The quality is quite high, but an observation is the direction they're taking these models correlates heavily to the usage demand of China vs the West. Specifically, they're immensely focused on t2v for action / high effect shots. There's one human reference shot in the entire release page, and that one doesn't focus on dialog at all.

For filmmakers I've talked to in the US, one of the biggest demands they have is v2v where they can carry over an actor's performance and insert it into whatever world they want. The movie market in China is somewhat different though - it's heavily oriented towards high action / high special effect movies. Consider this list of hollywood movies that have flopped in the US, but did great in China:

Warcraft (China: $225m box office, US: $47m)

Resident Evil (China: $159m, US: $27m)

xXx: Return of Xander Cage (China: $164m, US: $44m)

Pacific Rim: Uprising (China: $99m, US: $59m)

One read of this is that action movies / visual spectacles translate more universally than dialog-based movies. Another read is culturally China prefers that type of content in general. I suspect that for Bytedance, their focus is on action / special effects because thats where they see the demand.

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hgcdfybfe38 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I hear this a lot, but I observed this is no longer that simple.

Like Green Book (2018) made over US$70.7 million in China.

And one of the most popular films in 2021 was Hi, Mom (2021), made over US$785 million.

Obsession (2026) is another one that is doing amazing in China, absolutely beating high action films like Supergirl ($12 million and going vs less than $1 million)

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cyanydeez 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

hong kong films is the mirror image of hollywood and fantasy/action are a lot more popular than american.

But you're probably just blundering with value comparison since just per capita, your numbers arn't that' extreme, still the point stands.

	▲	DiscourseFan 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think it makes sense that historically American film focused on narrative based dramas and slow burn horror. Think of classic Hollywood hits such as Citizen Kane and Psycho. This is even apparent in the recent success of Obsession, which really follows strongly in the trend of Hitchcock, magical realism, human drama, psychological horror. Compare this with historically successful Honk Kong films: Kung Fu Hustle, Police Story, Ip Man. I mean there are examples of Hong Kong films that are slow burn human dramas, like Chungking Express and Eat Drink Man Woman, and successful American action films like Diehard, but I think its clear that Hollywood film didn't start out with action movies, and Hong Kong film didn't start out with slow burn dramas, but adopted these genres afterwards; you could even claim that successful Hong Kong films like the Bruce Lee films of the 70s fueled the American appetite for action in the 80s, which was the most prominent era for that genre in the US. As a corollary to this, it becomes clear that the Korean and Japanese film making industries are not as culturally distinct from Hollywood as Honk Kong film making is. For Korean film, the reason is obvious: Koreatown in Los Angeles is right next to Hollywood, in some respects is a part of Hollywood, and there are deep ties now between the Korean and American film making industries for that reason, and Korean-Americans have an overly high degree of representation in American media, and Korean productions often come to America to shoot (think of the end of Squid Games: it's almost certainly the case that they shot in LA because a producer has a cousin or something that works in Hollywood).
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