Huayi Brothers has officially filed for bankruptcy, and the petitioner is an obscure small tech company, with debts totaling only 11.4 million yuan.

Ten years ago, when Wang Zhongjun Hao spent 370 million yuan at Sotheby’s to buy a Van Gogh masterpiece, this amount was not even a drop in the bucket.
But today, the balance across Huayi Brothers’ 22 bank accounts is already less than 1,000 yuan.
Some say the biggest problem with Huayi Brothers is that it treats capital as capability, the market trend as strength, and leverage as confidence.
But I believe the biggest reason is that they missed the structural shift in China’s entertainment industry.
In the past, the entertainment industry was led by: film companies / talent agencies / theaters / celebrities / directors.
Later, it became led by: platforms / algorithms / short videos / live streaming / drama industry manufacturing / user data.
In other words, the entertainment industry shifted from a “resource matchmaking business” to a “traffic distribution business.”
What Huayi was previously good at was: knowing who I know, what kind of gatherings I can set up, who I can get to film, and how I can get the films into theaters.
But in the new era, what matters more is: who controls users, who controls distribution, who controls data, and who controls the mechanism for continuous content production.
Huayi didn’t truly get hold of new entry— they didn’t even sense it— and they were ruthlessly eliminated. So it wasn’t a loss to any single bad movie; it was a loss to an era shift:
From the dividends of film industry, to the dividends of platform algorithms; from a celebrity-centered system, to a traffic-centered system; from big-budget narratives, to high-frequency content supply.