Actress Liang Jing [Photo provided to China Daily]

But the situation changed in 2015 when Chinese sci-fi novelist Liu Cixin won the Hugo Award. Not only was this widely regarded as a watershed moment for the sci-fi movie industry in China, but it also sparked a sharp rise in the number of quality scripts reaching the market every year since then.

"The idea to make The Secret of Immortal Code came before Liu's win. It was very difficult in the beginning, but we did hope to attempt something that few people have tried before," says Wang.

With his desire to make the movie something akin to the Chinese equivalent of Frankenstein, Wang says he believed that a crafted, polished storyline was more important than relying on market research.

"When I was the producer working on Brotherhood of Blades, most of the financiers (who turned down his request to raise the budget) said the market for martial arts period dramas in China had waned, since two similar productions had just bombed at the box office," recalls Wang.

But the Chang Chen-starring film directed by rising star Lu Yang proved that Wang's judgement was correct.

Spurred on by word-of-mouth acclaim, Brotherhood of Blades (2014) notched up a score of 7.5 of 10 on the popular Chinese entertainment rating platform, Douban. The film's success helped to revive the fortunes of the struggling martial arts genre and paved the way for its 2017 sequel to secure a far more healthy budget.

The sequel, which was also backed by the China Film Group, enhanced the studio's confidence in Wang, and provided him with a second project to produce The Secret of Immortal Code.

"When you are making films, you should always insist on exploring the unknown and untried. Otherwise you will just be repeating what others have already done," he says.