Base Media, a Chinese animation studio that contributed to the recent blockbuster family feature Ne Zha 2, has teamed up with China’s Moonton Games to develop an animated series based on Moonton’s Mobile Legends: Bang Bang (pictured).
Moonton is a subsidiary of ByteDance, the owner of TikTok. Its free-to-play video game Mobile Legends: Bang Bang has more than 110 million monthly active players, and has been installed 1.5 billion times worldwide, according to Moonton. In the game, online players battle each other for control over an arena.
Base Media has worked on a growing portfolio of family-friendly animated features. Its first such project was US/China co-pro Wish Dragon, which premiered in theaters and on Netflix in 2021. It also contributed more than 230 shots to the breakout Chinese film Ne Zha 2, which has made US$2.2 billion globally, making it the biggest box-office success of the year and the highest-grossing animated film of all time. Base also contributed VFX to recent Marvel films Deadpool & Wolverine and Wakanda Forever.
Base will produce the Mobile Legends series with Singapore-based IP incubator The Little Black Book Studios, which worked on popular anime series Naruto and helped Base launch its animation studio in 2017. Little Black Book is also bringing in another Singaporean company it incubated, Innocus Global Group, to build a merchandise line for the series.
This deal is reminiscent of how Riot Games, the gamemaker behind Mobile Legends competitor League of Legends, teamed up with France’s Fortiche to make the YA-skewing animated series Arcane. That show has proven to be popular with critics and audiences alike; its two seasons (released in 2021 and 2024) have collectively racked up roughly 12 million views in the first half of 2025, according to Netflix’s latest Engagement Report.