Tencent Video Denies Dropping Hu Ge's 'Zhang Juzheng' Epic Amid Cost-Cutting Fears
A late-Monday rumour that Tencent Video had 'returned' several big-budget series — among them Zhang Juzheng, a prestige historical drama starring Hu Ge and supervised by Chen Daoming — ricocheted across Weibo within hours and was denied just as fast. The ease with which the industry believed it has turned a false alarm into a referendum on whether China's streaming platforms still have an appetite for expensive prestige television.
The claim arrived the way such claims now do: a gossip account posting screenshots, a penguin emoji standing in for the platform, and a question mark doing heavy lifting. Late on Monday, Weibo accounts reported that Tencent Video had "returned" several of its big dramas — industry shorthand for quietly cancelling a commissioned series before it films — and that the biggest name on the list was 张居正 ("Zhang Juzheng"), a historical epic starring Hu Ge as the Ming dynasty's great reforming grand secretary, supervised by Chen Daoming and produced by New Classics Media, the studio behind some of the past decade's most successful series. Shooting, the reports said, was supposed to begin in November.
Within about an hour, the show's official account posted a one-line rebuttal: "In preparation, everything proceeding smoothly, awaiting the official announcement." Then Tencent Video's own account did something rarer — it reposted the denial with a promise of its own: "Looking forward to meeting you on Tencent Video." The platform had publicly re-committed to a project it had, hours earlier, been rumoured to have killed.
What made the episode worth more than a correction was how completely the rumour was believed. This is a project assembled from the top shelf: a Mao Dun Literature Prize-winning novel as source material, an A-list leading man, a supervising producer of Chen Daoming's stature — a configuration that, as one widely shared commentary put it, would have been fought over as an S-plus flagship a few years ago. The same post argued that the panic was really a question: if even this has to be weighed and re-weighed before the cameras roll, what happens to the Chinese historical drama — does the genre survive, or does the schedule fill with costume-romance fast food?
Sceptics pushed back the same night, calling the rumour traffic-bait and asking why anyone would trust anonymous "melon" accounts over an official denial waiting to happen. But the believers had logic on their side: the long-video platforms have spent two years under the banner of 降本增效 — cutting costs, raising efficiency — trimming slates, shortening seasons and, as this site reported on Monday, slicing and selling back scenes to viewers already paying premium early-access fees. A rumour of returns is precisely what that era's logics predict.
The rumour was false. The fear that made it instant was not. The show's account is now awaiting its own official announcement — and the industry is waiting with it, to learn whether a Ming-dynasty reformer can still clear the spreadsheet.