"How many tears do you have to complete the journey of life......”
If you automatically have a singing voice in your head, congratulations, you have also been poisoned by the name of "Removing the Three Evils Around You".
At the end of the Spring Festival family movie, I didn't expect such a grotesque movie to become a refreshing medicine for mainland audiences. It is sharp and a little nonsensical, and even a cult episode in the film can be inadvertently inserted, and it has become a new ** divine comedy for countless netizens. Such a "Weekly Removal of Three Evils" is difficult not to overjoyed the entire film industry.
Objectively speaking, despite the high-quality early word-of-mouth, "Eliminating the Three Evils Everywhere" is not too bright a project in the local market of Taiwan. However, this film has become a rare "Taiwanese dark horse" in the mainland market in recent years, and the box office reputation has soared since the screening stage, and even fell at the box office last weekend, and it is expected to run all the way to the 500 million box office mark with a strong momentum.
What is it that has captured the hearts of discerning mainland audiences?
Good content is not afraid of a cold start
For any film, it must be scarce to be selected by the audience, and this time is no exception.
In our opinion, "Removing the Three Evils Around the World" is right to the pain point of mainland audiences' demand for "scale films".
How do you define a large-scale film?
Taking the two "large-scale domestic films" "Solid as a Rock" and "Wading Through the Angry Sea" that also attracted much attention last year as examples, both of them broke through the existing content boundaries through the depth of topic selection and plot spectacle. However, these two films are still based on the mainstream domestic film narrative system, so the freshness that "scale" brings to the audience is limited.
As a Taiwanese film, "Removing the Three Evils Around the World" is destined to be different from the above two films in terms of creative genes.
The number of Taiwanese films released in the mainland is scarce, and it is difficult to get out of the circle, and Taiwanese large-scale crime films are originally new to many audiences. Not to mention that although this film is a gangster-themed movie, the protagonist Chen Guilin is in a gang, but he is not involved in gang disputes like most films, but intends to "get ahead" after being diagnosed with a terminal illness and embark on the road of exploring self-worth.
He is still a complete villain, but he uses violence to eliminate violence. The blurring of the boundary between good and evil at the script level and the plot trend of anti-routine rarely appeared in similar domestic films in the past. This is also a content gap that has always existed on the big screen in the mainland.
At the same time, the cult elements and bloody scenes added in the second half of the film give "Everywhere the Three Evils" a special charm like a cult film. A group of cultists dressed in white chanted reverently in the holy auditorium, Chen Guilin smiled and bloodied the audience, when the camera pulled to the portrait of the saint on the wall, the scene was grotesque and absurd, and the metaphor was so far that the audience had endless aftertaste.
The other side of the freshness is that "Removing the Three Evils Around the World" still retains the full resonance points of mainland audiences.
This film was born from the ancient allusions in "The World Speaks New Words", and basically retains the whole picture in the plot structure. The complete Chinese story core, a large number of traditional elements and strong religious beliefs that match the film** are actually not unfamiliar to mainland audiences - although these contents have hardly appeared on the mainland big screen in the past.
At the same time, in the film, we can actually see many elements of Hong Kong gangster films that mainland audiences are familiar with. In fact, "Removing the Three Evils Around the World" is the first film written and directed by Hong Kong director Huang Jingpu in Taiwan, and he is originally good at narrating through violent aesthetics and action scenes.
"Removing the Three Evils Everywhere" undoubtedly also has the characteristics of Hong Kong-style "cool films". The film shows many action scenes that mainland audiences like to see, especially in addition to the first evil "Aberdeen", the overall plot design and narrative techniques are the same as classic gangster-themed Hong Kong films.
Even the shooting scene in the cult spiritual retreat, which has received the most praise, and the scene of the slow shooting of the cultist in the sound of girls playing and singing, are inexplicably reminiscent of the classic movie scene directed by John Woo. The use of classics to present new effects is also an ingenious innovation.
In our opinion, this is also why "Removing the Three Evils Around the World" can be more loved by mainland audiences than other Taiwanese films of the same type in recent years.
One of the best comparison cases is the mainland-Taiwan co-production crime film "Soul Hunting" released in 2021. Compared with "Removing the Three Evils Around the World" directed by a Hong Kong director, this film created by the main creative lineup of Taiwan has a more pure Taiwanese flavor, and the two leading actors Zhang Zhen and Zhang Junning are also well-known excellent actors with high national degrees.
And this crime-themed film with science fiction elements not only won three awards including Best Actor at the 58th Golden Horse Awards, but also exceeded NT$50 million at the local box office in Taiwan, and its awards and market performance were better than "Three Evils Everywhere".
However, such a high-quality project has only received tepid market feedback in the mainland market, with a cumulative box office of 11.1 billion yuan, and the Douban score is only 68。
Therefore, the standout of "Removing the Three Evils Around the World" is not only due to its own scarcity, but also to the co-production with mainland audiences at the content level, which determines that it can become a Taiwanese imported film with "appetite".
**Empty window, create the right time and place
Another bonus that should not be ignored is derived from the market**.
"Removing the Three Evils Around the World" happened to choose the starting point of the "cold period" after the Spring Festival. At this time, the market is just in the window stage where new films have not entered, and there are only a few head films in the Spring Festival file that are struggling to support. Therefore, such a market environment is extremely relaxed and favorable for medium-sized films with good quality such as "Around".
The filmmaker also made a judgment on the publicity and distribution more accurately.
It can be seen that a week before the official release, "Removing the Three Evils of the Week" was first screened at 14 o'clock to 16 o'clock on February 24th and 25th in ten high-tier cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
With the blessing of the Golden Horse Awards and Taiwan's high-quality early word-of-mouth, many fans and audiences have come to visit, and the Douban score of the film has increased from 8 in just two days of screening1 to 84 (has now fallen back to 8.)2 points), setting the highest score for films released in the mainland this year and the highest score for crime action Chinese movies in the past 11 years, laying a solid word-of-mouth foundation for the follow-up breakthrough of "Eliminating Three Evils Around the World".
At this time, the filmmaker chose to take advantage of the victory to pursue and add national screenings during the period from 18:00 to 20:00 from February 27th to February 29th, which further consolidated the dominant position of "Removing the Three Evils Everywhere". Even the "disc swapping incident" that appeared at this stage not only failed to affect the audience's enthusiasm for watching the movie. On the contrary, it brought an additional topic bonus to the film, driving more audiences to seize the opportunity to enter the theater as soon as possible.
After the official release of the film and the release of the streaming resources, after careful comparison by the strict audience, they also realized that the change of disc did not affect the excitement of this film. Therefore, after the screening, the box office of the film did not fall but rose, and on Sunday, March 3, it also staged a rare flat box office reversal.
At the end of the day, "Everywhere in the World" is not a perfect film. From a commercial point of view, there are many Taiwanese films that can outperform "Removing the Three Evils of the Week", and in terms of thematic depth, it is not difficult to find a humanistic blockbuster that surpasses "The Three Evils of the Week" in the Taiwan market in recent years.
It is worth mentioning that during the screening of this film, Taiwanese director Qian Renhao also issued relevant information on Weibo, saying that "Removing the Three Evils Around the World" ** The original script "Lawlessness" conceived and created in 2015 was conceived and created. At present, Qian Renhao said that he has filed a complaint against "Removing the Three Evils of the Week", and the court has not yet made a ruling, and the director of "The Three Evils of the Week" Huang Jingfu has also issued an article denying plagiarism as early as October last year.
But this not so perfect film, when it was extremely depressed after the end of the Spring Festival, came to the mainland market at just the right time, and it still became the first choice for many mainland audiences to watch movies in the near future.
This may be the "right time, place and people" that belongs to "Eliminating the Three Evils Everywhere".
Behind this film, we have once again seen the urgent desire of mainland audiences for good content and new content.