The Lunar New Year festival in mainland China's film market is always a highly anticipated prime time, creating huge box office revenue for film and television works. However, just this past weekend (December 15th to 17th), 14 new Chinese and foreign films were released in mainland China, including "The Third", "The Fury", "Detective Conan: The Shadow of the Black Iron Fish" and "The Dog God" etc., but the overall box office performance was unsatisfactory. So far, no film has hit a box office of more than 1 billion yuan. This makes people wonder, what changes have taken place in the most popular Lunar New Year stalls in the past?
First of all, let's take a look at the highly anticipated new Lunar New Year film "The Three Brigades". Produced by Chen Sicheng, directed by Dai Mo, written by Zhang Ji, and starring Zhang Yi, Wei Chen, Cao Bingkun, Wang Xiao, Zhang Zixian, etc., this domestic crime suspense film is adapted from real events. It was screened at the Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Film Festival in early November and won the Widely praised. However, despite its excellent reputation, the box office in the first weekend was only 245 million yuan, and it did not become a hit as expected.
In comparison, the crime suspense film "The Disappearance", also produced by Chen Sicheng's team, reached a box office of 545 million yuan in the first weekend of the summer season. It can be seen that the performance of "The Third Brigade" was not satisfactory. In addition, "Tide of Fury" and "Detective Conan: Black Iron Fish Shadow", which were released last weekend, received box office of 86.4 million yuan and 72.74 million yuan respectively in the first two days of the weekend, which are relatively good box office performances.
However, Luc Besson's highly acclaimed new film "The Dog God" only received 5.13 million yuan at the box office in three days of release, which is in sharp contrast to its 8.3 points on Douban. Overall, this year's Lunar New Year prime-time box office has not been as popular as in previous years, and there has not yet been a movie that can be called a hit. Against this background, we can’t help but wonder, why did the box office fail to take off during prime time during the Lunar New Year this year?
On the one hand, although the much-anticipated "The Three Brigades" has an excellent reputation, it is not a good movie. Its emotional concentration is greater than its narrative density, which affects the box office to a certain extent. On the other hand, the extremely cold weather in the northern region also affected the number of moviegoers over the weekend. What's more important is that this year's summer box office has been so hot that the audience's willingness to spend on movies may have been overstretched. Based on all the above reasons, the film market for the Lunar New Year holiday this year appears to be tepid.
Despite this, we can still look forward to the rest of this Lunar New Year season, because the upcoming "Twinkle Twinkle Star" has used innovative publicity and marketing events and the IP effect of the web drama of the same name. The current pre-sale box office is as high as 258 million yuan, it may become a dark horse in the Chinese film market this year.
The concept of the Lunar New Year prime time slot was first created by Hong Kong filmmakers. The Lunar New Year slot in mainland China's movie market originally refers to mid-to-late December to the end of the year. As more and more films squeeze into this slot, it gradually Extended to late November to December 31 each year. However, in recent years, with the rise of the Spring Festival and summer sales, as well as the increasing importance of the National Day sales, the Lunar New Year sales have gradually been relegated to the second-tier schedule.
Comparing last year’s (2017) Lunar New Year stalls with this year’s Lunar New Year stalls, we will find that in last year’s Lunar New Year stalls, the film market set a box office record of 5.6 billion yuan, while the box office of this year’s Lunar New Year stalls has only been 2.464 billion yuan so far. It is obvious that Not as good as last year. Especially during the Lunar New Year prime time this year, although the box office was slightly higher than usual, it was far from a hit level. This may also be related to the fact that the types of films released during the Lunar New Year this year are very rich, the quality is generally above the standard, and the quantity is also large.
However, this did not bring a more popular box office performance for the Lunar New Year season. Under such circumstances, we will also have "Aquaman 2: The Lost Kingdom", "Stealth" and "The Annual Meeting Will Not Stop!" ”, “Goldfinger”, “If You Are the One 3” and many other blockbuster films, perhaps a blockbuster film will emerge among them, bringing a successful end to the Chinese film market this year. Let’s wait and see!
