Smart Cinema will enter the North American market in July to expand its reach around the globe and provide Chinese films with another vehicle to reach the world audience, CEO Jack Gao said on Tuesday during the ongoing 22nd Shanghai International Film Festival.

The film-streaming mobile platform will launch an overseas version of its app in North America in partnership with U.S. distributor Well Go USA Entertainment. The mobile app will have Chinese films with bilingual subtitles and will offer popular overseas payment options such as PayPal, he said. 

According to Gao, the overseas distribution channels have long been monopolized by the big Hollywood studios, which had hindered China's ambition to present more domestic films to other countries. However, the mobile platform could offer another option and opportunity for Chinese films and their audiences.  

"Previously, limited by the traditional model, Chinese films have few distribution and screening channels overseas," he said. "In the era of the mobile internet, every mobile phone screen can become a movie projector to offer Chinese films to overseas markets. This will be a new breakthrough in the 124-year history of motion picture development."

With the continuous development and expansion of its film industry, China has rapidly become both a big producer and consumer of films. However, compared with Hollywood films that tend to make twice as much money from international box office as in North America, the booming Chinese film industry has not been able to translate its big domestic commercial returns into a global success.

The platform will serve 60 million overseas Chinese as well as foreign audiences interested in Chinese films. The first batch of films include 12 titles such as "Wrath Of Silence," "The Heart," "Twins" and "Lost in Love," as well as the documentaries "Four Springs" and "Zhang Yimou's 'Shadow'."

At the same time, Smart Cinema has become the exclusive online cinema partner of the Chinese American Film Festival, and will show many Chinese films to audiences in America.

The Smart Cinema app has already been launched in Italy and Spain, starting to release films since November 2018, and plans to expand its business to more countries and regions including South Korea, China's Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. 

"The platform is a brand new and innovative attempt in China's movie screening field. It is our mission to bring domestic smash hit films to the world and encourage a love of Chinese films," Gao said, adding his mobile film screening platform will also embrace the burgeoning 5G era by developing 5G plus 4K technologies to ensure a better movie watching experience.

Smart Cinema is part of the Chinese film screening system. Unlike normal video streaming sites and video-on-demand services, Smart Cinema turns people's mobile phones into screens in an innovative way to transmit new releases approved by the country's film authorities and being screened in theaters. 

Currently, films are put on video platforms months or even years after they finish their theater runs, but Smart Cinema provides a chance for users to watch films on demand even while they are still in theaters, once distributors agree to this procedure. 

The Smart Cinema app will be operated the same way as a theater, meaning one ticket buys a one-time viewing, and the income generated on the app will be automatically included in the official box office statistics, rather than as part of online streaming revenue.

Besides the prospect of expanding overseas, Smart Cinema also announced it will collaborate with domestic film studios to establish a national mobile film screening alliance, which could put more Chinese films onto the Smart Cinema platform. More than a dozen film studios have already signed on to join the alliance.

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