Illustration: Liu Xidan/GT

At the ongoing 2025 Beijing International Film Festival (BJIFF), an exhibition featuring over 150 hand-drawn posters by Chinese director Yang Yu, better known as Jiao Zi, for the blockbuster Ne Zha 2 has become an unexpected cultural phenomenon. 

At the exhibition site, a display area showcasing a range of licensed products for the animated film, including blind boxes, badges and keychains, attracted numerous visitors.

"The eight-day long exhibition was all booked up within a day," Cui Yan, deputy director of the BJIFF organizing committee, said at a summit forum on international movie IP authority and franchise development.

This frenzy, he noted, reflects a seismic shift in China's cultural industry: film IPs are no longer ancillary revenue streams but central to a "content-consumption-technology" ecosystem that redefines storytelling's role in global soft power.  

The success of Ne Zha 2, which has grossed over 15 billion yuan ($2.1 billion) since its release during the 2025 Spring Festival and generated 8 billion yuan in derivative sales covering cosmetics, trendy toys, and automobiles, within a single quarter, underscores a critical insight. 

Industry experts have emphasized that a key to exporting cultural IPs lies in identifying representative cultural symbols.

The panda serves as a prime example. With its adorable image and uniqueness, it has gained widespread popularity internationally. From the Winter Olympics' Bing Dwen Dwen to the Chengdu Universiade's Rong Bao, pandas have successfully become cultural ambassadors of China.

Similarly, the "Ne Zha" character, a classic figure from traditional Chinese culture reinterpreted through modern animation, has the potential to become a signature project for cultural export. 

Its popularity both in China and abroad proves that images with profound cultural heritage and innovation can transcend borders, attracting audiences from different countries and regions, and building bridges for cultural communication and exchange, Cui said.

Xie Yi, a distributor who helped facilitate the Japanese releases of Chinese animated films, including Ne Zha 2 and I Am What I Am 2, told the Global Times that by learning from Japan's successful "goods" economy - peripheral products themed around popular culture elements such as anime, games and idols - they achieved great success when introducing Chinese animated film The Legend of Hei to the Japanese film market. They are now developing related inspired products, which have attracted many Japanese consumers.

In addition, traditional IPs need to be combined with new trends to form "new China chic" products.

Zheng Yaqi, an animation director who is also the son of China's prolific children's book writer Zheng Yuanjie, told the Global Times that creativity and emotional connection are the core of animation. Only by attaching these elements to licensed products can a link between animation and products be achieved.

He is also calling for further segmentation of the market and target audiences to avoid the current situation of severe homogenization.

Immersive experiences represent another breakthrough. 

At the BJIFF exhibition, interactive elements like a big message wall on which visitors can leave messages for production teams and cosplay check-ins have transformed passive viewers into active participants. 

Yuan Ye, a curator and art director, likens such strategies to "converting emotional equity into kinetic energy." 

"Classic IPs have accumulated substantial emotional assets, with as high as 78 percent of audiences willing to pay for IP-related sentiment," Yuan said at the forum, giving the example of how Shanghai's immersive drama Sleep No More, with its 30 percent repeat visitor rates, prove that when audiences inhabit a story's world - whether through theme parks or augmented reality - their connection deepens. 

Industry insider Tan Zhenjie pointed out at the forum that while Disney and Japan's Ultraman have thrived through multi-decade "generational layering" - constantly refreshing content while nurturing cross-media ecosystems - China's IP development often prioritizes short-term virality. 

Integrating IPs with cultural tourism is an important way to achieve sustainable IP development.

Feng Huan, an industry insider based in Beijing, shared at the forum that her company once faced a challenge to create an IP to promote the discovery of dinosaur fossils in Yunyang, Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality.

"Creating a standalone IP from scratch around this geological treasure would have been resource-intensive and risky," she said. 

Instead, the strategy they adopted was to leverage the existing popularity of New Big-Head Son and Small-Head Father, a beloved Chinese animated series, and use it as a springboard.

By integrating Yunyang's dinosaur heritage into the show's universe by devoting five episodes to a "Dinosaur Adventure in Yunyang" storyline and introducing two gender-specific dinosaur characters (a male and female pair), the project bridged the gap between regional history and mass-market appeal. 

"These new dinosaur IPs were woven into the series' fifth season and animated film, inheriting its established narrative framework and fanbase," she said.

The author is a reporter with the Global Times. life@globaltimes.com.cn