To mark its 10th anniversary, Love O2O has returned with a surprising new look that has caught the public’s attention.
Recently, Love O2O changed its original Chinese title from Wei Wei Yi Xiao Hen Qing Cheng to Yi Xiao Qing Cheng for its online re-release. But the most striking change is that the face of lead actress Zheng Shuang, who played Bei Weiwei, has been replaced using AI technology with the face of actress Wang Chuyue. Most of the original footage, dialogue, storyline, and Yang Yang’s performance as Xiao Nai have been retained. The series has also been visually upgraded to 4K.
The move has turned the drama into a hot topic across online entertainment forums. Why would a production completed 10 years ago not simply be remade from scratch, but instead preserve most of its original footage while replacing the face of one of its central characters with AI technology?
Love O2O premiered in 2016 with Yang Yang and Zheng Shuang in the leading roles. In August 2021, after regulators issued a notice instructing organizations not to invite Zheng Shuang to participate in program production and to stop broadcasting programs featuring her, a number of her works were removed from platforms, including this drama. In other words, the issue surrounding the series was not its storyline but controversies involving Zheng Shuang’s personal life.
Against that backdrop, replacing Zheng Shuang’s image offers a way to separate the production from the actress’s direct presence, potentially allowing distributors to bring the drama back to audiences. It represents one approach to reviving and monetizing an older title after it had previously been removed from streaming platforms.
The reason producers went to such lengths to replace the lead actress’s face with AI is largely tied to the enormous popularity of Love O2O. The 30-episode drama began airing on August 22, 2016, telling the romance between Xiao Nai and Bei Weiwei against the dual backdrop of university life and an online gaming world. Soon after its premiere, it became one of the year’s biggest television phenomena.
According to data compiled on Baidu, the drama had surpassed 28 billion online views by December 31, 2018, averaging more than 800 million views per episode, reportedly the highest average per episode at the time. Even years later, the series retained a substantial audience familiar with its characters, storyline, and the pairing of Xiao Nai and Bei Weiwei.
In effect, the producers already possess a proven intellectual property, a story with a demonstrated ability to attract audiences, and an extensive library of completed footage. Yang Yang’s appearance and performance in the drama are also widely regarded as representing one of the defining periods of his career. Those are valuable assets that are difficult to simply discard when the distribution of a once hugely successful drama has been interrupted.
From a content-business perspective, using AI to modify part of the existing footage offers one obvious advantage: there is no need to reshoot the entire series. Producing a completely new version would require casting actors, rebuilding sets, filming another 30 episodes, completing post-production, and accepting the risk that a remake might fail to recreate the appeal of the original. In this case, most of the drama’s existing “visual assets” can remain intact. Yang Yang is still Xiao Nai, the storyline remains the same, and the dialogue and basic structure of the scenes are largely preserved. The main intervention is concentrated on the female lead’s face. It can therefore be viewed as a way of reusing an existing content library at a significantly lower cost than rebuilding the production from the ground up.
However, the visual results have not received universal approval. After the new version was released, viewers expressed mixed reactions, with some criticizing the AI-generated facial expressions for appearing stiff and unnatural. Wang Chuyue confirmed that she had agreed to allow her face to be used for the AI replacement. The actress, born in 1999, publicly apologized to viewers, saying she understood that the new version might differ greatly from how audiences imagined Bei Weiwei. She also said the decision was unrelated to her agency or the platform and revealed that she had since moved into behind-the-camera work.
The return of Love O2O shows that AI is moving beyond simply generating new images. The technology is now beginning to be used to directly modify film and television productions that were completed years ago. This experiment could open up a new way to deal with productions that have become “stuck” because of controversies involving individual cast members—a problem that has caused headaches for numerous producers in recent years.
Sources: k14