The "Four Dharma Kings" of manhua drama: Tomato, China Literature, Soy Sauce and Kunlun, who is actually making real money?

In 2025, the manhua drama market started from scratch, and its scale soared to 168 billion yuan within a year, with total views exceeding 70 billion. Entering 2026, this figure is expected to reach 243.6 billion yuan or even higher. The short drama industry took three years to complete the development path that the manhua drama industry has covered in just one year.

Where hot money flows, there are never a shortage of stories. Longman Media saw consecutive daily limit increases on its stock price thanks to its work *Travel Back to 1988*, and investors in the secondary market began to look around for the next investment target. However, the breakout success of a single drama is a completely different matter from the formation of a mature industry track. Counting on your fingers, there are only a handful of players that have truly turned manhua drama into a sustainable business in the industry.

We can draw an analogy with the "Four Great Dharma Kings" described by Jin Yong. Purple-Clothed Dragon King, White-Browed Eagle King, Golden-Haired Lion King, and Green-Winged Bat King each have their own unique skills and their own dominant territories. The current landscape of the manhua drama market is roughly the same.

ByteDance's Tangshu and Hongguo hold the traffic entrances, China Literature Group owns the most abundant IP assets, Jiangyou Animation stands out for its outstanding production capacity, and Kunlun Wanwei has built a profitable monetization closed loop in overseas markets. The four players each have their own unique survival logic, and each defines a certain possibility of the industry.

Purple-Clothed Dragon King: Tangshu and Hongguo, ByteDance — the one who holds traffic holds the whole world

Among the four Dharma Kings of the Ming Cult, Purple-Clothed Dragon King ranks first, not only for his superb martial arts skills, but also for his charisma that controls the overall situation. In the manhua drama industry, this position belongs to Tangshu and Hongguo under ByteDance.

Data speaks for itself. In the first half of 2026, in the statistics of native AI dramas and manhua dramas on the Douyin platform, Tangshu topped the list with a total view increment of 229.7 billion, accounting for about 67.9% of the total volume of the top 15 platforms. In other words, the scale of Tangshu alone exceeds the sum of the second-ranked to the 15th-ranked platforms. Jiuzhou with 668.74 billion views and Hema with 228.06 billion views are already considered leading players in the industry, but they are not in the same league as Tangshu at all.

This overwhelming advantage is no accident. ByteDance has accumulated a mature traffic distribution mechanism back in the short drama era. From the information feed recommendation of Douyin to the free short drama app of Hongguo, the entire operation chain has been fully verified. Hongguo launched the independent "Hongguo Free Manhua Drama" app in October 2025, and manhua dramas had already obtained a first-level entrance position on the homepage of the Hongguo short drama app before that.

Tangshu Novel has opened the adaptation rights of more than 60,000 IPs, and announced that it will provide a minimum guarantee of up to 30,000 yuan per minute and more than 1 million yuan per work for high-quality manhua dramas. The core logic of this strategy is even clearer: use the free model to lower the viewing threshold, use traffic support to attract production teams to settle in, and then use advertising revenue sharing to complete the business closed loop.

The views of native manhua dramas on Douyin in 2025 accounted for nearly 70% of the entire manhua drama market. This proportion means that the current manhua drama industry can basically be equivalent to "the manhua drama industry within the Douyin ecosystem". The choice of the platform almost determines the life and death of a manhua drama work.

The strong performance of Tangshu and Hongguo is not only reflected in the view data. In terms of content types, almost all the top works on the Hongguo platform are 3D manhua dramas, and series such as *The Legend of Ten Thousand Demons* and *The Precious Fairy Basin: The Mixed Spiritual Root Is the Real Boss* have been continuously developed into multiple seasons. The total views of 3D manhua dramas in June 2026 increased by more than 16 times compared with that in January.

This evolution from low-cost silly-style manhua dramas to content that emphasizes higher picture completion shows that ByteDance is consciously promoting the high-quality development of content, rather than simply pursuing the expansion of total volume.

Of course, the high concentration of traffic also brings hidden worries. Production teams are becoming more and more dependent on platforms, and their bargaining space is being compressed. Some practitioners privately complain that the revenue sharing rules of Hongguo can be changed at any time, but you cannot afford to stay out of this market. This kind of conflict already happened once in the short drama era, and manhua drama is just repeating the same story.

White-Browed Eagle King: China Literature Group — IP is the ultimate moat

Yin Tianzheng founded the Tianying Cult on his own, relying on his profound internal skill foundation. In the manhua drama industry, China Literature Group plays a similar role. AI can reduce production costs, but where the core stories come from is always an unavoidable problem.

The IP resources in the hands of China Literature are beyond the reach of most of its peers. Since it entered the manhua drama track in October 2025, China Literature has relied on AI technology to realize the rapid visualization of massive IPs, producing nearly 1,000 AI manhua dramas in the whole year, 12 of which have exceeded 100 million views. *Three Thousand Shelters*, adapted from the Qidian novel *I Build a Shelter in the Eternal Night*, has accumulated more than 300 million views across all platforms, and even pushed the original novel into the top 10 of the Qidian bestseller list. This effect of "manhua drama feeding back the original work" is very difficult for pure manhua drama production companies to achieve.

China Literature's strategy is not limited to producing dramas on its own. It has invested in Jiangyou Animation, a leading AI manhua drama production institution in the industry. The two sides plan to launch no less than 400 manhua dramas per year in the next three years, more than 50% of which will be adapted from China Literature's IPs.

At the same time, China Literature has opened 100,000 high-quality IPs for the whole industry, and launched AIGC tools such as "Manhua Drama Assistant" to improve adaptation efficiency. From the "Copyright Assistant" that connects online literature libraries with adaptation demands, to the "Manhua Drama Assistant" that provides full-process creation support, China Literature is building a set of AI solutions covering the entire IP life cycle.

This strategy is in the same line as China Literature's IP operation ideas in the long drama and animation fields in the past. With sufficient reserves, you will not panic. When other companies are worrying about "what to shoot for the next work", the problem facing China Literature becomes "which work to shoot first".

However, whether the IP advantage can be converted into a competitive advantage in the manhua drama track still needs to be observed. How much the overlap between online literature readers and manhua drama audiences is, and how high the technical difficulty of splitting long online novels into hundreds of strong plot units is, these are all problems that China Literature needs to keep solving. IP is the starting point, not the end point.

Golden-Haired Lion King: Jiangyou Animation — speak with production capacity

Xie Xun's Seven Injury Fist can cause seven kinds of injuries with one punch, relying on real solid skills. In the manhua drama industry, Jiangyou Animation is exactly the player known for its outstanding hard production capacity.

In the 2025 ranking of manhua drama manufacturers, Mantan Animation, Jiangyou Culture, and Qixiang Culture took the top three positions with a leading gap, with total views reaching about 2.819 billion, 2.228 billion and 1.724 billion respectively. Jiangyou Animation is the related entity of Jiangyou Culture, and its dynamic manhua work *The Whole World Is Weird: I Master Zero-Yuan Purchase at the Start* is the phenomenal hit of the year, which still remained on the ranking list until December thanks to its long-tail effect.

The core capability of Jiangyou Animation lies in large-scale content delivery. With the in-depth cooperation with China Literature Group, Jiangyou Animation has obtained a stable IP supply, and its annual production target of at least 400 works belongs to the first echelon in the industry. It does not pursue every single work to become a hit, but improves the hit rate through mass production. Since the production cost has been greatly reduced by AI, the strategy of casting a wide net is economically feasible.

However, high production capacity also means high consumption. Only about 0.48% of new AI manhua drama works in the industry can break 100 million views, and only about 1.3% of new dramas can reach the break-even line. Even leading players like Jiangyou Animation cannot guarantee that every work can make profits. Production capacity is the admission ticket, but whether it can achieve sustainable profitability depends on the combined effect of IP selection, production quality and platform revenue sharing.

As commented by industry insiders, the model of Jiangyou Animation is more like a "manhua drama factory" — efficient, stable, and predictable, but lacks the real gene of creating blockbuster hits. This comment may not be completely fair, but in an industry that is still changing rapidly, there is no final conclusion yet on whether the factory model can finally outperform the creativity-driven model.

Green-Winged Bat King: Kunlun Wanwei — find a way to survive in overseas markets

Wei Yixiao ranks first in the world in lightness skill, moving like the wind and never fighting head-on with the heroes in the Central Plains. The posture of Kunlun Wanwei in the manhua drama industry is somewhat similar — when the manhua drama market in China is fiercely competitive, its main battlefield has always been overseas.

DramaWave, the overseas short drama platform under Kunlun Wanwei, has jumped to the third place in the revenue ranking of overseas short drama platforms in August 2025, with monthly downloads exceeding 4 million. Its total global monthly active users exceeded 28 million, and it has achieved good results in major markets such as North America, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. In September 2025, DramaWave officially launched the animation channel, becoming the first platform among the world's leading short drama platforms to introduce animation content.

Behind these figures is a clear business logic: the willingness to pay in overseas markets is much higher than that in China. The domestic manhua drama industry mainly relies on advertising revenue sharing, and the revenue ceiling of a single work is obvious; overseas users have mature payment habits, and the same content can generate higher unit revenue. Kunlun Wanwei has also allocated tens of millions of US dollars to support overseas AI short dramas, to further expand content supply.

Another advantage of Kunlun Wanwei is its self-developed large model. Its SkyReels platform integrates a multi-modal large model, which can realize one-stop generation from script input to automatic editing. The average daily usage time per user on the FreeReels platform exceeds 1 hour, and the average viewing time of AI manhua dramas per user exceeds 30 minutes. These data show that Kunlun Wanwei has already built a complete closed loop of "technology + content + monetization" in overseas markets.

Of course, the overall financial situation of Kunlun Wanwei is not optimistic. It expects to record a loss of 1.95 billion yuan in 2025, and the contribution of the short drama business cannot be separated and calculated separately. But from the perspective of manhua drama going global, Kunlun Wanwei is one of the few companies that have actually made profits overseas. While the competition in the domestic market is still centered on traffic distribution, Kunlun Wanwei has verified the commercial value of manhua drama in another battlefield.

The four great Dharma Kings each have their own dominant territories, but the boundaries between them are blurring. While supporting production teams, ByteDance is also accumulating IP resources; while opening up IPs, China Literature is also building its own production capacity; after gaining a firm foothold in overseas markets, Kunlun Wanwei may turn back to compete in the domestic market.

The charm of the manhua drama industry lies in that it has lowered the threshold of content production to the lowest level in history, but raised the threshold of content competition to the highest level in history. AI can help you finish producing a manhua drama in a few days, but no tool can guarantee that the audience will finish watching it.