Total Recap

Amarsanaa Battulga

From bite-sized summaries to full contextual breakdowns, movie recap videos are diverse, controversial, and wildly popular

In November 2022, Liu Ziwen missed out on a business trip and a hefty bonus because she hadn’t watched enough TV . The 29-year-old had seen her colleagues meeting with her manager during lunch breaks in their office to discuss House of the Dragon over the past weeks, but “I hadn’t seen it, so I just finished my meal [alone] and got back to work,” Liu tells TWOC.

When the manager at the translation company in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, sent a list of employees chosen for the work trip abroad in the office group chat, Liu’s name wasn’t on it. Everyone that had been meeting at lunch to discuss the HBO prequel to Game of Thrones was.

That evening, as soon as Liu got off work, she didn’t start watching all 10 roughly hour-long episodes of the show but instead searched online for summaries of House of the Dragon .

These recap videos on platforms like Bilibili, Douyin (China’s version of TikTok), and YouTube, distill TV series or movies into summaries that range in length from several minutes to around an hour long. Over clips or stills of the show, the presenter may also provide commentary. Recap videos have been around in China at least as early as 2015, but they sprung up like mushrooms during the Covid-19 pandemic.

There are thousands of recap channels online now, some with tens of millions of subscribers. One 10-minute recap of the 2017 Korean horror movie Forgotten , posted in January this year, boasts over 23 million views on Bilibili. But even now, nearly a year on since cinemas in China stopped their pandemic-related regulations, recaps only seem to be becoming more popular.

“You couldn’t go to the cinema [in China] during the pandemic and I’m the type of person who can only watch something that long in a distraction-free environment,” says Hou Kaiyue, a first-year PhD student at the University of Bristol in the UK. “I started watching recaps when the pandemic started while I was doing my master’s [in Shanghai].”

For many, recaps help save time and relieve the fear of missing out. Liu realized that she wouldn’t be able to smoothly join in on her colleagues’ conversation if she also hadn’t watched Game of Thrones , which has 73 episodes of approximately 60 minutes each. Recaps were a quick alternative.

For others, such as Hou, choosing recaps is related to fear of (and attraction to) horror movies . She says that she often watches recaps of movies full of suspense when she doesn’t “quite dare to watch the original.” A team of researchers led by Xu Hailong, associate professor of film and cultural industries at Beijing’s Capital Normal University, published a study on recap videos earlier this year. After analyzing 400 recap video samples from five popular Bilibili channels, they observed that the most popular recaps were of films that include suspense elements, such as thriller, horror, adventure, and detective movies.

Recaps of such movies usually last between 10 to 30 minutes. “They just go through the story and there isn’t much interpretation because, frankly, there isn’t much to interpret [in these movies],” says Li Siyu, a master’s student of English literature at Nanjing University.

Li started watching recaps to stay up to date on the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise which consists of dozens of films. But the Bilibili channel he regularly watches, Filmlast (which boasts over 1.2 million subscribers), offers far more than a simple synopsis. “Before retelling the plot, they introduce the behind-the-scenes story: how the project started, who was invited to write and direct, how the actors were cast,” Li explains. Each video is about an hour long. In contrast, recaps on Douyin are often under five minutes and are usually reserved for “more eye-catching genre films with simpler plots such as small-budget horror films,” he says.

Others use these videos to get an accessible introduction to arthouse or experimental films. “I started Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love [(2000)] many times but couldn’t finish. So, I watched a recap, then went back and watched the film till the end,” Hou tells TWOC. “The film’s pace is very slow; the narrative is a bit fragmented and confusing. I wanted to first find out what the story is so that, when I watch the full film, I can focus on things like filming techniques and metaphors.” Li, meanwhile, discovered Italian neorealism and Iranian New Wave films through a Bilibili channel called MovieTalk . “They interpret and even spoil some of the plot points, but that doesn’t affect me a lot,” he says. “I still see the whole movie afterward and form my own ideas.”

Recaps of non-Chinese films and TV shows are particularly popular in China because most of them are never released here. Only a few dozen foreign films receive a license to show in domestic theaters each year, and film festivals that screen more foreign titles are mostly restricted to big cities. Cinephiles are left to use illicit streaming or download platforms online to watch movies like Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), and shows like Netflix’s live-action adaptation of One Piece .

Preview Mode - Subscribe to unlock full content

Beijing’s Snowy Spell in Photos

View a vivid collection of images showcasing the arrival of the first snow in Beijing in 2023

Chinese-Language Christmas Movies To Stream Right Now

Tired of watching Love Actually, Home Alone, or Die Hard? Here’s something different this holiday season: Sinophone Christmas comedies.

Cold Fashion: How Ancient Chinese Kept Warm in Winter

From paper to straw to fur coats...these are the clothes that people wore to keep warm in ancient China

Haven of Humor: How Chinese Migrants Find Comfort in Comedy

Chinese-language comedy clubs abroad emerge as a haven for migrants to humorously share and find solace in their common experiences of discrimination and personal hardship

Flying Blind: Visually Impaired Tourists Still Face Barriers

Poor accessibility still hinders visually impaired tourists in China, despite the efforts of a few volunteer groups

Beijing’s Snowy Spell in Photos

Chinese-Language Christmas Movies To Stream Right Now

Cold Fashion: How Ancient Chinese Kept Warm in Winter

Haven of Humor: How Chinese Migrants Find Comfort in Comedy

Flying Blind: Visually Impaired Tourists Still Face Barriers

The World of Chinese Magazine

Categories

Social Footprints