Picture source @Visual China
text | Mouyu
The Spring Festival war is coming. Among the currently 6 top seeds, " Let's Shake the Sun Together " directed by Lianrui Pictures and Han Yan is a special one.
For director Han Yan, this is the last part of his life trilogy, based on the first two parts "Get Out!" "Tumor King" and " gives you a little red flower " are well-known, and "Let's Shake the Sun Together" has its own IP value.
This is also the reason why the distributor dares to put this small-budget film on the Spring Festival schedule to compete with the major powers. It is worth mentioning that this is also the first time director Han Yan has set foot in the Spring Festival.
For Lianrui Pictures, starting from "Send You a Little Red Flower" in 2020, Lianrui has gradually polished a set of "low cost investment + realistic themes of life, old age, sickness and death" style of film and television production.
This mode is used in "Send You a Little Red Flower", "My Sister", " Life Events", "I Love You!" "After many works such as "We Shake the Sun Together" have achieved both word-of-mouth and box office success, the release of "Let's Shake the Sun Together" also means that this model will usher in the final test during the Spring Festival:
How can Lianrui's "birth, old age, sickness and death" business experience be shaken out? How big is the box office?
"Old Age, Sickness and Death" Business History
On New Year's Day in 2021, Lianrui Pictures collaborated with director Han Yan for the first time to produce "A Little Red Flower for You". With a box office of 1.43 billion, it won the box office championship of the year.
Since then, realistic themes have become the main direction of Lianrui Pictures’ efforts. "My Sister", "Life Events", "Mom!" were released successively. 》,《 I love you! ", with the speed of launching two movies a year, these movies with the same characteristics were quickly created into the Lianrui model.
dismantles the Lianrui model. It mainly has the following characteristics:
First, it lies in the cost control of videos.
Looking at the above-mentioned movies of Lian Rui, there is no all-star lineup, such as in the movie "Mom!" "The leading actors Wu Yanshu and Xi Meijuan chose acting talents that are more suitable for their roles. The most popular among all actors is only the third female actor Wen Qi, who is a new generation actor.
In most cases, in order to expand the base of the film, Lianrui adopts a mix of , "a small number of well-known creators + a large number of non-famous creators" and .
For example, in "My Sister", except for Zhang Zifeng, most of the others are new actors making their first appearance; in "Life Events", Zhu Yilong takes the lead. Not only the actors, but also the director Liu Jiangjiang are new in the industry.
This kind of cost control allows Lianrui Pictures to win before losing in film production.
Secondly, focuses on realistic themes that are “niche and highly emotional”.
Lian Rui's topic selection can be summarized as "birth, old age, illness and death": life, such as "My Sister" and the sister's choice of personal life; old age, such as "I Love You!" "The emotional life of the elderly; illness, such as the fight against illness in "Send You a Little Red Flower"; death, such as the emotional experience with deceased relatives in "Life Events".
Few literary and artistic works touch on these topics, and even in real life, the audience has little experience or will not take the initiative to imagine them. But these problems are faced by everyone. This feeling of "rarely thinking about" and being "knocked on the head and asked" made the audience resonate strongly with the movie and achieved high-scoring movies.
The third reason lies in Lianrui’s rich emotional after-sales service.
After watching Lian Rui's movie, most viewers will have a "touching" moment. To put it bluntly, they will cry.
It is not difficult to create a touching drama, but it is extremely difficult for a company to produce a "crying" drama stably with . Here I have to mention again the deep ties with Liansoft after 2020. Director Han Yan has been appointed.
How does director
of Crying Valve evaluate Han Yan’s characteristics in shooting realistic-themed movies?
Some film critics commented that Han Yan always adds romantic techniques and comedy passages to heavy themes, even in "Get Out!" "Tumor King" adds a lot of fantasy and two-dimensional elements.
This method of deconstructing the heavy themes of "birth, old age, illness and death" by inserting joyful content has expanded the base of Han Yan's films, and at the same time allowed domestic audiences full of "taboos" to watch these films without any worries.
According to Han Yan’s interview, as a literary film director, he was influenced by Ning Hao’s development trajectory. He specialized in genre films for a period of time and studied the creation methods of genre films.
Specifically speaking of creation, Han Yan added a mixture of various movie types to the emotional output that literary directors are good at. Take the first two films of his life trilogy as an example.
《Get lost! "Tumor King" contains half of which is the original flavor of chick flicks that Bai Baihe was familiar with at the time, and the other half is the literary and artistic film style that Han Yan is good at. It is worth mentioning that Han Yan and Bai Baihe were classmates at the Central Academy of Drama at the time, and it was Han Yan who actively recommended Bai Baihe for the heroine of the film. This was a part where the actors and directors each played their best.
The same is true in "Send You a Little Red Flower". The lead actor Yi Yang Qianxi has just become famous for "Young You", and half of "Send You a Little Red Flower" is when he has just experienced the pain of youth in literature. The other half has returned to Han Yan's literary and lyrical field.
Han Yan skillfully manipulated his own creative methods in Lian Rui's niche realism-themed film about "birth, old age, illness and death", and steadily produced batches according to the "a+b=Lian Rui" model.
Prior to this, "Life Events" had been generally disliked by the market due to its new director and the Qingming Festival schedule. It was also because of the supervision of Han Yan, which added reassurance to the combination and made this film a Chinese film. A unique Qingming stall in the market.
But this model is not without its hidden dangers. In addition to the "crying director", Han Yan has another well-known label, which is "half a good show". While
uses romantic and comedy techniques to show the core of realism, it will inevitably lead to "distortion" of the content description.
Real problems are complicated, but many times romantic expression is needed. To make you cry at this moment, you need to make a choice.
As a commercial film shot for Lian Rui, Han Yan chose a more basic shooting method. This allows the Lianrui model to use Xiaobo to win more box office, but it also makes some movie fans feel resentful.
A short comment with high praise and low score on the Douban entry of "Send You a Little Red Flower" wrote:
"The confrontation between man and disease, the understanding of death... I thought it would be very deep, but it turned out to be... It’s a dumb movie."
Bian Xiao has been engaged in domestic first-line theater distribution for a long time, he revealed to Mou Entertainment. Movies that rely on emotional incitement to gain more attention and box office often involve great risks. Once the audience finds that the quality of the movie is not as good as expected, the backlash will be extremely serious.
"But Lian Rui chose the topic cleverly. The heavy theme of life, old age, illness and death will make the audience unconsciously judge with a more tolerant attitude."
How to shake the box office together?
How will Lianrui’s model be continued in the future?
Bian Xiao believes that the biggest selling point of movies produced by Lian Rui Pictures, which lacks the support of top stars and IPs, is that it is "moving" to attract audiences to the theater. The early promotion of the movie will release a lot of themed clips that will make people cry.
"Essentially, it's still emotional marketing."
The paradox of Lianrui Pictures is that the topic of "birth, old age, sickness and death" they found is not suitable for sudden and inciting emotions in short videos, but The commercial nature of movies requires this.
Fortunately, the director and actors have added a lock to this contradiction: on the one hand, even with "emotional marketing", what is sold is the love of birth, old age, illness and death, which makes the movie carry an extra layer of emotion; On the other hand, the display of these emotions is ultimately presented by a group of actors with enough acting skills to carry the role, so that the emotions will not be suspended in the air.
For example, in the movie "I love you!" "In the climax at the end, Han Yan saved a big job and asked Ni Dahong to whip his whip and make a fuss in the mourning hall.If it weren't for the superb acting skills of Ni Dahong, Hui Yinghong, Tony Leung Ka Fai and Yip Tong, if any actor had done this at the end, it would have turned this touching movie into a joke.
The Lianrui model still has enough advantages in the future film market: first, its lower production cost gives Lianrui more room for trial and error; secondly, the current movie market is full of joy, and the screen is full of comedies. In the context of people, a company that can make audiences cry in batches is particularly precious. Finally, after having done special themes such as "anti-cancer" and "funeral", if Lianrui can continue to discover touching human fireworks from the subtleties. It will open up a new commercial space.
This advantage also corresponds to the Spring Festival. Among the six seed candidates, four comedies and one cartoon, the low-cost "Let's Shake the Sun Together" once again has the opportunity to win a bigger box office .
