China’s ‘star wars’ ambassador lu han: a new force for hollywood marketers?

From creating a local digital hub for the whole franchise, to planting 500 Stormtroopers on The Great Wall, Disney has been pulling out the stops to raise awareness for _Star Wars: The Force

Awakens_ ahead of its China opening on January 9. This week, it added a major promotional boost as superstar Lu Han was unveiled as the film’s official Middle Kingdom ambassador. With the

moviegoing demographic in China skewing increasingly younger, the former member of boy band EXO looks like a marketer’s dream. He’s got a social outreach that includes nearly 12M followers

on microblogging site Weibo (plus a Guinness record for the most comments on a single post) and a large international fan base. _Star Wars_ isn’t his only recent involvement with a Hollywood

film. On Wednesday, he released a music video for “Deep,” a song in Mandarin and English promoting Oriental DreamWorks co-production _Kung Fu Panda 3_. In a savvy tie-in, that video (below)

is the first directed by DreamWorks vet Raman Hui, the helmer of _Monster Hunt_ which released this summer to become the highest-grossing movie of all time inside the Middle Kingdom. _KFP3_

hits the PROC in step with the U.S. on January 29. The music doesn’t stop there. It’s been reported teen idol Lu Han will dedicate a remix of his new song “The Inner Force” and its music

video to the _Star Wars_ publicity campaign. Earlier this week, he said, “It’s an honor to become the China ambassador of _Star Wars_, may the force be with you!” WATCH ON DEADLINE So who is

the 25-year-old who posed with R2D2 and new droid BB-8, sending the video message above via his social channels — and his followers, even from outside China, wild? Since exiting the hugely

popular Chinese-South Korean band EXO in 2014, he has enjoyed solo success and been ramping up his acting career. This year, he starred in box office hits _20 Once Again_ and _The Witness_.

Both were remakes of Korean films and each were out-of-the-gate winners upon release with over $18M in their first weekends, landing them in the Top 5 films internationally in their

respective frames. When _The Witness_ was released Stateside at the end of October, China Lion marketed the film towards Lu Han’s fans “who span the globe,” the distributor’s Robert Lundberg

told Deadline at the time. His next role is in _The Great Wall_, the upcoming Zhang Yimou-helmed drama that stars Matt Damon. Judging by the reaction to his promotional work in the past few

days, this is a partner more of Hollywood might want to cozy up to, especially as those young moviegoers become a bigger part of the Middle Kingdom audience in second and third-tier cities.

As Lu Han asks in the “Deep” video below, “Baby are you ready for me?”: [embedded content]