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iQIYI Inc. (NASDAQ: IQ) (“iQIYI” or the “Company”), an innovative market-leading online entertainment service in China, launches the highly-acclaimed animated film Nezha (the “Film”) exclusively across nine Southeast Asian countries on April 5. The Film, which was released in 2019 is based on a well-known Chinese mythology, follows the story of Nezha as he grows up fighting against his fate as a “demon”. The Film was the second highest-ever grossing film in China with a total box office of RMB 5 billion.

VIP subscribers of iQIYI in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, Brunei and Cambodia will be able to enjoy the animated blockbuster with high-definition Dolby sound and subtitles in six languages, including Chinese, English, Malay, Vietnamese, Bahasa Indonesia and Thai.

Nezha has won Best Feature, Best Director, Best Screenwriter and Best Dubbing awards at the 16th China Animation Golden Dragon Awards, the “Oscars” of the Chinese animation industry. It was also selected to be China’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards. Since its launch on iQIYI in China, Nezha has been among the Top 10 most played movies on the platform, with an average viewer rating of 9 out of 10.

Enlight Coloroom Pictures, the producer of the Film and a leading animation studio in China, has a robust partnership with iQIYI. Several highly successful animated films produced by Enlight Coloroom Pictures have been launched on iQIYI platform with average viewer ratings over 8 out of 10, including Big Fish & Begonia and the RAINBOW SEA JUPITER CRISIS series. According to Dataxis, subscription video on demand (SVOD) subscribers in Southeast Asia are expected to hit 6.2 million by 2022, making it a major new source of young digital subscribers.

Nezha, a figure from Chinese classic fairy tales, is widely known among young people all over the world, especially in Southeast Asian countries, creating a solid foundation for the animated film to be a hit when it is streamed online to subscribers in the Southeast Asia region.

As online entertainment demand has grown since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, iQIYI continues to expand content supply through original production, copyright acquisition and revenue sharing partnerships. To date, the international version of the iQIYI App has launched more than 2,700 films, including new releases, classics and premium originals, as it continues to meet the online content demands of subscribers worldwide.