Gold House spent years opening other people’s movies. Now it wants the greenlight.

Bing Chen built a reputation on other people’s opening weekends. Gold House, the Asian Pacific culture platform he co-founded after years at YouTube working with creators, helped turn Crazy Rich Asians, Parasite, and Everything Everywhere All at Once into community events as much as studio releases.

Now the shop wants to say yes earlier. Gold House Studios will develop and produce original and IP-driven film, TV, and digital. Christine Yi and Brian Nemes run it day to day. Chen remains the public face.

Our read: Gold Open proved a crowd can show up. A studio has to pick which scripts get money before anyone buys a ticket.

From buyouts to greenlights

#GoldOpen was the public chapter: theater buyouts, bulk tickets, and opening-weekend campaigns with AMC and community partners. Behind that came cultural consulting for shops like A24, Lucasfilm, and Pixar, plus Gold House Ventures, the $30 million fund for Asian Pacific founders.

The Creative Equity Fund moved them closer to film checks. In its first stretch it backed more than a dozen features, including Sean Wang’s Sundance winner Dìdi, Vera Miao’s Rock Springs, and Lloyd Lee Choi’s Lucky Lu. Yi, who still runs Gold House Labs talent programs, put it plainly: too many films get made through a small miracle, then go unseen.

Studios is the next step. Premiere parties and investment memos still sit downstream of someone else’s greenlight.

What they say they will make

The slate leads with genre, not another awards-season prestige chase. Akiya is a Japan-set horror from writer-director Austin Osanai Everett, with Karen Fukuhara and Robbie Amell as a couple renovating an empty countryside house that turns out to be crowded with yōkai. Ranger 7 and Collective Pictures are producing alongside.

Also on the board: Mel Mah’s road-trip dramedy This Way to Home, Vera Miao’s martial-arts adventure Sun & Moon, and Keto Shimizu’s horror series American Yokai. Shimizu, who showran Legends of Tomorrow, is moving into folklore dread. On the IP side, Gold House has film rights to Slitterhead, the Keiichiro Toyama game from the Silent Hill lineage, with Ranger 7, JEA, and Striker Entertainment. An unscripted digital series is set to start filming in New York later this year.

Yi’s measure of impact is reach past the community that already shows up for Gold Gala photos. Genre and game IP are how they try to get there.

Our take

Pair this with Wong Fu’s Sung and the diaspora festival circuit. One lane is a $500K indie pipeline that refuses studio bounce. Another is festivals that fund and premiere work Hollywood still treats as a side bet. Gold House is trying a third: open the weekend, then own development, financing, and production under one roof.

Our verdict: watch whether Akiya and the Shimizu series get real dates. If the slate ships, Gold House stops being the friend who fills the theater and becomes the shop that picks the movie.