their magic using domestic film-production studios – the sort of move that can enhance the nation’s “soft power” and cultural reach on the global stage. For Wanda’s billionaire chairman Wang Jianlin, who has dialed back his ambitions to build an entertainment empire thanks to debt pressure, a lot is riding on the success of the complex.

This weekend, executives from major studios in Hollywood and China came to Qingdao, a city best known for its namesake beer, for the opening ceremony. Bloomberg