There was a time in Singapore when rock music was banned, men with long hair were considered gangsters and drugs, well, that wasn’t going to end well. Except it did, in a sense, for one of Singapore’s most famous sons, Dick Lee, who went on to musical heights and whose life story is the basis of 2017 made-in-Malaysia Singapore movie, Wonderboy. And all things look like they’re ending well too for Melvin Ang, founder and executive chairman of Singapore-listed mm2 Asia, whose entertainment division produced the film.

Was Wonderboy a commercial success?

Maybe not so much at the domestic box office, where ticket sales amounted to about S$100,000/US$74,000. But the film was heavily sponsored and supported, with backing too from Turner Asia. Put it this way; mm2 didn’t lose money.

Ang is sanguine, saying even though the film was one of his lowest box office performers, it was, to him, “a success from every angle” and he’s particularly proud of the project.

“It’s not only about Dick Lee,” he says. “The story itself is very encouraging and motivating.” His expectations were moderate, fully aware as he was going in of the challenges, including genre and language. Wonderboy is in English, which is a big ask for Singapore audiences watching local films, he says.

Perhaps unintended, Ang’s mm2 looks like it’s becoming the repository of Singapore movie lore, a guardian of local legacy. In November, about three months after the Wonderboy premiere, mm2 acquired the family-owned Cathay Cineplexes’ cinema operations and brand, founded in 1935 and owned by the same family ever since.

Of course there’s a strategic business angle, but Ang is not unaware of the place Cathay holds in Singapore hearts.

“mm2 is proud to be entrusted with the Cathay legacy... I’m deeply humbled that [owner] Ms Choo has chosen mm2 to be the one that continues the story of Cathay Cinemas,” he said during the announcement.

mm2’s expansion initiatives come against a landscape that, for all its opportunity, Ang describes as “very challenging”.

Content players are in a good position though.

“It’s really exciting because almost every market needs content and is trying to find ways to generate new ideas that are both commercially viable and help platforms gain market share,” he says.

He would much rather be in the business as a content creator today, he adds, than a decade ago “when free-to-air was king and you had to wait in line to see them”.

Although best-known for films such as the Ah Boys to Men franchise, which he describes as a poor man’s answer to Chinese blockbuster Wolf Warrior, TV projects are part of the mix.

The highest-profile TV show on mm2’s slate so far is the cross-border Mandarin version of singing contest The Voice Malaysia/Singapore with Singapore’s StarHub and Astro’s Malaysia – the first time the format has been produced across two markets.

Ang’s logic for picking and choosing between formats and countries is simple. Singapore and Malaysia are two small Chinese markets, and it made sense to share costs. “We needed to manage the costs and wanted the quality. It had to be affordable and commercially viable,” he says.

“We always try to balance the two C’s – content and commercial viability. Those are the left and right sides of the brain. Whatever content we are creating we think of how our partners benefit from it,” Ang adds.

Co-production is a big theme for him. Perhaps not with mainland China because “they are big enough as a market”. But between smaller markets able to produce Chinese content.

“The Chinese market is very fortunate in some ways, because you can create content that can travel across the market... If we are producing just Singapore content, that’s pretty tough because it’s such a small market,” he says.

Ang says optimising common tastes across Chinese-speaking markets is the only way forward.

There is, he says, a “huge opportunity with co-production to let everyone enjoy their individual market returns and the content can be semi localised.”

Co-production is the one area most people are looking at to maintain quality, he adds. “There’s just no choice,” he insists. “If you cut costs in content, you will go down faster.”

As an example of successful co-operation, he points to Tan Seng Kiat’s award-winning social drama, Shuttle Life, a Taiwan/Malaysia production about a young man (played by Jack Tan) living in the big city and struggling to take care of his mentally unstable mother (played by Taiwanese actress Sylvia Chang) and his five-year-old sister.

The film, made for less than US$500,000, won awards for best film, best cinematography and best actor at this year’s Shanghai Film Festival. Sales are going well. “We are getting very good traction,” Ang says.

Earlier this year, Ang unveiled a S$18-million/US$13 million investment in nine Asian features from Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Taiwan.

Titles included Hsieh Chun Yi’s romantic drama, Take Me To the Moon. The film, produced by mm2 Entertainment’s Taiwan team, stars Taiwanese actress Vivian Sung (Our Times) and Jasper Liu. Take Me To the Moon releases across Asia in December this year.

“One of mm2’s competencies is that we have no in-house directors and writers,” Ang says. Instead, the company goes “to the market and aggregates good talent and resources”.

This combines with mm2’s culture of being “a bit more risk taking” and working with new talent. Ang says mm2 has found happy talent hunting ground on digital platforms and the boom in short-form content creation.

mm2’s new slate is also being driven by a milestone US$25-million three-year deal between mm2 Entertainment and China’s New Culture Media (a subsidiary of Shanghai New Culture Media Group) and 9i Film & Television Media.

The companies plan to co-produce five features and multiple online films. The new collaboration underscores mm2’s commitment to producing content with appeal to audiences in both China and Southeast Asia, mm2 says.

Meanwhile, Ang, heading into the company’s 10th anniversary in 2018, is looking at a broad entertainment business – including theatre exhibition and concert promotion – that delivered a 130% increase in net profit (S$4.6 million/US$3.4 million) in the quarter to end September this year. Revenue was up 45% to S$31.4 million/US$23 million. First half profit was 58% up to S$10.9 million/US$8 million on revenue of S$56 million/US$41.4 million.

Shortly after the results were announced, CIMB titled its company note on mm2Asia “Home run, finally”. A nice 10th birthday accolade.