China’s Linmon Pictures is expanding its costume drama series

Chinese film and TV studio Linmon Media says it is expanding its commitment to the costume drama series genre.

This week’s TIFFCOM film and TV rights market, which takes place alongside the Tokyo International Film Festival, provided updates on four costume drama series and other contemporary shows. These will be published until 2025 and early 2026.

Executives were also in Tokyo for the international launch of “The Unseen Sister,” the company’s Midi Z-directed mystery drama film, which played in the main competition of the Tokyo International Film Festival. The film was released commercially in China on Saturday and has earned $15.7 million in its first seven days.

Previously announced, and the series closest to completion, is ‘Moonlit Reunion’, a romantic fantasy drama set in the city of Chang An during the Tang Dynasty and starring Xu Kai and Tian Xiwei. Tencent Video holds the title for China, while Linmon itself handles international rights. The game is expected to ship with 40 episodes in the second quarter of 2025.

“A Dream Within a Dream,” costume comedy-romance will follow. The story concerns time travel and a struggling actress who enters the fantasy world depicted in a screenplay and tries to escape the fate that has already been written for her.

The costume novel ‘In the Moonlight’ is expected to be completed in the first months of 2025. The story is about an impoverished princess and an aging emperor who are forced into a marriage of convenience. The main crew and cast have not been revealed.

‘A Journey to Glow’, a sequel to the 2023-2024 hit ‘A Journey to Love’, a costume drama featuring two hitmen from rival agencies, will be released in early 2026. It played on iQiyi in China and on both Viu and IQiyi in overseas territories.

In the contemporary register, Linmon used the TIFFCOM presentation to present “Under the Skin 2,” a glossy and somewhat fantastical series about a police detective and a portrait artist with unusual insights. The film, starring Tan Jianci and Jin Shijia, will be broadcast from December.

The company explained that Chinese-language costume dramas are still in high demand and are increasingly attracting new sales and audiences in a growing number of international territories.

The growing international reach of the Chinese drama genre and Linmon’s policy of retaining ex-Chinese rights for itself also means that some of its older series could be reintroduced to the market through Linmon International.

“We have never created as many costume drama shows as we do now,” a company spokesperson said at the presentation in Tokyo.

The company has previously said it is investing RMB4-6 million ($560,000 – $840,000) per episode on the shows to maximize on-screen production values. It compared the series ‘Journey’ to HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’, albeit with non-specific Chinese cultural elements and a larger number of episodes – as many as 40, when they reached a limit set in regulations introduced three years ago entered.