Unexpectedly, it is reasonable.
Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “Heike Finance” (ID: haikecaijing), Author: He Xu.
Wen丨He Xu
At 22:08 on February 21st, the film “Hello, Li Huanying” directed by comedian Jia Ling, the real-time box office rose to 4.025 billion yuan, compared with the 4.024 billion real-time box office of “Detective Chinatown 3” released in the same period. Yuan, achieve overtake, usher in the most dramatic scene of the Spring Festival in 2021.
The Spring Festival holiday has passed, and the box office smoke is not far away. It can be seen that the Chinese film market, which suffered a severe setback due to the outbreak of the epidemic in early 2020, has not only revived but also exploded with amazing energy after a short period of dormancy. It is not an exaggeration to call it a retaliatory movie.
The comparison and discussion of the two films on various social media continues to ferment. This event itself is actually as exciting as a big show, and it continues to push up the box office of both parties.
There are many hot topics, and the top ones include, “Tang Detective 3” or “Li Huanying”, who is more worthy of the most expensive ticket in history, “Tang Detective 3”, the vulgar stalker, beating the nurse and other bridges To what extent did Duan angered the audience, and whether the final box office of “Li Huanying” could reach 5 billion.
The dazzling Jinshan seems to be visible from afar, but obviously not everyone can reach it.
The head effect of the 2021 Spring Festival stalls remains the same.
According to the data of the Lighthouse on February 18, from February 12 to the sixth day of the Lunar New Year on February 17th, the total box office of domestic films on the 6th was 7.822 billion yuan, of which over 80% of the box office was ranked in the top The two “Tang Detective 3” and “Li Huanying” are divided.
On the one hand, “Tang Detective 3” frequently posted box office posters, and everyone ridiculed how Jia Ling became a lightning bolt; on the other hand, the director of “The Crowd” asked for the film on Weibo, and fans discussed the outstanding special effects of “Assassination of Novelists”. No return. Really a few happy and a few sad.
Affected by the warming of the market, many new films in 2021 have started the battle of announcement and release much earlier than before. It’s fine to use the summer file to place ads a few minutes before the Spring Festival file. Shen Teng’s happy twist has even promoted its Spring Festival film next year on platforms such as Douyin, which shows the fierce competition.
01
Surprise is more than “Li Huanying”
When talking about the Spring Festival stalls, we must mention the Lunar New Year stalls.
The Spring Festival files and the New Year files, although literally, have the meaning of saying goodbye to the old and welcoming the new, it seems that they can all be classified as New Year files. However, in mainland China, one is released during the Spring Festival and the other is released from December to January. The two have obvious time intervals and are not the same concept.
However, judging from the birth path, the Spring Festival gear was born out of the Lunar New Year gear.
The comedy “Party A and Party B”, directed by Feng Xiaogang, screenwriter Wang Shuo, and starring Ge You Liu Bei, released on December 24, 1997, is widely regarded as the first Chinese New Year movie. Mainland China is heating up.
The situation is similar to the earlier Hong Kong New Year movies. Since the launch of “Party A and Party B”, the Chinese mainland has been using comedy as the main New Year festival for many years. A “A World Without Thieves” has become the appearance of a Lunar New Year film: a mainland story, starring in Hong Kong and Taiwan, with a mainland actor with local characteristics. In 2010, the 3D blockbuster “Avatar” struck, ushering in the 1 billion box office era of Chinese New Year films.
The Lunar New Year film “Tai囧” released in 2012 attracted the audience’s attention to the story based on the context of mainland comedy. This hard-to-find film surpassed the 3D version of “Titanic” that year, the film star-studded “Painted Skin 2”, Ang Lee’s “Fantastic Drifting of the Youth Pie”, and Feng Xiaogang’s “One Nineteen Four Two” Wait for all the films to be the big winner at the box office.
After that, film adaptations that Hong Kong and Taiwan directors are keen to shoot, traditional Hollywood blockbusters, and the works of emerging directors from the Mainland have become the mainstream at the end of the year.
The concept of a blockbuster that became popular in China from the release of “Hero” in December 2002 has been further enriched by 2015: superb shooting techniques, family story core, and youthful expression. The more typical of these is the fantasy film “Monster Catch” shot by Hong Kong director Xu Chengyi, which is comparable to “Fast and Furious 7” at the box office.
Although “Monster Catch” was released in July 2015 and is not a Lunar New Year movie, fantasy movies have become a major genre of Lunar New Year and Spring Festival files.
This is inseparable from the characteristics of fantasy films: it relies on the extraordinary imagination, not only to meet the audience’s requirements for blockbuster films in terms of shooting methods, but also suitable for the whole family to watch together.
This year, overshadowed by the success of “Looking for the Dragon” and “Charlotte’s Troubles”, is the new film “Tang Ren”, which was won 810 million yuan at the box office by new director Chen SichengStreet Detective. This movie has surprised many viewers. Its detective and reasoning elements are rare in previous blockbusters, and its story presentation is mature enough. What the audience does not know is that this is actually the prologue of a series of works.
As the market gradually flourished, new creative groups began to appear, just as many sects gradually formed in the development of Wulin Rivers and Lakes.
Xu Zheng, Ning Hao, and Huang Bo are praised as the “Iron Triangle” of Chinese-language movies. At the same time, they also pay more attention to cultivating newcomers. In 2018, Wen Muye, the director of the famous “I am not the god of medicine”, came from Ning Hao. New director plan.
Chen Sicheng was brewing afterwards, and it was this kind of “grouping” cooperation. When he was preparing to film the “Tang Detective” web series in 2017, he went to Taiwan to find a new director and met Ke Wenli. The latter shot the word-of-mouth hit “Manslaughter” at the end of 2019.
The main melody films represented by “Take the Tiger Mountain” and “Operation Red Sea” have gradually become frequent visitors during the Lunar New Year and Spring Festival. The Hong Kong director Lin Chaoxian, who has directed the action film “Dog Bite Dog”, knows this well, and the audience’s most comment on his film is the exciting fighting and compact plot.
In the past, American blockbusters that were invincible during the Lunar New Year and Spring Festival are also trying to tell more local Chinese stories in Hollywood. However, the successive failures of “The Great Wall” and “Mulan” show that this type of model is actually very It is difficult to succeed. The creators and actors have tried their best, but they often only get unacceptable comments.
The major films at the end of 2018 and 2019 are all duels of these schools. As the Spring Festival stall market becomes more and more mature, players with large production and high costs are weeding out a large number of small and medium players. This market has finally become a contest between two or three strong players. The winners in 2018 were “Operation Red Sea” and “Tang Detective 2”, and in 2019, “The Wandering Earth” and “Crazy Alien”.
2020 is the continuation of the showdown, but the epidemic disrupted all plans. Chen Kexin, Chen Sicheng, and Xu Zheng said at the Golden Rooster Film Festival at the end of 2019 that they will never be black in the upcoming Spring Festival. It is impossible to verify whether there is a means to prepare for each other’s hacking, but this statement shows that each other is gearing up.
Although the nature of the Spring Festival file has become the peak battle for mature film creators, the successful counterattack of “Li Huanying” in 2021 shows that the Chinese film market, which is still in a period of rapid development, will always bring to the industry Surprise.
02
How does Jia Ling win?
Compared with Xu Zheng selling the copyright of “囧Mom” to ByteDance before the Spring Festival of the Year of the Rat, Chen Sicheng’s postponement of “Tang Detective 3” for one year is a gamble. Judging from the current return, he seems to have won the bet.
In an interview with the media in 2020, Chen Sicheng said that he had never thought about the transfer of the hospital to the Internet. The film went from cost toThe shooting techniques are all aimed at the cinema. In fact, apart from anything else, it can be seen from the identity of Wanda, the largest investor in “Tang Detective 3,” that this is destined to be a theater movie.
But at the same time, it was this year-long waiting that raised the expectations of the audience of the “Tang Detective” series and directly affected the subsequent word-of-mouth evaluation. Many people mentioned “disappointment” in the negative public opinion buzzwords of the lighthouse, and “not comparable to the previous two” is the main reason for the audience’s disappointment.
Objectively speaking, compared with the previous two films, “Tang Detective 3” is a film whose positioning is no longer clear. A short commentary from Douban ridiculed the main content of the film: 110 minutes of running scenes and 10 minutes of reasoning. For Tang Tanfen, the anticipated puzzle plot did not appear, and a lot of time was left for the construction of funny sections and the display of various cool shots. The movie “mixed” has outstanding characteristics. The content of the movie did not meet expectations, and negative public opinion soon occupied social media.
The most reasonable explanation for this change may be that the main appeal of this film has shifted from telling a reasoning story to making a family carnival movie suitable for viewing during the Spring Festival.
Despite the poor reputation, the Douban score has been declining. As of the publication of this article by Heike Finance, it has fallen to 5.6, which is below the pass line. However, the lively emotional communication in the film made its box office performance still high and broke quickly. 4 billion.
Compared with “Tang Detective 3”, “Li Huanying” is not a professional player. The true feeling is the first wave of praise it has received. Compared with the original sketches in 2016, the movie restored more story details, added more funny paragraphs, and relied on a wave of reversals at the end to impress a large number of audiences.
The success of “Li Huanying” is difficult to replicate. A large part of the reason is that it comes from the director’s unique life experience. However, its successful characteristics are traceable: Compared with Hollywood blockbusters, black humor, and reasoning and detective genres, it has a lower threshold for viewing movies.
The low threshold is not only reflected in the story’s background and theme, but also in the way the story is told: comedy content is mostly presented through language or single action image contrast, intuitive and easy to understand. This is obviously inseparable from the experience of the three leading actors Jia Ling, Shen Teng, and Zhang Xiaofei in performing sketches on the Spring Festival Gala stage for many years. Compared with the movie comedians, these three may know how to maximize the use of people from all over the country. The audience amused.
Although the film has a lot of deliberately funny plots, some plots that don’t seem to be clearDesign, but the effect it wants to achieve is clear at a glance. Jia Ling’s many emotional expressions, such as the “even if it makes you happy” all the time, and finally imagined the plot of driving her mother in a convertible car to watch the CCTV building, etc., to convey a huge and painful regret to the audience: Ziyu Raise but not wait. The successful communication of this theme is an important reason why it arouses the emotional resonance of the audience.
Jia Ling was born in the 1980s and was born in 1982. According to data from the Maoyan platform, among the 1.16 million users who want to watch the film, viewers aged 20 to 29 account for 54.4%. It can be seen that the idea of filial piety embodied in the traditional Chinese culture is still recognized by most young audiences.
The film’s interpretation of this concept is neither pedantic nor offensive. Jia Ling’s mother said in the film that she just hopes you are healthy and happy. This is equivalent to sublimation on the level of filial piety, which shows the great maternal love.
“Li Huanying” and “Tang Detective 3” are two completely different movies. The core of the former is family love and filial piety, while the latter is a mixture of Japanese, Hong Kong, American and other elements, trying to tell a global adventure Even the story of world peace.
Of course, this comes from the completely different creative intentions of the two directors: Jia Ling only wants to make her miss for her mother into a movie, while Chen Sicheng conceived a Tang Tan universe similar to Marvel.
The market is usually more inclined to the latter and less concerned about the former. The outbreak of “Li Huanying” may indicate that the box office battles of films that tell local stories have moved from bells and whistles to content that hits the hearts of the people, and what Jia Ling has found is one of the greatest common divisors.
03
There is still huge room
If you break 1 billion, you will dance the girl group dance; if you break 3 billion, you will lose weight. Perhaps Jia Ling herself did not expect that her film debut could reach 4 billion, or even 5 billion.
Although it was not out of the original intention, but as a result, “Li Huanying” explored a new direction for the Spring Festival film in addition to various genres such as action, science fiction, and adventure. For creators, this may be a land of fertility.
Chen Kexin once said that the success of “I’m Not the God of Medicine” allowed him to see the improvement in the thinking of Chinese audiences. Such a relatively literary and realistic theme has achieved commercial success,It is impossible for any other market to happen, which is also an important reason why he chose to stay in the industry.
Corresponding to the seemingly vast market, there are various obstacles that need to be overcome to achieve success.
In 2020, the high hopes of “Winning the Championship” and “One Second” and other films have gone at the box office. The tortuous release process of these films shows that there are always many and unpredictable difficulties.
The main melody film is also facing higher expectations from the audience. “Emergency Rescue”, released in December 2020, is not as good as expected in word of mouth and box office. The more concentrated complaint from the audience is that the creators have fallen into routine. Just imagine, when the creative team does not have much space and intentions in terms of narrative content and methods, the routine becomes a trap that can easily fall into it.
The story is set in a relatively free space for play, which is also where the “Tang Tang” series and “Li Huanying” succeeded.
The appearance of “Tang Detective” IP is the result of careful design by director Chen Sicheng. He once said in an interview that choosing a foreign Chinatown can well avoid things that could not be photographed in previous creations. At the same time, Chinatown also represents Chinese culture, which is easy for domestic audiences to accept.
Let’s talk about “Li Huanying” again. Although the development of the plot is related to a specific era, its narrative has downplayed the background of the era, focusing more on specific scenes and activities, and there are no untouchable elements.
According to Jia Ling later told the media, she currently has no plans to continue filming. Chen Sicheng said that this is the last “Tang Detective” series film he directed, and he has nothing more to express; if there is a fourth one, more new directors will be used, and his focus has shifted to Summer file.
Chen Sicheng mentioned that the single profit model of the film industry “only sells movie tickets” is difficult to carry the next unknown risk. Like most filmmakers, the solution he thought of was to create China’s Disney.
From the comparison between “Tang Detective 3” and “Li Huanying”, word-of-mouth has become more and more important to the box office, and at the level of publicity, the role of short videos has become more and more prominent. As film announcements become more dependent on short video platforms such as Douyin Kuaishou, ByteDance and Kuaishou, who are determined to enter the film industry, may become two forces that cannot be ignored in the upstream of the industry. The imagination is likely to be bigger than Maoyan. And Tao Piao tickets.
The high box office of the Spring Festival stalls has ignited the enthusiasm of the industry, and has also allowed countless people to see the power of warmly telling local stories. This is Hollywood and