Reporter |Ye Yuchen.
Edit |Chen Rui.
The 2024 Spring Festival stalls are over.
Beacon data shows that in the 2024 Spring Festival (February 10-February 17), the national movie box office will be 801.6 billion yuan, and the number of moviegoers was 16.3 billion, an increase of 18 percent compared with the box office and number of people in the Spring Festival in 202347% and 2636%, all of which set a new record in the same period. Among them, "Hot and Hot" became popular quickly after its release, with a box office of more than 300 million yuan for 6 consecutive days, and finally won 271.8 billion yuan won the box office champion. "Flying Life 2" is the film with the highest proportion of men in the same schedule, with a harvest of 239.8 billion yuan at the box office, ranking second. As the 10th anniversary of the series, "Bear Infested: Reversing Time and Space" once again broke the record and won 13$8.9 billion. "Article 20" ranked fourth, with a box office of 13 during the period400 million yuan.
The main movies of the Spring Festival in 2024.
The Spring Festival market is improving, but an important reason behind the growth of various data is the increase in the number of Spring Festival stall days. The box office is calculated according to the number of days off, and this year's public holiday is two more days than in previous years, taking the number of moviegoers as an example, the number of moviegoers in this year's Spring Festival stalls is 1600 million, 1300 million, if calculated according to the average number of moviegoers per day, there is a high probability that the number of moviegoers this year will be negative, 33The 1% attendance rate is also down from 41% last year.
In addition, although there are 8 movies scheduled for the Spring Festival this year, they are all small and medium-sized feature films, and there are no special effects blockbusters similar to "The Wandering Earth", which exposes the current situation of insufficient reserves of domestic special effects films. In the long run, a healthy film market should not only be limited to small and medium-budget films. Moreover, this year's Spring Festival comedy films are piled up, and the genre is converging, which has a squeezing effect on the market - "Article 20", which is adapted from the case and is actually a social criticism film, has been packaged as a family carnival as much as possible, and films with unique positioning such as "Mr. Red Carpet" and "Let's Shake the Sun Together" have not exceeded 100 million yuan at the box office when they were withdrawn. This will also affect the investment direction of more films in the future, the scheduling plan of theaters, and the inclusiveness of reducing schedules.
Keyword 1: Lose 100 pounds.
"Hot and Hot" contributed to the most topics in this year's Spring Festival. Beacon data shows that there are 447 hot searches on Weibo for the Spring Festival file "Hot and Hot", and the hot searches are on the list for 789 hours, far exceeding other movies in the same schedule.
How to catch the audience's attention in the era of information ** is a challenge that every film has to face, and the continuous change of publicity and distribution methods has also begun to affect the film itself. "Hot and Hot" can continue to be concerned, not only by virtue of Jia Ling's personal efforts and popularity, but also by virtue of Jia Ling's personal efforts and popularity, and the industry's "film marketing starts from the moment the project is established" has been fully reflected in the whole link of the film's topic selection and publicity.
Before it was released, "Hot and Hot" only had a small composition and regular materials, and Jia Ling disappeared in front of the public a year ahead of schedule to maintain the mystery of her image. But after the movie was released on the first day of the Lunar New Year, the film released the post-Jia Ling** video clip, and organized a number of live broadcasts, so that the hot search on the first day of the Lunar New Year was dominated by "Hot and Hot". After that, the behind-the-scenes footage of the before and after comparison was constantly released, creating topics, roadshows and interview clips were constantly on social media, and the behind-the-scenes documentary was officially announced to be launched on the Internet on February 22. The materials of each ring are prepared in advance, and the exposure time is just right.
Jia Ling at the premiere of the movie "Hot and Hot".
Losing 100 pounds in Xiaohongshu is a highly discussed topic in itself, from the weight loss curve in the easter egg memo, to the salt-free dehydration record, to each outfit during the roadshow, every detail has been taken out and studied by KOLs in fitness, emotion, outfit and other tracks. These automatically derived topics, as well as the secondary creation of film materials, also contributed to the topic.
The film also accurately captures the emotional needs of the female group, encourages ordinary people to live for themselves, and crammes the emotional resonance points of the public such as inspirational and pleasing personality into every little detail of the film and even marketing.
From "Disappearing Her" and "All or Nothing" last summer, to "The Annual Meeting Can't Stop" on New Year's Day this year, it has provided emotional value to the audience and resonated widely with the audience, thereby raising the box office. The top two box office "Hot and Hot" and "Flying Life 2" also tell the story of ordinary people "fighting hard", bringing emotional satisfaction and catharsis to the audience, after all, in the Spring Festival stalls, which are mainly in the sinking market, most audiences do not pursue the artistic level of the movie.
In addition, in Jia Ling's two films, character building and artist growth are mutually promoting. "Hello, Li Huanying" is a story about Jia Ling and her mother, and "Hot and Hot" is a story of self-help. The name Du Leying is similar to "Ling", and the grilled fish restaurant where she works is also a homonym for Jia Ling's company's "Big Celebrity Entertainment", these designs have blurred the boundaries between the characters and the live actors, and the record of the extra-long easter egg at the end of the film makes reality overlap with the movie.
In today's film market, the artistic achievements of cinema commercial films are not completely positively correlated with the box office, and even more often they are upside down, especially during the Spring Festival, where the audience consumes emotions and atmosphere.
Keyword 2: Withdrawal.
A total of 8 movies were released during the Spring Festival this year, but 4 were withdrawn.
On February 14 (the fifth day of the first lunar month), "Let's Shake the Sun Together" announced that it would be withdrawn and rescheduled for release on March 30; On February 16 (the seventh day of the first lunar month), "Mr. Red Carpet" announced that it would withdraw from the Spring Festival file and re-select the schedule to meet the audience; Subsequently, the two animated films "Huang Pi: The God of Wealth Cat Descended from the Sky" and "The Nether of the Canopy of the Eight Rings" also announced their withdrawal from the Spring Festival file. Such a large-scale withdrawal is the first time in Chinese film history.
As the finale of director Han Yan's "Life Trilogy" - the first two are "Get Out, Tumor" and "Send You a Little Red Flower", and the box office is 5100 million and 143.2 billion yuan, which was a hot movie in the year - "Let's Shake the Sun Together" with the theme of life and death is indeed not suitable for the Spring Festival, and the audience has a natural resistance to the story of incurable diseases during the Chinese New Year. The filmmakers of "Let's Shake the Sun Together" admitted in the withdrawal statement that they made a major mistake in the selection of schedules, and the withdrawal of "Mr. Red Carpet" was even more embarrassing.
This is not the first time that "Mr. Red Carpet" has changed schedules. In October last year, the film company announced that it would be released on November 17, and it may be more able to realize Ning Hao's desire to "fully communicate" with the audience if it is released on an ordinary weekend. Perhaps the success of the premiere of the Pingyao Film Festival raised the filmmaker's expectations for the box office of "Mr. Red Carpet", and a week before the original release time, the filmmaker suddenly announced that it would be rescheduled to the first day of the Lunar New Year in 2024. In the reshuffling publicity**, Ning Hao and Andy Lau** connected and explained the reason with the sentence "listen to the capital", becoming the first live-action movie to announce that it will enter the 2024 Spring Festival.
On September 16, 2023, Ning Hao took "Mr. Red Carpet" to the 48th Toronto International Film Festival for an interview.
The market consensus in the past few years is that the Spring Festival stalls are not only the world of comedies and family films, but more genre films can find their own audiences in this schedule, and as long as the quality is passed, they can get long-term box office returns after the Spring Festival. For example, in 2021, Rao Xiaozhi's "The Crowd" will have a box office of 7600 million yuan, Zhang Yimou's "Sniper" will exceed 600 million yuan in 2022, and Cheng Er's "No Name" will be 93.1 billion yuan, the animated film "Deep Sea" 9$1.9 billion. And Ning Hao's last movie "Crazy Alien" got a box office of 2.2 billion yuan during the Spring Festival in 2019, second only to the dark horse "The Wandering Earth" that year. These factors made the filmmaker decide to take another gamble in the Spring Festival file, and Huanxi Media, the producer of "Mr. Red Carpet" during the Spring Festival last year, became the champion with the 4.5 billion yuan box office of "Man Jianghong".
However, the market is unpredictable, and Beacon data shows that the trend of sinking the box office during the Spring Festival this year is more obvious, and the box office proportion of first-tier cities is only 96%, and the box office proportion of third- and fourth-tier cities reached 535%。Compared with Jia Ling's live-action **, Ning Hao's "Mr. Red Carpet" can be regarded as a reality show in the entertainment industry in a sense. It's a pity that the story itself is too far from the average audience. This kind of distance is not something that the main creative team can get closer by going to the live broadcast room of grassroots star anchor Dong Yuhui to do a guest interview.
However, even if the movie is released on an inappropriate schedule, in fact, there is still the possibility of long-term screening in the gap after the holiday. For example, with the decline in the popularity of the topic of top films, "Article 20" began to surpass the single-day box office and film scheduling rate after the start of construction, becoming the first for several consecutive days. It's a pity that the capital can't afford to wait, and the share price of Huanxi Media fell to a record low of 0 on February 16HK$54. Perhaps in order to stabilize the stock price, "Mr. Red Carpet" announced its withdrawal late that night.
It's hard to predict how good the chances of "Mr. Red Carpet" returning to the big screen will be after the withdrawal, after all, there are few precedents for successful re-screenings. Ning Hao knows very well how to make a film that can achieve a win-win situation for business and authorship, Bad Monkey Pictures is the most important hit maker in the market in recent years, but "Mr. Red Carpet" is a rebellious existence, with a certain threshold for viewing, and it is destined to fail to complete the mass level of communication. In the interview during the promotion period, Ning Hao expressed many times that he wanted to return to the original state of making movies. In most movies, in order to take into account the audience's viewing habits, shoot one or two thousand shots to speed up the pace of the movie, "Mr. Red Carpet" only has more than 380 shots. Ning Hao thinks that by filming the story he wants to tell in the most simple way, he can ** his current anxiety and self-doubt.
On the one hand, there are creators who still pursue their own works, and on the other hand, there are major shareholders who need to be responsible for the stock price, and the complex considerations behind the investment make it difficult for the film to be just a movie, which may explain the twisting choice of "Mr. Red Carpet" to withdraw, change gears, and withdraw again.
Keyword 3: screen shot.
On February 15, Xue Zhiqian's promotional long article on "Flying Life 2" was mixed with several movies he made while watching the movie**, which caused many netizens to accuse him of stealing and infringing on the copyright of the movie. Subsequently, on the evening of February 16, CCTV News interviewed Zhu Wei, deputy director of the Communication Law Research Center of China University of Political Science and Law, who determined that the "screen photography behavior" was not illegal. Xue Zhiqian took the report as a kind of support for the screen shot. In order to support idols, fans released a large number of screen shots** swept social platforms, and filmmakers such as Dong Runnian, Shao Yihui, and Lu Yang, as well as some theaters and **people, issued a boycott, making it clear that screen photography is uncivilized behavior. This has led to a big discussion on the legality and legitimacy of screen photography.
"Screen photography" usually refers to the audience using mobile phones and other devices to shoot the film screen on the big screen during the viewing process, if the film is pirated and commercially disseminated, it is called "pirated photography". For most audiences, screen photography is not significantly malicious, just like travel and food check-in, it is a part of sharing life on social platforms, taking photos and checking in at the cinema, and Amway's favorite movies have even become a habit for many ordinary audiences when watching movies. At present, the filmmaker only makes a verbal appeal to the screen shooting behavior, and does not explicitly prohibit it. After all, screen photography has become an unofficial material after the screening, and to some extent, it has also played a role in promoting the film. The definition of screen photography is also not clear in the law.
But it is pointless to extensively dwell on whether it is illegal to post Weibo on the screen of a movie theater, more often the law is the minimum standard of morality, and even the law itself may not be without room for improvement. For the audience, screen photography is first of all an uncivilized movie-watching behavior, which is equivalent to not making loud noises, walking around at will, and playing ** in the theater. Especially for public figures like Xue Zhiqian, when expressing their views on public platforms, they need to pay more attention to the guiding effect of their words and deeds on their followers. Does such a simple logic still need to be discussed at the National Congress?
The copyright of this article belongs to Yicai, and it may not be translated without permission.
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