Bloomberg: Tencent to budget $295mn for movies

Tencent Holdings main movie arm plans to spend at least 2 billion yuan ($295 million) investing in Hollywood and Chinese films in the two years through 2017 to expand its presence in global entertainment production, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. Tencent Pictures, which helped finance domestic smash “Warcraft” and the upcoming “Kong: Skull Island,” is investing 1 billion yuan this year and more than that in 2017 on a plethora of local and foreign movie projects. That figure covers only movie financing and doesn’t include the company’s budget for intellectual property and content acquisition, the people said. Founded just last year, its film-making arm is beginning to produce movies based on its trove of popular in-house content, adopting a franchise model akin to Walt Disney Co. and Marvel.