The “internationalization” of Thai movies is not smooth.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Reading Entertainment” (ID : yiqiduyu), text | Zero.
Thai film is gradually moving towards a bigger market, but also taking into account the importance of maintaining the characteristics and diversity of the film theme. .
As the last batch of new films before the National Day, the films released on September 20th mainly include “Decisive Victory”, “Little Q” and “Friendship and Above”. Among the three films, “Decisive Moment” is a pre-heating of the theme of the gift; “Little Q” is adapted from Japanese novels, and the successful remake of the “Guide Dog Xiao Q” is in the forefront, taking the warmth of healing the wind; “Friendship and Above” is a Thai love comedy.
After the frenzy of the National Day stalls, this week’s short-lived movie will not have much box office imagination. After the National Day, there were heavyweight new films such as “Climb”, “My and my motherland”, and there was obviously not much room in the short ten-day schedule. According to the lighthouse data, on September 20th, the overall movie box office was only 74.619 million yuan, and the highest single “small Q” in one day was only 16.673 million yuan in income. The first day of the “Friendship and Above” box office was 4,592,600 yuan, still in “Zhu Xian 1” After the old films such as “Little Wishes” and “Rom Little Black Wars”, the proportion of the films was 10.4%, and the percentage of box office was only 6.3%.
The production company of “Friendship and Above” Thailand GDH559 Film Company is the mainstay of Thai film. In 2017, the dark horse explosion “Genius Gunner” won 271 million yuan in the mainland China, which is also the team of this company. GTH Pictures, the predecessor of Thailand’s GDH559 film company, has long been a record with youth love stories such as “Little Lovers” and “Hornors”.When beautiful.
On: “Little Lovers”, below: “Hormon”
“Friendship and Above” is a standard Thai love comedy movie. Overall, the film has a good smile design, a beautiful character, a story of “friendship or more, lovers are not full” that is easy to resonate. The heroine invites the Chinese audience to be familiar with this little thing. “Small water” in the “Pingzina Leviser Pai Bun.” But from the box office results, it did not stir up any splashes in China.
After the “Genius Gunners”, Thai film type innovation has stagnated?
In 2017, a “Genius Gunner” changed the psychological expectations of Chinese audiences on Thai movies. Previously, Thai film, as a source of small language, has only made a special feature in a few types of films, and is well known to Chinese audiences: one is the “small fresh youth” represented by “The Little Love of First Love” and “Dear Galileo”. The love film, the second is that Tony Jia almost single-handedly hit the internationally famous “Fighting Fighter”, “Dongyin Gong” and other Thai Boxing Movies; the third is Thailand Thriller The horror film, such as “Ghost”, “Spirit of the Ghost”, etc., is distinguished from Japanese-style horror and Hong Kong-style horror film by its unique style, and enjoys a high reputation in the horror film circle.
From the perspective of the Chinese mainland film market, the Muay Thai film has limited appeal to the mainland audience who have been appetizing by domestically produced kung fu movies. There is no new generation of superstar flags outside Tonyja. The horror film market is not big, and the horror of the Thai horror film is extremely high, and it is almost impossible to go through the trial. Among the three types of movies in Thailand, it is obvious that the international potential audience of youth romance films is the widest.
So “Friendship and Above” can be regarded as the traditional advantage of Thai movies.project. The main story of this film is similar to the classic Taiwanese drama “I may not love you” – a pair of opposite-sex friends of the opposite sex who insist on being a “good friend forever” for the sake of the relationship between the two. Rather than a lover, in the past, the two experienced a love relationship with other people while maintaining this “friendship and more” relationship, which led to a series of stories containing laughter and tears.
The boundaries between heterosexual friendship and love, this is a topic that is easily controversial. Although “Friendship and Above” has a thick comedy shell, there is still no circumvention of the ambiguity of the relationship between the two “friends/lovers” to the audience. When they use their friends’ labels to fall in love, they hang on them. The name of a couple, but not rewarded by others, is undoubtedly a kind of harm.
But the “Friendly Friends” or all Thai comedy films worth learning about Chinese movies is that they have the ability to make exaggerated and brain-comed comedy bridges very natural. This ability is actually reflected in the widely spread “Thai Brain Advertising” – usually without a star, but with a very savvy perspective on a small scene of healing or funny.
But including this “Friendship and Above”, Thai films are concentrated on a certain type of theme, and it is difficult to avoid the emergence of routines. Youth and beautiful heroines, as if you never have to consider the consumption, consumption, life, and superficial love story endings – this part of the film represented by “Friendship and Above” is both a Thai movie. Going out of the mainstream of the country is also a type of “product” that completely succumbs to the market. This point is far from the real movie of Thai movies like “Genius Gunners”.
The success of the first love story, “Love in Siam” and other successful Thai love movies are sincere, and you are willing to discuss some of the core issues from the theme of the comedy style. But “Friendship and Above” is a part built on “Friendship above, love below “There are quite airy comedies on the air, as if floating in the air can not fall. We see young and beautiful male and female protagonists flying by plane, deep into various emotional problems, but there is no trace On the topic of love, “Friendship and Above” finally chose the “following the way” to complete the finale, and did not give some real feelings that can be contemplative after a light in the cinema.
Compared, it is even more rare for the “Genius Gunners”. Love, exams, and humanity are also universal topics. The “Genius Gunners” completely deviated from the routine traps of Thai movies, and opened up new types of films in a new style. This has been successful overseas, and “Friendship.” The above “appears to return to the old line ten years ago.
“Friendship above” under international packaging, may not be able to go international
Of course, it is not objective to say that “Friendship and Above” is completely in place. Reading Entertainment Jun believes that “Friendship and Above” is more like a work based on traditional Thai love comedy, plus a lot of “international packaging” works. In this regard, “Friendship and Above” is implicitly ambitious.
In the film, Pan’s career is “empty”, and the protagonist’s career is a music agent. He is helping his boyfriend’s musicians to record a song from a group of Asian singers. Naturally, their stories have evolved from cities in Thailand to Hong Kong, Malaysia and many other places in China. Some important lines in the film and even the theme songs are in the form of Mandarin. The Cantonese and Thai language stalks are a big smile. In addition, the name of the famous Malaysian singer Zhu Zhuai also appeared in the plot.
Internationalization of the place where the story takes place, reading entertainment is still influenced by two aspects. One is that it is easier to integrate into the international film market outside the local audience, especially China, Southeast Asia, etc.; It is a change in the temperament of the film itself. Therefore, “Friendship and Above” is therefore more modern, but it is also more isolated from the rustic.
Only for those foreign markets, this set may not work. The logic is just like “Chinese and American co-production” trying to open the US market, such as the “Great Wall” and other Chinese films, trying to adapt to overseas markets, or inevitably acclimatized. This is the heart disease of the Chinese film market for a long time.
However, this situation has changed with the emergence of a number of domestic box office explosions. It is not difficult to find that in recent years, “War Wolf 2”, “Wandering Earth”, “Red Sea Action”, “Where is the Devil’s Angel”, all are done in the country.The “technical level” of “internationalization” is the level of technology. Guo Fan, director of “Wandering Earth” once said frankly: “Can you accept them (foreign)? I will serve the Chinese audience first.” After the domestic market has grown sufficiently large, this is actually a fairly sober attitude.
And the output of small-language movies such as Thailand to the larger market may still take into account the combination of some “universal emotions” and regional features – the Indian film from “Wrestling Daddy” To “Mystery Superstar” has already harvested a round of market, this year’s “How to Home” also reflects the spread of the common emotional resonance of human beings in different regions. From this point of view, while Thai films are gradually moving toward a larger market, they must also consider the importance of maintaining the characteristics and diversity of film subjects.