Guo Jingming's best-selling series "Tiny Times" will be made into movies, marking a new stage in the author's career and seizing on the trend of novel-to-film adaptations.
"We hope to achieve Harry Potter's success," said Liang Dong, CEO of FromMovie Ltd., the Beijing-based entertainment group that bought the film rights to the trilogy.
FromMovie has already chosen Qu Youning, one of Taiwan's top drama directors, to shoot "Tiny Times 1.0", with Guo consulting on the screenplay. "We will turn the best-selling novel into a blockbuster screen hit," Liang said.
From page to screen
"Tiny Times 1.0" and "2.0", the first two parts of the trilogy, were separately released in 2008 and 2009, with "Tiny Times 3.0" having just come out this December.
"The series tells the life story of people born in the 1980s and 1990s," Guo said. According to him, it reflects the struggles and sufferings experienced by his generation.
As the most commercially successful writer in China, Guo's recent move has aroused much curiosity, especially on the subject of his copyright payment. Many speculate that it reaches over 10 million yuan ($1.58 million), though neither the investor nor the author has commented.
Meanwhile, according to FromMovie, the initial investment for the film versions of the trilogy is estimated at 300 million yuan, a colossal number in the domestic novel-remaking sector.
Lucrative market
For the last decade, the movie and television market targeting young people has become highly lucrative for many investors. Twelve years ago, "Princess of Pearl", a TV adaptation of the romance novel by well-known Taiwanese female writer Chiung Yao, was wildly popular among teenagers.
In 2002, "Meteor Garden", a Taiwanese TV drama became another successful example of novel adaptations targeting younger people. To this day, many people born after 1980 in China still hold vivid memories about those two red-hot TV series.
With the resounding effect caused by "Princess of Pearl" and "Meteor Garden", many TV drama producers began to eye this potentially huge market.
An online poll conducted by China Youth Daily (CYD) in November this year showed that among the 2,315 interviewees who have watched those remakes, 41 percent are teenagers and young adults born after 1980.
"Having a novel become a screen hit can indeed boost a writer's fame," said Xu Lei, another popular writer, known for his serial novels "Robbing the Grave", "but the screenwriter is the key ingredient for a successful adaptation," he added.
Room for improvement
Despite the massive market potential, viewers don't think so highly of the current novel-based films and TV series. Another online poll by CYD showed that 75.1 percent of the interviewees believe these remakes are generally substandard, with about a quarter of respondents saying that the productions are a total failure.
According to Zhang Guotao, an associate professor specializing in television at Communication University of China (CUC), it's a realistic option for producers to make good productions based on literature works.
"But a precondition is that the novel itself has become a classic work," he said, adding that a work's popularity must be timeless in order for it to be successfully remade.
Guo said that ever since "Tiny Times 1.0" was first published, he has been repeatedly invited to turn it into movie and TV series, and he personally is looking forward to the adaptation.
"For me it is really a great challenge" he said. "My novels have attracted millions of readers, and it makes me feel both under pressure and excited [to do this]."
When Tiny Times investor FromMovie announced their expectation to remake the novel into a Harry Potter-style success, most people doubted it could be done.
Whether the films can repeat Harry Potter's success is quite unknown, but at least "Tiny Times" already boasts one element that critics say is essential: a huge fan base and established popularity. It's currently the best-selling series among teenagers, which is nothing to overlook. Whether the books become classics remains to be seen, but they are well on their way to being an indispensable part of a generation's memory.