The pre-sale of the Spring Festival stalls, which opened two days earlier than last year, came to the third day today, and as of the press release of Poison Eyes, the total pre-sale box office of the Spring Festival stalls has exceeded 16.6 billion.
From the horizontal comparison of the pre-screening time, although it is not as good as the "first Spring Festival file in history" in 2021, it has significantly surpassed 2022 and 2023, which is still the result obtained under the premise that this year's film lacks big IP and traffic stars. For the pre-sale stage alone, it is undoubtedly a good start.
From the perspective of supply, there are 6 seeded players in this year's Spring Festival stalls, which is slightly less than in previous years, but the Spring Festival stalls have always been overcrowded, and 6 is a reflection of returning to rationality.
Judging from the films, the echelon pattern is obvious, and the competition within the echelon is extremely fierce. Different from the "double strong" pattern in previous years, this year's pre-sale stage is still in a "three-legged" trend, which is more like the box office structure of the Spring Festival stalls before the epidemic. At present, "Flying Life 2" and "Hot and Hot" temporarily lead with 45.16 million and 44.43 million respectively, and "Article 20" follows with 40.75 million.
In the second echelon, "Bear Infested", "Mr. Red Carpet" and "Let's Shake the Sun Together" are all at the water level of about 12 million. In the Spring Festival pattern of previous years, "Bear Infested" is often regarded as the dividing line between a hit and a hit, and now the second-echelon films can temporarily be on par with "Bear Infested", which is undoubtedly a good sign. Of course, the brand effect of "Bear Infested" and the viewing of the movie just need to be stronger, and the pre-sale stage is not its force period, and it is still necessary to see the trend after the screening. 
The farce of the sub-line release, which was boiling before the pre-sale opened, also came to an end with the official announcement of the release notice. Still, there are voices of concern: a lack of blockbusters, comedies, and a postponement ...... on ticketing decisionsThis is not only a problem for the Spring Festival, but also a microcosm of the confusion of practitioners after the reconstruction of the laws of the film market, and more fresh attempts are needed to verify the answer.
Is there no audience without blockbusters?
The number one problem that worries the industry the most is that there is no "industrial blockbuster" this year.
Such worries are not groundless, and it is not difficult to find that industrial blockbusters are the backbone of the earliest support for the development of Spring Festival stalls.
Since Stephen Chow landed in the New Year in 2013 with "Journey to the West", the Spring Festival has officially become a schedule that can be valued by the industry. Since then, there will be no absence of industrial blockbusters in the Spring Festival stalls almost every year, and it has created a box office miracle for Spring Festival stalls such as "Operation Red Sea" and "The Wandering Earth" that have left famous film history.
It's just that by 2024, today's audiences have largely disenchanted industrial blockbusters in the traditional definition, and their judgment of any schedule should not be blindly immersed in past experience. Among the top ten films at the annual box office in 2023, except for "The Wandering Earth 2" and "Fengshen Part 1", none of them have anything to do with industrial blockbusters.
According to the Beacon report, in the summer file, which accounts for 38% of the annual box office, the high-frequency words of the top five films are "educational significance" and "good plot". The industrial blockbusters "Megalodon 2: The Abyss" and "Transformers: Rise of the Super Warriors" in the same schedule have limited competitiveness.
The same is true in the competition of the Spring Festival stalls, last year's "The Wandering Earth 2", which had the IP blessing of the previous work and large special effects scenes, also had the best reputation, but the box office was still inferior to "Man Jianghong", which relied on the plot and star lineup, and failed to reproduce the counterattack of the 2019 Spring Festival stalls.
Going hand in hand with blockbuster disenchantment, the industry is becoming more and more superstitious about the magic of comedy, especially the influence of comedy in the Spring Festival, which has been deeply rooted in the minds of practitioners. From "Hello, Li Huanying", which will hit 5 billion in 2021, to "This Killer is Not Calm", which will counterattack by relying on "the only comedy in the schedule" in 2022, and then to last year's "Man Jianghong", comedy seems to be the most popular card in the Spring Festival stalls.
Therefore, this year, not only is there a majority of comedy in the scheduled films, but several films tend to show comedy passages as much as possible in the trailers released in the early stage. However, films such as "Article 20" and "Mr. Red Carpet" may be relatively serious at their core, and if the audience enters the theater with the expectation of pure comedy, there is a certain risk of expectation management.
According to the opinion of lighthouse analysts, comedy is less prone to aesthetic fatigue than action and suspense genres, but it has high quality requirements. Therefore, the core of the three films in the top echelon that finally opened the gap is still in the word-of-mouth fermentation after the screening.
In Poison Eye's view, the key issue is not which industrial blockbuster or comedy is more suitable for the Spring Festival, but whether the supply of the same schedule type is too homogeneous.
Homogeneous supply, even if it conforms to the so-called schedule temperament, has no good results. The 2022 National Day file is the best example. Under the example of the "Me and Mine" series and "Changjin Lake" jointly opening up the market space for the National Day file, the "main theme" has become a label bound to the National Day file. As a result, three main theme films will be released in one go on the National Day in 2022, and in the end, the entire schedule will only end with less than 1.5 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 66%. The audience has only one choice, which is about the same as no choice.
The most fatal point of homogeneous supply is that the number of viewers watching movies during the same period is very likely to decline. Top echelon films like "Man Jianghong" and "The Wandering Earth 2", which have completely different styles and temperaments, may as well "watch both" for the audience. But if it's an all-color comedy, the result of the orientation is very likely to be "pick one to watch".
The frequency of watching movies is an important dimension for recovering the number of moviegoers during the Spring Festival. According to Maoyan's "2023 Spring Festival File Data Insights", the audience of **2 or more movies in the Spring Festival file in 2023 accounts for nearly 14%, which is basically the same as in 2022, but far less than the nearly 19% in 2018.
Letting audiences who love blockbusters watch blockbusters, and audiences who love comedy watching comedy, is the way to further expand the schedule, rather than finding the "schedule password" and then rushing up.
The tickets are back, and the pre-sale is up
Misfortune and blessing are relied upon, and blessing and misfortune are lurking. The lack of visual effects blockbusters has a very** benefit - ticket prices have dropped.
According to the analysis of the first day of pre-sale of Lighthouse Professional Edition, compared with the pre-sale of the same period last year, the ticket price of each film has dropped significantly, generally remaining below 50 yuan, while last year it was basically above 50 yuan.
There are many factors that affect movie ticket prices, so let's look at objective factors first. According to the film release notice, the minimum distribution price of Spring Festival films is still 40 yuan in Class A cities and 35 yuan in Class B cities, which is the same as in the past two years and has not **.
And this year's 6 seed contestant films, the average length is also shorter than last year, there is no "The Wandering Earth 2" and "Man Jianghong" such as more than two and a half hours of long films, generally hovering around two hours. Shorter durations match more sessions, which in turn can allow for lower ticket prices.
But the core reason is that this year's ticket supplement is extremely strong. If there are viewers who have opened the ticketing software in the past two days, it is not difficult to find that the long-disappeared "19"9 yuan movie ticket" is back for this year's Spring Festival.
This is also related to the supply characteristics of this year, non-industrial blockbuster comedies, reality films, the production cost is relatively lower, the cost pressure is smaller, and the room for concessions to the audience in the ticket price is greater. In the absence of big IP and traffic stars, the pre-sale results can also achieve overtaking in the first two years, it should be said that "19."9 yuan movie ticket" is a great contribution.
From another perspective, last year's market experience shows that today's audience ticket purchase decisions have shifted significantly backwards, preferring to buy tickets after the film's popularity or word-of-mouth has increased, so it is becoming more and more difficult to sell well in the pre-sale stage. According to the Beacon report, the average proportion of pre-sales on the first day of 2023 is lower than in previous years, especially in non-popular periods, and even the proportion of the box office in the first week of the film is declining, while the proportion of the second week has increased.
In any consumer industry, discounts on items in the early stages of pre-sales are a normal pricing rule because users pay more waiting time for that item as a cost. Wait until the stage where the spot is available, and then return to the original price of sales. Such a flexible pricing strategy is now also playing out in the film market, and in the post-screening stage, the ticket subsidy will be greatly reduced.
For the filmmakers, after losing the strategy of ensuring the film schedule through sub-line distribution, this year's Spring Festival films generally lack pre-screening appeal, and ticket compensation has become the only means to ensure attendance and compete for the proportion of films in the first row of the Lunar New Year.
It's just that, in addition to ticket compensation, can there be a more imaginative way of pre-screening competition? In Poison Eye's view, trying the screening strategy is a possibility.
The coldest time period of the film market every year is the vacuum period before the start of the Spring Festival. Any film with a slight volume did not dare to be finalized at this time, because the screening cycle was too short, and it basically ended on the first day of the Lunar New Year. In recent days, the weekday box office has hovered at the water level of 40 million, even on weekends it is only 80 million, and "The Annual Meeting Can't Stop" released on December 29 has won 32 box office daily crowns.
Although the statutory holiday only starts on the first day of the Lunar New Year, many consumer holidays across the country start earlier. Judging from common sense, young people returning to their hometowns also have a period of intensive social interaction before the festival, and the potential demand for watching movies has not been seen by the industry.
If it is a film that is quite confident in its own reputation during the Spring Festival, in fact, you might as well try the strategy of screening in advance, so that the word-of-mouth can ferment in advance, which may be more conducive to striving for film scheduling. In last year's summer file, high expectations and high reputation film screenings have almost become the norm, and they are large-scale intensive screenings, so that the film has an earlier word-of-mouth fermentation cycle, so as to get out of a more beautiful long-term line.
Young people who are becoming more and more "not fond of the New Year" may really have the interest of entering the cinema in the Chinese New Year's Eve.
Movies compete, Dong Yuhui gains
Marketing is also one of the important highlights of this year's Spring Festival competition. After all, throughout 2023, the importance of good movie marketing to the box office trend of movies has been repeatedly verified, so even if there is a rigid need for watching movies during the Spring Festival, the energy of marketing cannot be ignored.
The earliest was "Hot and Hot", which was out of the circle with a "small composition" by the main creator Jia Ling, which kicked off the Spring Festival marketing war. The special thing about the film is that Jia Ling, as a national-level actor, is a hundred pounds for the new film. The experience itself is enough to constitute the film's biggest selling point, and it is not something that other films can replicate. The strategy of "Hot and Hot" is to keep Jia Ling mysterious to the outside world in the pre-screening stage until the mystery is revealed on the first day of the Lunar New Year, so as to ensure the freshness of the first batch of moviegoers.
The film is currently leading the box office in the pre-sale stage, which is also due to the dividends brought by the full "mystery". On the surface, there is no big IP for the Spring Festival films, but in fact, Jia Ling herself, who has the previous work "Hello, Li Huanying" as the foundation, is the biggest IP of the Spring Festival file.
However, the film is adapted from the well-known Japanese film "100 Yuan Love", and the label of "overseas adaptation" is not a positive impression in the audience ecology in recent years. Some core moviegoers have resistance before the screening, which is also one of the potential hidden dangers of "Hot and Hot".
And "Flying Life 2", as the sequel to director Han Han's highest-grossing work, is an important opportunity for him to come out of the haze of the failure of the Spring Festival file of "Four Seas". Racing is not only Han Han's strongest feelings, but also the only responsibility for the big scenes and special effects of this year's Spring Festival. And Shen Teng, as an indispensable face for the Spring Festival file (click here to read: The Spring Festival file cannot be without Wu Jing and Shen Teng), after last year's "Man Jianghong", except for a brief cameo in "Super Family", he has not appeared in any film in 2023, and this time it also carries the expectations of many audiences.
"Article 20", starring Zhao Liying, is the only film with a certain fan effect during this year's Spring Festival. As a representative of 85 flowers, Zhao Liying will also have no works broadcast in 2023, and she has not appeared in a movie for many years, and the "comeback" of the big screen has made fans have high expectations. According to the analysis of public opinion of Lighthouse AI, the current praise of Article 20 is 315% from Zhao Liying.
But the genre of the film itself is a combination of comedy and realism. Judging from the information that has been leaked so far, "Article 20" should refer to the regulations on justifiable defense in Article 20 of the Criminal Law, which has also been a topic of debate in legal circles for many years, but it is still difficult to judge how to use comedy to cut into this serious issue, based on the information provided by the current trailer. Previously, at a venture capital event, a judge once told young creators that comedy and realism are in conflict in terms of genre. How to knead, we will only see after the screening.
From the perspective of marketing scenarios, Poison Eye mentioned in last month's article (insert link: "Announcement room" where movies don't skip subject 3) that movies and drama products are increasingly lacking traditional "announcement rooms" where content can be discussed. In the past, some interview variety shows played this function, and now, like "If You Are the Truth, Do Not Disturb 3", you have to go to "Mao Xuewang", which is separated by a generation gap, to replace the traditional function of the announcement room.
And this year's Spring Festival files "Mr. Red Carpet" and "Article 20" have all entered Dong Yuhui's "Walking with Hui" live broadcast room, which is not only a new traffic peak for Douyin, but also a rare scene where you can have traffic and chat with creators about content.
In the past, many film producers would log in to the live broadcast room to sell tickets, but in the live broadcast rooms like Xiao Yangge, Li Jiaqi, Liu Genghong and other top streamers, either the entertainment attribute is stronger, or the product attribute is stronger, and only Dong Yuhui can meet the content output needs of the filmmaker.
From the perspective of effect, in the live broadcast of "Mr. Red Carpet" on the evening of January 31, Dong Yuhui's live broadcast room sold "199 yuan" low-cost tickets nearly 600,000 copies. This number is not difficult to achieve, and most of the time of the live broadcast, the goods were out of stock, so that many viewers said "on the original price ticket" in the barrage, but in the end, the original price ticket did not appear. Therefore, compared with the specific sales volume of the goods, the more important function of this scene is product promotion.
And, although Douyin has opened up the ticket purchase link for movie tickets, what appears in the live broadcast room is still the exchange coupon that needs to be redeemed on the Maotao platform. The short-term business has always focused on shortening the purchase decision-making chain, and the current setting is not the maximization of the film's box office revenue. It can be seen that the distribution of interests between short ** platforms, live broadcast companies and film parties needs to be further coordinated, and strive to maximize the conversion of consumers' ticket purchases.
The Spring Festival is always the grandest but also the most mysterious schedule, and everything has to wait for feedback after the release to judge the final results. Although most of them are comedies on the surface, I still hope that they can be wonderful in their own way.