Hengdian's extras are flocking to scenic spots across the country

01

A couple of days ago, Lao Yu, the head of a well-known 5A scenic spot in East China, came to Beijing.

I arranged to meet him for tea at China World Mall. Before we could even exchange a few pleasantries, Lao Yu kept sighing about how fierce the competition for jobs has become. As soon as they posted a few summer positions, their HR inbox was nearly flooded with resumes.

I asked him what positions they were offering, and he said they were scenic spot NPC roles, with a monthly salary of around 10,000 yuan.

Speaking of this job, Lao Yu originally thought it was just a temporary gig. To his surprise, the flood of incoming resumes included not just performing arts students, but also actors from escape room theater productions. When he flipped further through the pile, he was stunned to find many applicants with experience from Hengdian, listing more than half a page of film and TV credits.

Lao Yu put down his teacup and asked me, why are actors from Hengdian starting to crowd into scenic spots?

His question reminded me of a visit to a short drama company in Hangzhou back in March. The person in charge showed me their newly integrated video generation model on the spot. The screen was playing dozens of seconds of ancient costume fight scenes, where both the sets and the characters' faces were AI-generated, with not a single real human involved.

He excitedly did the math for me: in the past, filming live-action short dramas required money everywhere, from set construction to actor fees. Now, a few people sitting in front of computers can produce finished videos at a fraction of the previous cost.

Before I left, he even chased after me and asked, "Buddy, do you think we can sell this same technology to scenic spots?"

With the film and television industry no longer needing live actors, the number of real production opportunities in Hengdian has truly decreased.

In May this year, some media revealed that there were only over 20 long-running dramas being filmed in Hengdian. The overall number of new productions started has nearly halved compared to the same period in 2024, leaving nearly 10,000 actors waiting for roles, with only 700 to 800 people able to land gigs. The vast majority can go ten days or half a month without any work at all.

The situation is even worse on the short drama front. Entering 2026, the boom of live-action short dramas has clearly faded, and AI micro-dramas have quickly occupied the supply side.

According to the "2026 Q1 Micro-Drama Creation Guidelines" released by the China Netcast Association, around 128,000 micro-dramas were launched across the industry, of which about 122,000 were AI-generated, accounting for over 95%.

At the same time, the salaries of grassroots extras have long been under pressure. As early as the beginning of last year, the basic pay for Hengdian extras was adjusted to 135 yuan for 10 hours. After the union takes its cut, they only get about 12 yuan per hour in their pockets.

Later, I talked to several people who had worked in Hengdian.

A Tao, who had been in Hengdian for seven years, told me frankly that in his busiest years, he would stand in as a background actor in ancient costume dramas in the morning, rush to a short drama set in the afternoon to play an overbearing CEO's assistant, and sometimes even take on small commercial shoots at night. He was extremely busy but felt fulfilled.

However, after this year's Spring Festival, he suddenly had nothing to do. He no longer had to worry about conflicting schedules, and his phone was eerily quiet every day. When it occasionally vibrated, A Tao would immediately sit up to check it, only to lie back disappointedly after realizing it was just a food delivery coupon. He told me he's not afraid of hard work now; days without any jobs are simply unbearable. If things don't get better, he'll go find a job at a scenic spot next month no matter what.

It's worth noting that before Hengdian drifters flocked to scenic spots across the country, Hengdian itself had already figured out how to make scenic spot NPCs work.

According to a February report from CCTV.com, Song Qiang, the person in charge of NPC selection at the Hengdian Actors' Guild, revealed that during this year's Spring Festival, more than 300 NPC roles were set up in various parks of Hengdian World Studios. They regularly select new talents from within the guild every month to continuously bring fresh faces to the parks.

Among them, there is an NPC named Ruhua in the Qingming Riverside Landscape Park, played by Hengdian actor Wang Hao. He interacts with tourists for seven to eight hours every day, and has become a hit on short video platforms with his exaggerated yet down-to-earth interactions. Many tourists make special trips just to exchange a few lines with him.

In the same park, the role of Bao Zheng is permanently played by Zhao Chengfang, who has over 20 years of acting experience. Zhang Zeduan is portrayed by Xing Longke, and Su Shi is played by Wan Weibing. All of them are veteran actors who have honed their skills in Hengdian.

Extras who had been waiting for roles in front of the camera for half a year changed into new costumes and lined up neatly at the entrances of scenic spots.

02

The question Lao Yu asked can actually be viewed from two perspectives.

Hengdian drifters are leaving because there are fewer and fewer spots in front of the camera, making it impossible for them to continue their old careers. Meanwhile, the scenic spot ticket business can no longer sustain itself, so they have to offer high salaries to recruit people and explore new revenue streams.

These two trends collided, leading to the current situation.

Over the years, short dramas have eaten into the budgets of long dramas, and AI has further reduced the demand for actors in short dramas. In this vicious cycle, the grassroots are always the hardest hit.

Not only have A-list actors' salaries been cut by 70%, mid-tier actors can't get roles, and even the casting groups for grassroots extras have gone quiet. Scenic spots that are still willing to pay for people's acting skills have become one of the few remaining livelihoods that Hengdian drifters can grasp.

According to incomplete statistics from Travel Daily, since the beginning of this year, nearly 100 scenic spots across the country have successively launched recruitment drives.

Recent viral examples include Luohe Wildlife Park in Henan recruiting for a distinctive black bear NPC position with an annual salary of 100,000 yuan, and the DiXinGu Scenic Area of Diewu Qingjiang in Hubei launching a summer trainee recruitment program with a total salary budget of 100,000 yuan for 10 days of work.

Prior to that, Zhouzhi Water Street in Xi'an offered a maximum monthly salary of 50,000 yuan for 180 NPC positions. The Xiangwang Hometown scenic spot in Suqian calculated daily wages by multiplying the applicant's height in centimeters by 10, meaning a 199-centimeter-tall applicant could earn nearly 2,000 yuan in a single day. Nearly 2,000 people competed for only 5 positions.

In the summer NPC recruitment requirements released by various scenic spots, being interactive, outgoing, and not stage-frightened are common expectations. Some performance-related NPC positions also require a background in dance, martial arts, or relevant academic majors, with age requirements ranging from 18 to 50 years old.

Behind the large-scale recruitment of scenic spots, the case that truly showed them a way out is the Wansu Mountain Wuxia City in Kaifeng.

After its "Matchmaker Wang's Matchmaking" performance became a huge hit, the scenic spot achieved a total revenue of 1.27 billion yuan in 2025. It now has more than 1,000 NPC actors, putting on over 1,000 interactive performances every day.

Public data shows that by coordinating with the bank note quest chain, Wansu Mountain has extended the average length of stay for tourists from 3-4 hours to over 8 hours. Among returning visitors, 68% come back to experience new NPC storylines.

There are many similar viral scenic spot actors. Changchun Zoological and Botanical Park first became famous for its "Snow Cake Monkey" character, played by Wang Tiezhu. He bantered and chatted with tourists under a mock "Five Elements Mountain", turning the zoo into a real-life talk show venue.

In an era where young people value emotional experiences, the content created by real human interactions is far more difficult to replicate than expensive hardware investments, and is easier to spread spontaneously on social media. It can be described as an inexhaustible gold mine.

As a result, scenic spots across the country suddenly realized one thing: hardware is static, but people are dynamic.

Essentially, NPCs are a content product with low marginal cost. The additional investment for each actor's interaction is almost negligible, but the traffic brought by each viral hit can be explosive.

Once scenic spots figure out this economic logic, the problem becomes: where can they find the right people?

Lao Yu said that current NPCs generally come from several backgrounds: formally trained actors from opera troupes, martial arts enthusiasts from martial arts schools, performing arts college students, and Hengdian drifters who have accumulated acting experience and a sense of social media trends.

In his opinion, Hengdian drifters happen to be the group with the highest matching qualifications. They have worked on film sets, understand how performances work, and have certain improvisational skills, making them far faster to get up to speed than ordinary people.

The convergence of these two trends, where Hengdian drifters move to scenic spots across the country, is a spontaneous market-driven reemployment distribution that has perfectly filled a huge gap during the transformation of China's cultural tourism industry.

03

Landing the job doesn't mean you can keep it securely.

Just like in Lao Yu's stack of resumes, Hengdian drifters are only part of the applicant pool. College students and social media influencers are also competing for the same positions.

Take the recent recruitment of 12 summer trainees at Hubei's DiXinGu Scenic Area as an example: online applications exceeded 700 on the first day alone, including many students from top-tier 985 universities. The path to becoming an NPC has become much narrower than it was two years ago.

On the other hand, scenic spots also have their own troubles. Data from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism shows that the number of A-level scenic spots nationwide has grown from 6,042 in 2012 to 16,994 by the end of 2025, but the growth rate of total revenue is far slower than the expansion of scenic spot numbers. As a result, the average revenue per scenic spot has actually shrunk, and competition will only become more intense.

After scenic spots across the country rushed to follow the trend of recruiting NPCs, while the scene looks lively, only a few have truly gone viral.

Merely copying the superficial elements of a hit won't capture the soul of the characters. Recruitment announcements and high salaries often only bring a first wave of media hype.

The stage design behind scenic spot NPCs, the ability to produce high-quality performances, whether the actors themselves are interesting enough, and whether the scenic spot is truly willing to give them room to perform, all determine whether the scenic spot's investment in NPCs can be sustainable.

Wu Guoping, a representative of the National People's Congress, proposed during this year's Two Sessions that scenic spot NPCs should be included in the national vocational classification system as an emerging profession to promote industry standardization. This proposal sends a clear signal: when a once-temporary gig starts to be discussed for professional certification, it means the job has become a serious, long-term career path.

In reality, many Hengdian drifters only realize after arriving at scenic spots that this job is more demanding than being an extra.

After all, as an extra on a film set, you might just stand in the background for half a day and wrap up after a few shots. On peak days at scenic spots, tourists are nonstop from morning to night. Actors have to wear heavy costumes under the sun, shout until their throats are hoarse, and still greet the next group of tourists into the performance with a smile.

Lao Yu said they did a lot of research before recruiting scenic spot NPCs, and there are two types of people they are most wary of.

The first type takes themselves too seriously as actors, expecting tourists to cooperate with their performance. The second type treats the job as nothing more than a part-time gig, just wanting to clock in their hours and leave.

What scenic spots need are people who can fully integrate their characters with tourists. This threshold is bound to filter out many Hengdian drifters who still dream of returning to film and television sets.

However, what deserves more attention than long-term professionalization is another trend.

By investing resources to cultivate NPCs, scenic spots are essentially incubating content assets for themselves. But content assets have an inherent problem: they are tied to the people playing the roles, not the scenic spots themselves.

If an NPC's social media account gains millions of followers, the next question naturally becomes: why wouldn't that actor go solo? At the end of last year, rumors about the departure of a top-tier NPC sparked widespread online discussion. The actor ultimately chose to stay, but the underlying tension between the individual and the scenic spot is very real.

Scenic spots and top-tier NPCs will inevitably have to face a tough battle over the ownership of these content assets.

Fortunately, from a broader perspective, the market is still expanding.

Data from Fantasy International shows that as of 2023, the number of immersive experience projects in China has reached 32,024, creating nearly 928,000 jobs that year, with around 200,000 new positions added in 2024.

The demand for labor in the experience economy has not yet peaked, and it is perfectly absorbing the surplus labor from the struggling film and television industry. The underlying business logic is that modern consumers are willing to pay for high-quality emotional experiences.

This short window of opportunity has made many Hengdian drifters excited. A Tao said he's currently in talks with several scenic spots. He doesn't care how much the monthly salary is; he just hopes to get the authority to operate his own short video account. That way, even if he moves to another scenic spot, his fans will follow him. But the scenic spots have firmly refused to agree.

In any case, the mindset of this group of Hengdian drifters is very representative: the scenic spot gives them a stage, but they still want to point the camera at themselves.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Travel Daily", written by Theodore Xishao, and republished with authorization from 36Kr.