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Producers of Best Picture nominee “Green Book” Peter Farrelly and Nick Vallelonga accept the award for Best Picture with the whole crew on stage during the 91st Annual Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood on Sunday, February 24, 2019. Viggo Mortensen is the first on the left, while Mahershala Ali in fourth from the left. Photo: Agence France-Presse
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Alibaba Pictures shares rise after striking gold with Green Book’s best picture win at the Oscars

  • The movie unit of Alibaba Group has already struck gold with Wandering Earth, which has taken in US$648 million at the box office so far, the second highest-grossing movie of all time in China
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Laura He
Laura He
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Shares of Alibaba Pictures Group, the movie studio of the world’s largest e-commerce company, rose after a movie it co-financed won the best picture award at the 91st Academy Awards, also known as the Oscars.

The stock rose as much as 2.1 per cent to an intraday high of HK$1.48 in Hong Kong, ending Monday’s trade 0.7 per cent lower at HK$1.44. Shares of the company, renamed in 2014 from ChinaVision after Alibaba Group bought a 52.9 per cent majority stake in it, have risen 38 per cent in the past 12 months.

Green Book, a segregation-era road trip drama based on a true story, was crowned the best picture at the Oscars, handing Hollywood’s top award to a movie backed by Alibaba Pictures. The 130-minute movie directed by Peter Farelly, staring two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali and three-time Oscar nominee Viggo Mortensen, will be shown in mainland China on March 1, according to an announcement by Alibaba Pictures.

“This is [Mahershala] Ali’s second Oscar win, but it is Ali [Pictures]’s first!” according to a post on the Weibo account of Alibaba Pictures, whose parent Alibaba Group also owns South China Morning Post. “Alibaba Pictures has become the first Chinese internet film company that has backed an Oscar best picture winner. ”

Taopiaopiao, the Alibaba unit that has 30 per cent market share of China’s online movie ticket sales, will offer the film on its platform. A Chinese-language poster shows Green Book as a co-financed movie of Alibaba Pictures.

Green Book, nominated for five Oscar awards, also took home best original screenplay in addition to best picture and the award for best supporting actor for Ali.

Alibaba Pictures’ movie portfolio since Alibaba’s purchase included some of the biggest box office draws in mainland China and in Hollywood. They included Wolf Warrior, Operation Red Sea which grossed US$579 million, and Monster Hunt 2. The studio invested in Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible – Rouge Nation, Mission: Impossible – Fallout and J.J. Abrams’ 2016 production of Star Trek Beyond.
But the studio also had its flops, principally as an investor in last year’s Buddhist epic Asura, a mythology with a production budget of 750 million yuan (US$112 million) and an opening weekend box office of US$7.1 million.

(Corrects throughout the story first published on February 25 to say the movie was co-financed by Alibaba Pictures)

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Alibaba’s film unit gets Oscars bump
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