The WSJ reports,"early last month, the Chinese e-commerce giant registered a company in Hong Kong under the name Alibaba Films Group. Later in the month, it changed the name to the more slick-sounding Alibaba Pictures Group.
What this mysterious company will do isn’t clear, though hints abound".
The two directors of Alibaba Pictures Group listed in the registry documents — Dong Ping and Zhao Chao — are both executives at ChinaVision Media, a television and film-production company in which Alibaba bought a 60% stake in March for $805 million. At the time, Alibaba didn’t elaborate on its plans, only saying it would team up with ChinaVision to “explore future business opportunities as part of Alibaba’s digital entertainment strategy.”
ChinaVision last year was one of the distributors of the action-comedy movie “Journey to the West: Conquering the Demon,” directed by Hong Kong movie star Stephen Chow. The company’s TV series last year included the drama “Left Hand Joins Right Hand.”
"Dong, ChinaVision’s chairman, co-produced the 2000 international hit “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” which won an Oscar for best foreign-language film. He has also been involved in several other internationally distributed Chinese movies. Dong also co-founded the popular tabloid Beijing Times in cooperation with the People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of China’s Communist Party.
So, is Alibaba going into the movies? An Alibaba spokeswoman declined to comment on the registration, while a ChinaVision representative in Hong Kong couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
But since the beginning of this year, Alibaba has been trying to expand into entertainment and digital-media industries through aggressive acquisitions and newly developed services, as part of its attempt to make its e-commerce and other platforms more attractive".
