Star Cinema, the country’s largest film company in terms of revenue and annual releases, announced they will partner with social entertainment platform Kumu on a romantic-comedy film. Production is planned to start this year.
“The one-of-a-kind partnership between a film production company, Star Cinema and streaming and social entertainment platform kumu, hopes to bring the audience a different kind of entertainment viewing,” ABS-CBN said in a statement, explaining how quarantine measures forced their team to find creative ways to keep telling stories.
The movie will be streamed on Kumu,. a social entertainment platform with a strong footing in Filipino content. According to data from March this year, Kumu grew its content creator base from 65 to 1,000 over the last year, with monthly active users expanding from 500,000 to 2 million since its launch on Android and iOS devices in February 2018. A large portion of their user base consist of overseas Filipino, with over 12 million living and working across the globe.
“The pandemic has shown us the power of social media,” said ABS-CBN Films (Star CInema) managing director Olivia Lamasan. “That’s a big, big part of the story of the movie that we are all so excited to do.”
The film will be directed by Cathy Garcia-Molina, whose major films include The Hows of Us (2018), A Second Chance (2015), and Unexpectedly Yours (2017). In 2019, her film Hello, Love, Goodbye, starring Kathryn Bernardo and Alden Richards, was the highest grossing Filipino film of all time.