has no traffic star, no big IP blessing, and even the title sounds ordinary. However, "Twinkle Twinkle Star" has created a pre-sale box office myth of 340 million, shocking the entire film industry, and even exceeded won the annual pre-sales champion "The Wandering Earth 2", which can be called the first dark horse in the 2024 movie market.
However, what is even more surprising is that more than 1 million people canceled their tickets before the movie was released. What concept? Let's put it this way, it is equivalent to canceling the box office of "Burning Winter". On the day
was released on New Year's Day, the number of ticket refunds reached an unprecedented peak, with 1.83 million people refunding more than 80 million in box office. This is not a love movie, it is obviously a "black humor".
Xiao He is also a success, and Xiao He is a failure. A movie broke both the Chinese pre-sale box office record and the ticket refund record, and "fraudulent marketing" played a major role.
Domestic film "three-piece marketing package"
Keeping up with the development of the Internet, today's movie marketing has vigorously opened the era of "short video fraud". With the purpose of "deceiving anyone, you will be the one", it is simply more ruthless than "Northern Myanmar". The best acting is probably the audience invited by the film crew.
Some people have even summed up the "three-piece package" of domestic film marketing: "Wu Jing visited the cast, Huo Siyan burst into tears at the premiere, and Zhang Yimou was shocked."
Whether it is at the producer's press conference or at the film's on-site promotional activities, You will always see a familiar and friendly figure from time to time, and that is Wu Jing.
As a "tough guy" actor who has attracted much attention in recent years, Wu Jing's box office appeal is huge. Therefore, these directors invited him to appear as a "visiting class" and interacted with the actors for a few times, and the popularity started.
More importantly, it invisibly sends a signal to the audience - this movie is worth watching. Therefore, it seems that Wu Jing's visit to the team is a good sign that the movie will be a hit.
As busy as Wu Jing is Huo Siyan. She frequently attended major movie premieres and was often moved to tears.
Huo Siyan has cried at least 10 times at the premieres of domestic films in the past two years, and her husband and son came to wipe her tears. She is indeed a veteran actor.
Of course, the most intuitive way of publicity is Lao Mouzi’s shock, which is a kind of affirmation from a “famous director”.
To prove how good the actors are at acting, the frequency of Zhang Yimou’s shock on the short video platform has far exceeded that of uc headlines. Especially on the set of "Rock Solid," he wanted to be shocked 800 times a day. I don’t know but I thought this was Zhang Yimou’s first time directing a movie.
was just more shocked, just like Huo Siyan cried more, which made people question the authenticity.
Because every time the audience walks into the cinema with high expectations, their hearts remain unchanged after watching it, and they even want to open Douban and give a one-star rating.
It is normal for there to be a slight gap between promotional materials and the main film, but the main film and the content are vastly different or even identical, and are collectively referred to as "fraudulent marketing."
We have to mention "Teng-style fraud". Shen Teng, the former box office mascot, has gradually become the chief "scammer" of Happy Twist Movies.
The movie "The Hotel Where the Sun Never Sets" had always used Shen Teng as a selling point before it was released, but ended up using a "humanoid kt board" to distract the audience. The movie was as bad as "Dream Showbiz".
On the poster of the comedy film "The Ring", Shen Teng dominates half of the country by himself. With this appearance, he must be a great hero. Unexpectedly, he only appeared for less than 3 minutes.
The same routine was used in "Li Cha's Aunt" before. Therefore, now everyone has learned to be smart. Before watching a movie, you must first find out what the "content" is.
Short video scammed into box office password
Of course, this kind of fraudulent marketing did not develop in a year or two, and it can be traced back to 2002.
At that time, Zhang Yimou had released a movie called "Hero". He was not satisfied with just taking the actors to promote the movie. This was simply too wasteful.
Therefore, they chose to hold the premiere in the Great Hall of the People, inviting more than 600 media outlets at once, and slaughtered the headlines of major media, pushing the popularity of the movie to a new peak. But this is still one-way propaganda centered on traditional media and offline activities, and the efficiency is not high enough.
It was not until 2011 that the publicity method using the Internet as the main position was officially launched.
"Love Is Not Blind" starring Bai Baihe and Wen Zhang used Weibo as a platform to create various hot topics and triggered unprecedented discussions among the audience.
This movie, with a total investment of only 8.9 million, has a box office of 350 million. This return on investment is quite amazing in the entire film industry, and is almost a miracle that is difficult to replicate.
Next, the era of short videos taking control of the box office has truly arrived. 2017’s “The Ex 3” was the first movie to detonate the market through the short video platform.
At that time, the publicity team kept throwing "emotional bombs" on Douyin and concocting all kinds of bloody scenes. Just the lyrics "Breakups should be dignified" resonated with countless netizens, who followed the trend and posted second videos.
cried to the point of fainting, which was a basic operation, and even spawned the popular meme of "the ex becomes the current one after watching the movie".
relied on a promotion cost of 50 million yuan to achieve a box office of 1.9 billion yuan, which can be regarded as opening the door to a new world for subsequent bad movies.
So much so that many people still don’t understand, who is watching a movie of this caliber? How can we still make 4 movies?
And even today, 6 years later, it still has a box office of 1.2 billion.
Because the current short video marketing is still copying the routine of "The Ex 3", there is essentially no difference.
It is nothing more than using the audience's reaction to stir up emotions and play the emotional card. It's just getting more and more extreme. It's not enough for people to cry. Dogs have to watch it cry.
Alternatively, internet celebrities may be asked to re-create movie clips to encourage netizens to participate. The most successful one is "All or Nothing", which is known as the "TikTok movie". The official Douyin account of
has more than 3.6 million fans, and the number of video views has reached a terrifying more than 24 billion, with a total of 230 topics on the list. Before the release of
, there was a frenzy of imitating "the scene where Wang Chuanjun worships Buddha's name". Even if you haven’t watched the movie, you may have seen related videos, and it has even become popular on TikTok abroad.
There is also the "three-piece set" we talked about at the beginning, which makes the highlights of the movie and related behind-the-scenes into short videos for dissemination, no matter what, it is just a compliment.
When encountering a bad domestic movie with a short video, it’s like grasping at straws. The movie has not been released yet, so publicity and distribution will take precedence. The core of
is to whet the audience's appetite and let everyone know how exciting the story is, how good the actors' acting skills are, and how heartbreaking the plot is.
has no bottom line to create various hot spots and grasp the emotions of the audience. Only in this way can they become "tap water" to forward and share, and achieve a small gain.
But there are only so many good movies, what if they are not strong enough?
That’s easy to say, just ask an actor to pose for the photo.
The producers of "Tea No. 2 Middle School" arranged a small healing script in which "migrant workers watch a movie while working, and then cry while watching it."
However, because the traces of staged photos were too obvious, he was scolded for being mentally retarded.
When it comes to the degree of mental retardation, it has to be the movie "Palma the Dog" that made the dogs cry wildly. The publicity team was probably out of their minds and really wanted to trick the audience into thinking they were dogs.
Fraudulent publicity backfires
Fraudulent publicity methods often bring a huge gap to the audience, and they feel as sick as eating flies after watching it.
The most typical case of overturning is "The Last Night on Earth". Director Bi Gan originally made literary films, and his audience was limited. But in order to sell the movie, the publicity team insisted on promoting the artistic film as a romance film.
created a "kiss New Year's Eve" stunt on the short video platform, and specially set the event at 21:50 on New Year's Eve.In this way, when the movie ends, I can just kiss my lover until the next year.
Whoever came up with this idea is a genius. Each emotional line accurately hits the g-spot of modern urban men and women. The pre-sale box office suddenly reached 159 million, and exceeded 260 million on the day of release. You must know that the total box office of Director Bi's famous "Roadside Picnic" was only 6.45 million.
From a business perspective, we must admit that this is a successful marketing, but it also invisibly overdraws trust in the director.
"The Last Night on Earth" is not a bad movie by any means, but it was criticized badly. Because the audience had not yet waited for the anticipated "New Year's Eve kiss", they "fell asleep" because the rhythm was too slow. This directly caused the stock price of investor Huace Film and Television to evaporate by 1.6 billion, and Bi Ganfeng Ping was also affected to varying degrees.
insists on forcing an audience that does not belong to it into the cinema. Whose fault is this? You can't say that the director's quality is not good, let alone blame the audience for having no taste.
It is not only literary films that have been counterattacked by deceptive marketing, but also "Twinkle, Twinkle, Twinkle Star", which has made a lot of noise this time.
The producers created a "snow resort" marketing romance in an ingenious way. 1,314 theaters across the country have also been specially selected to open on time at 13:14 on December 30. In fact, it uses a snow machine to spray snowflakes, and then matches it with music, which is called "bringing the audience a romantic snowfall experience." The short video of
was heavily promoted, and it was hard to get a ticket for this show. The phone numbers of many theaters were almost overwhelmed.
The refund rate hit a new high in the beginning because some people did not buy "Snow Resort". But according to feedback from viewers who went there later, the viewing experience was very bad. There will be "snowflakes" interrupting the process, and some people even got sprayed with foamy snow, making them so angry that they wanted to call the police on the spot.
The key movie itself is not good-looking. It is seriously inconsistent with the publicity and has a feeling of being "cheated". The whole story obviously takes place mostly in summer, but it tries hard to market it as snow. I originally thought it was a sweet love, but it turned out to be extremely boring with long shots of unknown meanings, dreams and reality intertwined.
Therefore, the movie started to go up and down, and "ugly" also appeared on Weibo's hot search list as promised. It was originally the first dark horse of 2024, but it was suddenly turned into a big joke in Chinese-language movies.
Bad money drives out good money
relies on short video marketing to leverage high box office, which has been tried repeatedly in the industry. To put it nicely, it’s marketing, but to put it poorly, it’s “fraud.”
Nowadays, traffic is king, and the marketing of movie dramas has become a game between the film producers and the audience. Providing false expectations to the audience through false propaganda. Only when the audience was tricked into entering the theater did they realize that the best part of the entire movie was already in the short video.
As long as you tweet on Douyin and find a few audience members and actors to cry, you can get hundreds of millions in box office. It’s not that the quality of movies cannot be improved, but short video promotion is more cost-effective. As for the follow-up reputation, whether it is a red or a black and red film is not at all considered by the film crew.
This kind of marketing method of "give a piece of candy first, then give a slap in the face" is extremely disrespectful to the audience, and will be backlashed sooner or later. It's like a Happy Twist movie, every time Shen Teng is used to stage the "wolf is coming" story, consuming the audience's patience and trust again and again. Nowadays, even for movies with Shen Teng's famous name, people's expectations are not as high as before.
Bad money drives out good money, and fraudulent movie marketing is definitely not a good sign for the film and television industry. The performances on the screen are all mediocre, but the scenes off the screen are more exciting than the last.
The producer of "Stories from Yong'an Town" threatened to "make an appointment with the film critic"; the screenwriter of "I Am a Mountain" went crazy online, cursing the audience as "mediocre ravines" and "humble cowards"...
Spring Festival release Coming soon, the real fighting and wrestling in the film industry in 2024 will officially begin. The publicity teams of various companies have been sharpening their knives for a long time. I don’t know what kind of ridiculous farce will be staged by then.
Movies are spiritual food for the public, so we can’t always force-feed “shit” to the audience. If in the future, movie promotions are all based on fraud, then Chinese-language movies will indeed be doomed. Marketing expenses are higher than production expenses, good films are not watched, and bad films make a lot of money.If this continues, will anyone still be willing to make movies with their heart?
Reference:
Houlang Movie: Have you ever been "cheated" by short video movie announcements?
Fixed Focus: Movie box office, is it controlled by short videos?
ic Lab: Short video marketing, a fig leaf for domestic bad movies
Entertainment Capitalism: Audiences go crazy, dogs cry wildly, movie marketing has more acting skills than movies
Fox Factory Entertainment Observation: In 2023, movie marketing will gradually go "crazy"
Editor: Chacha
