Even China's Most Reliable Comedy Star Is Out of Work: The Film Slump Reaches the A-List
A variety-show joke by Shen Teng — China's biggest box-office draw — and a wry question from actress Li Xiaoran have gone viral because they are not really jokes: production starts at Hengdian are down to about a third of last year's level, and even established stars say the phone has stopped ringing.
Shen Teng, the most reliable box-office draw in Chinese comedy, leaned into a microphone on a travel variety show this week and asked the younger cast a serious question: "Where do you all find work? I've been resting for over half a year." The studio laughed; the internet did not. Within a day, "so even Shen Teng and Li Xiaoran have no dramas to film" was riding the hot-search lists on both Weibo and Baidu.
The joke landed because it came in a pair. On another weekend show, Hello Saturday, actress Li Xiaoran listened to her younger co-star Zhao Jinmai describe heading back to Hengdian to shoot, and asked, half-envying, "So you still have dramas to film?" Two of the country's most established screen faces, on state-of-the-industry record, admitting they were waiting for the phone to ring.
Behind the laughs are numbers that industry watchers have been trading all autumn. According to a Baidu-trending industry roundup, the rate of new productions starting filming at Hengdian, the country's largest studio complex, has fallen to about thirty percent of last year's level. The knock-on effects reach well past the stars: extras' day rates in the town have been roughly halved, and local media profiles describe supporting actors surviving on food-delivery shifts between calls. One of the few growth businesses in town, incongruously, is performance — tourists now pay from 218 yuan to shoot their own short-drama scenes opposite the studio's professional "NPCs," whose workload has doubled as visitors crowd in. The site where the nation's dramas are made is, this holiday, doing rather more tourist theatre than drama.
The viral moment has reopened an argument that has run through the industry's bad stretch, and it is not a polite one. "Mid-tier actors are taking the worst of this," one widely shared post on the film-winter hashtag argued — stars can bank on nostalgia, newcomers are cheap, and the middle of the profession is being hollowed out. That post, written a year into the slump, collected more than 1.2 million likes. Against it stands the audience's rebuttal, which has trended in its own right: viewers point at years of derivative sequels, rushed scripts and formula plots and argue the industry engineered its own contraction. "There is no winter," one popular post put it. "The warmth just isn't reaching you."
The site has followed this contraction from several angles — most recently the middle-aged women paying to star in their own Hengdian short dramas and a novelist's bleak encounter with the short-drama adaptation machine. What the Shen Teng moment adds is the top of the pyramid confirming what the extras have known for a year: the squeeze is not a tier, it is the weather. Whether even an A-list joke can hurry greenlights, no one on either side of the argument claims to know.