Meituan sells reunion by filming Hu Ge's farewells — 370M views

For Chinese New Year 2025, Meituan's agency PAWPAW made a deliberately 'mistimed' film. Instead of the season's standard homecoming story, actor Hu Ge says goodbye - on a station platform he walks past parents in nine different family scenes, leaving each one, and in the film's controversial final beat returns for one more reunion that realism says cannot happen.

The idea rested on a contrarian insight: the moment people feel the ache of reunion most is not when they arrive home but when they leave it - seeing grandparents at the gate or a parent's car drive away. So the film tells the story of saying goodbye to make families spend their limited time together better, with Meituan positioned as the way to make that time count.

The execution was as risky as the idea. The two-minute-eight-second single take was assembled from separate shoots: Hu Ge performed alone against a green screen while the 'parents' were filmed in nine states on a 40-meter moco track, then composited in roughly ten layers - meaning every look and gesture had to land within half a second with no scene partner present.

Agency-reported impact: the film passed 100,000 views on its primary channel within a day, spilled organically across Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu and Bilibili with 370M+ total exposure, and generated wide commentary about its ending. It won the 2025 Golden Mouse gold for best commercial short video and four silvers across creative and original-content categories.