This article is from WeChat official account:Dumou (ID: DomoreDumou)< span class="text-remarks">, author: He Runxuan, the title picture is from “Destroy Squad” in the second season of “Death Machine”
Online for a week, the audience expects that the second season of “Love, Death and Robots” for two years has suffered a word-of-mouth crash.
Compared with the high score of 9.2 scored by 350,000 people in the first season, the Douban score in the second season has fallen below 7 points. Nearly half of the 90,000 viewers who watched it first gave Samsung’s evaluation, which means that it is not that bad, but it also slipped into mediocrity.
Because of wild imagination and exquisite visual effects, “Death of Love” was once considered by the industry to be the work of streaming media innovation in the animation industry, but the performance of the second season seemed to make this revolution ushered in defeat. On the website of Rotten Tomatoes, its popcorn index is only 47%, which is one-third less than the first season.
If foreign media critics are still merciful to it, the narrative out of the Eastern world makes the Chinese audience unceremoniously put down three words: dissatisfaction.
In addition to reflections on production, people may be more concerned with a question behind it: How did Netflix, which has a good hand of cards, messed up “Deadlock”? Is it still the Netflix that made the “Kingdom” that made a sensation in Asia?
The repetition of God’s work is not a “good harvest”
With the 18 episodes of the first seasonCompared with the capacity, the second season of “Love Death” has been cut by more than half, with only 8 episodes. This length of time first makes the audience who are expecting to see “Science Fiction + Yellow Storm + Diablo + Metaphor” not very satisfied. What’s cramped is not only capacity, but also positive brain holes.
The reason for the gods in the first season of “Death Machine” lies in its crazy brain.
People who are familiar with “Death Machine” know that the inspiration for this series is “Howling Metal” and “Universal Bizarre Records”. The former is a French comic magazine founded in 1974. The founders are headed by cartoonists Morbis and Philip Drutt, and have assembled HR Giger, Chris Foss, Jacques Taldi, Enchi Bi Top painters and designers such as La, Richard Corbe, etc. In addition to providing a platform for these European painters, “Howl” itself also allows these creators to have an organic connection with sci-fi movies, almost laying the aesthetic foundation of contemporary sci-fi.
The cover of “Howling Metal”
Chris Foss designed the first version of the spaceship concept map for “Alien”, and Morbiss himself did it for “Dune” (Zuo Du edition), “Star Wars”, “Electronic Century Conquest”, and “The Fifth Element” “Concept Design”.
The director of “Alien” Ridley Scott once said that “Howl” enlightened the aesthetic direction of the film. “In 1977, I came into contact with “Howling Metal” and its publishing house by chance. For other comics under the banner, in the same year, I won the right to direct “Alien”; at that moment, I realized what kind of aesthetics this movie should develop.”
On this basis, “Universal Bizarre Record” was born seven years after “Howl” was founded. This is a segmented movie composed of 9 cyberpunk stories, involving zombies, crossing, wasteland , Comedy, sci-fi, and fantasy, in addition to being a bit backward in technology today, the level of weirdness and chaos of the story is not inferior to “Love Death”. Wuhu Animation believes that this animation lays down the three central themes of American animation: the motif of the battle between good and evil, the role of heroism, and the framework of science fiction.
“Universal Bizarre Record”
The two producers, Tim Miller and David Fincher, were fascinated by the above-mentioned works. After ten years of exploration, they finally joined hands with Netflix to make “Love Death”.
On the basis of inheriting the former sci-fi framework, “Love Death” is based on the three conceptual fulcrums of “love”, “death” and “robot”, and explores human society in the context of the new era . Among them, “Happy Hunting” and “The Witness”, which are most well-known to domestic audiences, superimpose steampunk and cyberpunk on the background of oriental fantasy, which not only shows the spectacle visually, but also allows the audience to experience the global world. The pleasure of shuttle.
Screenshot of “Happy Hunting”
And some classic images, such as super-light travel, mutants, and monsters, can also be inherited here. For example, “Beyond the Crack in Aquila”, “Sonny’s Advantage”, and “The Shapeshifter” all have these key plots.
The “robot” in the title of the play appeared repeatedly in the first season: it not only refers to ordinary robots, but also extends to robots and mechanical armor, and it also appeared once in the beginning of the movie as a logo symbol.
But in the second season, “Dead Machine” lost this global perspective. None of the eight episodes involved the East, and even Hong Kong, the capital of cyberpunk, lost its trace.
At the same time, conceptual repetitions continue: The old topic of human beings being killed by robots takes a quarter of the space (“Automation Customer Service”, “Life House”) ,The remaining episodes are hard to say that there are new ideas-“Snow in the Desert” wants to discuss the experience of eternity and life, which is an old stalk passed down from generation to generation in the science fiction world; “High Grass” takes the urban ghost story style, except for the fixed frame The dazzling skills of animation, the story is not reversed.
“High Grass”
More importantly, although the first season of “Death of Love” was criticized by netizens as a “visual feast, a wasteland of thought”, it still has a penetrating cultural expression.
The body of the fox demon in “Happy Hunting” has been transformed into a purely mechanical body, forming a set of intertextuality with the Mechanic Ji in recent science fiction films, which can even be traced back to the creation of science fiction author Gwyneth Jones in 1985 “Gynoid” concept.
“Gynoid” is usually translated as “machine girl” in the context of the Japanese second dimension. In addition to the original female robot, it can also refer to the cute girl equipped with auxiliary machinery and the cute girl who controls the mecha.
But unlike Moe Niang, “Death Machine” can also find a cyber erotic contrast in Japanese culture: Japanese erotic manga artist Sora Yamaki is obsessed with drawing Sexy Robot (sexy robot) and created a mechanical version of Marie Lian Monroe, the latter, like the fox demon in “Dead Death”, has the coldness of metal and the charm of women. In addition to eroticism, “Happy Hunting” also has anti-colonial expressions. Although due to limited time, this expression is more of a highly concentrated comment, but the flavor is undiminished.
The Fox Demon in the first season of “Dead Machine”
However, after misappropriating the concepts and images of the first season, “Dead Me” failed to find its own foothold in the second season. Douban netizens commented that “serious streaming thinking”, that is, they can see many works. Shadow, but not as good as the original.
And jumping out of the animation content, structurally speaking, the second season also has a flaw. Through 18 non-linear independent short films, the first season of “Death of Love” removed the tradition of foreshadowing and formed a structural rebellion against traditional animation. However, the second season lost this rebellious spirit in the repetition of concepts.
The senior film critic “the ticket checking staff in Hall 3” simply criticized it for its “amusement paradise tendency”: “Death Machine was a pioneer with the slogan “Fuck Kids”, but the second season is obviously He became Song Gongming who was recruited for security.”
Big Data VS “Love Death Machine”
What’s wrong with the second season of “Dead Death”, which has a shocking reputation?
Currently, a speculation in the industry is that Netflix is caught in its own big data model.
This suspicion is not unreasonable. Netflix’s “House of Cards” is the winner of big data, and Netflix is also willing to strengthen its data label to the outside world. More importantly, the content team for the second season of “Dead Death” is almost the original team, and the selected works are also a large number of Nebula Award and Hugo Award writers. The formula is the same, but the body feel is quite different after leaving the factory. There is only one possibility: deviations occurred during processing.
“House of Cards”
Although the production of the second season of “Dead Machine” is still a black box, looking back at Netflix’s growth path, you will find that big data is an important support point.
Atlantic magazine published a long article in 2014(translator IDEAISLAND), mentioned that they discovered through crawling methods that Netflix had as many as 76,897 repertoire styles, and the description of these repertoire styles was very detailed.
For example, when describing a feature film, Netflix does not simply call it a love story or something, but uses “undercover films adapted from classic Victorian literature”, “1980s brain-burning cult horror films”, “Dark Suspense Gangster Movies” to locate the audience’s accurate preferences and increase retention. The journalist of the magazine also told the Netflix official of his research results, which was affirmed by Todd Yellin, vice president of Netflix product innovation.
Netflix’s gameplay is mainly to design different labels first, such as “1980s”, “comedy”, “fiction adaptation”, “song and dance”, and then arrange and combine these labels to form a style.
These permutations and combinations also have a fixed grammar, usually: region + adjective + noun + based on xxx + occurred in the xxx era + photographed in the xxx era + about xxx topics + suitable for xxx age groups. Take “Stranger Things” as an example, it has a magical combination label: children + monsters + thriller + retro music, but it has become a trend icon.
“Stranger Things”
According to Yellin, Netflix spends money to hire people to watch movies and label them. The training materials alone can reach 36 pages, and they even score 1-5 points on the protagonist’s moral level and the romance of the movie. In the end, Netflix will use machine learning algorithms to integrate the user’s viewing data and the tags of the professional team.
Under this rigorous algorithm, Netflix is convinced of its technical capabilities. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, a former Netflix content executive stated that the techies “never have a reason to do anything beyond pure indicators.” Hunter, the former chief product officer who has left Netflix, and his team even believe that it is a waste of money for Netflix to spend money to produce promotional videos to promote self-made films. Because the product team can make up their ownEdit movies to make short films that attract more clicks.
But this is not the first time Netflix has overturned big data. The 2014 “Marco Polo” is a reference case. This huge US$90 million system was originally intended by Netflix to expand into the global market, but because it was full of lust for the Eastern palace, it was criticized at home and abroad.
On Rotten Tomatoes, its freshness index is only 33%. Film critic He Shizhi believes that the problem of this drama is mainly the distortion of historical facts, a large number of naked sex scenes that have not made any progress in the progress of the story, and the story editing and narrative are chaotic. The root of these problems lies in Netflix’s blind trust in big data. Another film critic Zhou Liming also expressed a similar point of view. Chen Zhuchuang is too influenced by big data and regards writing TV scripts as filling out scientific questionnaires.
The competition with Hollywood also made this company realize that big data is not everything. When “The Wife Club” starring Jane Fonda was launched in 2016, the Netflix product team selected a picture to promote to users, but there was no Jane Fonda on the picture, because the test showed that when she was not in the picture At the time, it can attract more users to click.
After a heated debate, Netflix finally decided to include Jane Fonda’s picture. This turmoil is just a microcosm of the conflict between Hollywood and Silicon Valley in Netflix. A former executive of the Netflix engineering team, Bob Helter, once told The Wall Street Journal that the relationship between the two parties was “naturally tense” because “Los Angeles people do not believe in numbers as much as Silicon Valley people.”
“Family Wife Club”
So, from the standpoint of a technology company, it doesn’t seem so difficult to understand Waterloo in the second season of Love Death. First, according to Techcrunch’s report, Netflix has indeed tried big data in the “Dead Machine” project: According to a 100% A/B test, there may be four types of viewers watching the first season’s program. The order may come from previous user data. And compared to the blindfold in the first quarter of the projectRunning wild, the second season does have more visual spectacles, which tends to please the audience.
Unless Netflix discloses its own production process, it is difficult for Netflix to thoroughly clean up the suspicion of flattering viewers with data.
Apart from “Dead Machine”, has Netflix hit the pot
To be fair, although the second season of “Dead Machine” is mediocre, there is still merit in returning it to the ordinary animation industry. For example, the wonderful visual effects are unanimously recognized by the audience.
The production company of this season’s “Extermination Team” and “Full House” is Blur Studio, which is familiar to the audience. The latter is the visual effects company of producer Tim Miller, who participated in the “Star Wars The Force Unleashed” “The CG of the “League of Legends” game and the post-production of the “Avatar” and “Terminator” series of movies. Blur Studio still contributed fake and real CG special effects this season, making the audience wonder whether this is an animation or a real person.
The protagonist of “Destroy Squad” in the second season of “Dead Machine”
In addition, “The Drowned Giant” is also considered to be the best work of this season, like a sci-fi prose poem, which has been repeatedly analyzed by the audience. Its original work comes from the writer J·G·Ballard during the New Wave period. Douban netizens associate it with Marquez’s “The Most Beautiful Drowning Man in the World”, and believe that it has the temperament of a dark fairy tale: compared to holiness and beauty. , Loneliness and absurdity are eternal themes in the world.
The Bureau of Future Affairs thinks that there are three other literary analogies related to this: Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”, Melville’s “Moby Dick” and Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels.” The end of the analogy is still an open case, but it can attract controversy, which is enough to prove that the audience pays.
Screenshot of “The Drowned Giant”
Aside from “Dead Machine” and the current non-fatal big data paradox, Netflix’s money-making business is going well. It would be a bit mean to criticize it based on just one work. According to the Q1 financial report, Netflix’s net income reached $1.71 billion, which is almost all of Netflix’s income in 2019.
Netflix, which has made money, is also pursuing its own globalization strategy drastically. One important piece of deployment is the Asia-Pacific. Due to its relative superiority in infrastructure and per capita entertainment consumption, South Korea and Japan have become its first targets.
Since entering the Korean market in 2016, Netflix has invested more than RMB 4.8 billion and operated more than 70 projects. In February of this year, Netflix continued to overweight, announcing that it would invest US$500 million in content production in South Korea. If you use the cost of this year’s new film “Victory” to convert, this investment can produce at least 23 projects of the same size.
Half of the funds in the Asia-Pacific region is spent in South Korea. Apart from the fact that Hallyu culture originally circulates around the world, the success of “The Kingdom” may be a booster. After spending 4 years infiltrating the Korean film and television industry, Netflix launched its first self-produced drama “The Kingdom” in 2019, and the latter soon ranked among the New York Times’ top ten series of 2019.
This also opened Netflix’s journey to American blockbusters in South Korea-“Asda Chronicle”, “Sweet Home”, and “Victory” all have very strong beauty film styles: large investment, large battles, and narrative framework. grand. But from the content point of view, this American “invasion” may be mixed: the advantage is that it has injected new blood into the Korean drama market that has fallen into the typified involution; the disadvantage is that it may damage the original small and beautiful core of Korean.
Netflix’s first self-produced drama “The Kingdom” in Korea
In Japan next door, Netflix obviously has to be a little reserved. baseFor the basic disk of the two-dimensional in Japan, the current cooperation between the two parties is more in animation. According to the playlist, Netflix will have 22 original animation projects and 3 live-action comics in Japan in 2021. However, unlike “Deadlock”, one of Netflix’s masterpieces in Japan in recent years is “Rilakkuma and Kaoru”. This stop-motion animation focuses on tenderness and healing, and is dubbed by netizens as the control group of “Deadlock”: ” Cute, Lucky and Rilakkuma.
“Moe, Lucky and Rilakkuma”
At the Q1 earnings call, Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarando also emphasized the global radiation of original content from Japan and South Korea. “What we see in Korean dramas and Japanese anime is that they are regionally And the surrounding countries have performed very well. And occasionally they will match the interests of global users, triggering a global desire to watch.”
But apart from capital, from the perspective of users, Netflix is facing the same challenges as the second season of “Dead Machine”. Q1 Netflix’s subscriber growth was only 3.98 million, which was lower than the previous forecast of 6 million. Although Netflix said that this situation was due to the early release of subscriber growth due to the epidemic last year, the market still believes that it is in a high degree of competition, with slow growth and competition. Factors influence.
Disney+ subscribers broke 100 million in March of this year, and according to a Parrot Analytics report, viewers’ preferences for content have changed in the past two years. Q1 Their total demand for Netflix content is slightly higher than 50%, and this figure was 65% the year before.
Netflix’s opponent is not only Disney, but also cable TV and YouTube. In the earnings call, founder Reed Hastings admitted this: “Our biggest competitor in terms of watch time is cable TV. Our second biggest competitor is YouTube, which is longer than Netflix in terms of watch time. Much more, and Disney’s scale is much smaller, but we are one of the middle members.”
In the broader market, Netflix is on the lookout: HBO Max, Apple TV+, AmazonPrime and Peacock, and even Tik Tok are among them. The field of streaming media has expanded from the long video field to the entire pan-entertainment, which may not have been thought of when Netflix was founded.
Netflix is optimistic about this. Hastings pointed out: “Competition is fierce, but this industry has always been like this. We have competed with Amazon Prime for 13 years and Hulu for 14 years. So from the perspective of the competitive environment, We did not notice any substantial changes.”
This kind of optimism has always been the spirit of Netflix. When it was underappreciated by the market in 2019, they used 98% of the users to be potential Netflix users to motivate themselves, and achieved a counterattack in 2020, and the stock price rose. More than 70%.
But all competition will eventually return to content. After the second season of “Dead Machine”, perhaps Netflix should realize that the biggest change is not the competitive environment, but the audience. The big data of “House of Cards” eight years ago may be a good medicine, but time has passed and the prescription may have changed.
After all, “House of Cards” also said: the always change is the best.
Reference material:
The sacred drama rushes to the street, you are not scolding, the ticket checking staff in Hall 3
Netflix knows who its enemy is, Dongfang Entertainment
Why does Netflix value the Korean market so much? Mtime.com
How Netflix Reverse-Engineered Hollywood, Atlantic (compiled/IDEAISLAND)
Algorithm or human favor? Netflix ultimately chose Hollywood, the Wall Street Journal (Compilation/Kathy)
“Love, Death and Robots”: An attempt to make animation go further in the streaming media era, wuhu animation human space
Without this 1974 science fiction magazine, there would be no today’s “Love, Death and Robots”, machine core
This article is from WeChat official account:Dumou (ID: DomoreDumou), Author: He Runxuan