Chinese executive Peter Luo, CEO of the Beverly Hills-based film financier Starlight Media, has launched a new venture dedicated to exploring technologies of entertainment and commerce within the Metaverse.
Named Metaverse Entertainment Inc., the company will be a subsidiary of Starlight’s talent incubator Stars Collective. Luo’s company has partnered with U.K.-based firm DigiBox Technology and Chinese tech entrepreneur Tonggang Chen, founder of Huashi.TV, on the venture.
The startup says its mission is to “provide storytellers and brands with a simple entry point to gaining exposure to virtual worlds through a model that will generate recurring revenue.”
The new company aims to complete the structuring of an entertainment ecosystem with NFT assets by the end of 2022, setting itself up as a one-stop shop for initiatives raging from NFT creation to smart contracts, distribution, sales and more speculative metaverse functions.
“We recognize the importance the metaverse will play in our future and we believe the companies that are early in developing a metaverse roadmap will gain a significant advantage,” Luo said in a statement. “The Metaverse is going to have a major global impact on the way that people interact and socialize. NFTs are one of the most natural use cases of blockchain technology and are driving thousands of new users, interactions and transactions each day.”
Metaverse Entertainment marks a bold diversification for Luo’s Stars Collective initiative. That program and company was set up in 2020 to cultivate and empower a large pool of young director talent for future collaborations. The company says it has since signed approximately 200 young filmmakers from around the world, with whom Stars Collective will explore NFT collaborations in addition to traditional movies.
Luo is best known in Hollywood and Beijing for his activities as a film financier via Starlight. The company scored an early success as a backer and co-producer of Jon Chu’s 2018 hit Crazy Rich Asians. The company has a director-first model, whereby it signs exclusive first-look deals with established and emerging filmmakers. Recent releases to emerge from such tie-ups include James Wan’s Malignant, as well as forthcoming projects like UMMA for Sony Pictures, produced by Sam Raimi and starring Sandra Oh; and Hunting Season, a time travel thriller from John Wick franchise writer Derek Kolstad, also produced by Wan.
Added Luo: “In serving the metaverse sector, our mission is to be an incubator, accelerator and storytelling mechanism for a new generation of creators who intersect with the entertainment ecosystem and the metaverse.”
