Compared with the Spring Festival stalls of theaters, which have exceeded the 8 billion mark in box office, what are the Spring Festival stalls of online movies that don’t attract much attention? In terms of works,
is booming.
"Defiant 2", regarded as the most successful domestic martial arts film in recent years, has been transferred to the Internet, with a Douban score of 7.2, and its scores are directly catching up with those of popular blockbusters in theaters;
the action film "Black and White", 4 The film has a box office of over 10 million, starring Andy On and Eric Tsang . It has an authentic old Hong Kong flavor and has been evaluated by netizens as the spiritual sequel to "Underworld" and " Infernal Affairs ";
"" is produced by Zhang Yibai. "Everyone Comes to ", the cast includes Liao Fan, Tong Liya, Qiao Shan, Fan Wei, Du Jiang, Bao Beier, Wei Daxun and many other stars. It is so luxurious that it doesn't look like an Internet drama.
During the Spring Festival, a total of 15 new films were released online, exceeding the number in theaters during the same period. Since the three major video platforms iQiyi, Tencent Video, and Youku jointly launched the first online movie Spring Festival in 2021, online movies have also had the concept of schedules like theaters.
2023 is a relatively special year. Online movies and theater movies have shown opposite trends in many aspects of development. For example, offline theaters are recovering as a whole and the box office is booming; but the development of online movies is not as good as before. In many aspects Inferior to 2022.
As for the Spring Festival period, four theatrical movies were withdrawn, and the remaining four films almost took over the entire Spring Festival box office. However, on the online movie side, various types of movies emerged, and the overall quality was higher than the previous level for the same period, but in the end The box office still achieved the opposite outcome, that is, the better the content, the worse the box office.
2023 online movie Spring Festival stalls
Before the official arrival of the 2024 Spring Festival, this online movie Spring Festival stall had been anticipated by the industry, believing that it could wipe out the overall decline of online movies in 2023.
html launched its exclusive broadcast on Youku on February 4th. "Black and White Stealth" won the daily top spot on the first day of release. After that, won the daily top spot for 4 consecutive days, and the box office exceeded 10 million on the 4th day. is considered This is a manifestation of the enthusiastic response from the market.Like theatrical distribution, more market-competitive heavyweight projects are concentrated during the Spring Festival.
The 2024 online movie Spring Festival show has two characteristics. The first is high-quality works. Among the works released in February, in addition to the previously mentioned "Defiant 2" and "All Are Coming", there are also suspense comedies " Five-foot Detective " starring Pan Changjiang and Fan Shaohuang, Chen Guokun, The exciting action film "The Suit" starring Miya Mu, as well as "The God of Wealth 5" and "The Diamond Robbery" of the "Siping Police" series of IPs incubated locally by the Internet University.
"Big Star" + "Old IP" constitute the advantageous selling point of this online movie Spring Festival. The overall quality is higher than the previous two . Some movies such as "Black and White Stealth" and "Defiant 2" are better in art composition, script design, etc. Many dimensions have completely broken away from the audience's inherent perception of the Internet level, and are no less than theater movies.
Another feature of online movies during this year’s Spring Festival is diversification. The diversity here has two meanings: on the one hand, compared with the monopoly of comedies in the Spring Festival stalls of theaters this year, online universities are more tolerant of the subject types themselves; on the other hand, it means that in 2024, the video platform will also begin to intentionally Learn the idea of "drama series as theater" and create different types of platform features in the online field.
Among them, Youku aims at the elements of Hong Kong films, with the first-release "Operation Black and White" as the core, and planned a one-stop broadcast of Hong Kong films in this year's online Spring Festival, covering dozens of new and old Hong Kong films in seven major categories.
iQiyi focuses on the fields of martial arts and action. It uses Mesozoic action actors such as Xie Miao, Wu Yue, and An Zhijie as its team to create the "Action Master Season". "" and "Stranger Knife" are four action movies that cover various elements such as martial arts, modernity, crime, and drama.
Objectively speaking, on the supply side, online movies are better than ever in terms of richness and quality of film types, but the final reflection in the market is not satisfactory.
Among them, the case of "Defiant 2" is more representative. Previously, the release of "Defiant" in 2022 was a great success, with a rating of 7.1 on Douban, and a total box office of 29.76 million on iQiyi, which was both well received and well-received.
Therefore, during the release process of its sequel "Defiant 2", there was once the idea of switching to theaters. On January 13, 2023, it was officially announced that "Defiant 2" will be released in theaters, and the sequel will be developed from online movies to theaters. But in the end, it was decided to participate in the 2024 online movie Spring Festival, and it will be broadcast exclusively by iQiyi.
In terms of publicity, including the help of iQiyi, this sequel has invested more publicity resources than the first one. But the result is that after it was released on the first day of the Lunar New Year, it was not until February 18th that its official Weibo announced that the box office exceeded 10 million. By this time, the Spring Festival holiday had ended, and surpassing the previous year's results had become a luxury.
And the experience of "Defiant 2" is just a microcosm of the overall situation of online movies in 2023.
Online Movies, Hanging in the Air
The online movie market in 2023 has not picked up with the liberation of the epidemic, which is reflected in the fact that there is still a large gap in box office results compared with the previous two years. Judging from the number of movies with a box office of over 10 million, according to Maoyan Professional Edition statistics, there will only be 29 online movies with a box office of over 10 million in 2023, while there will be 49 in 2022 and 50 in 2021.
This is mainly due to changes in the market environment. Although since the promulgation of the "Film Industry Promotion Law of the People's Republic of China" in 2017, the professionalization and innovation of online movies has become the mainstream recognized by the market, it is undeniable that online movies and theater movies have always occupied two markets separately. .
Since the birth of online movies, its basic market has always been the overflowing "differentiated content" market in theater movies. For example, Jianghu movies or horror movies with more alternative themes, comedies or fun movies with a more direct feel.
But The rise of micro-short dramas in 2023 has directly reached out to the basic market of Internet majors. The two are similar in entertainment functionality, causing a large number of users to flow to the micro-short drama market.
This puts the Internet University in an embarrassing situation. Compared with the previous version, it is not as good as the theater movies. The distribution channels are limited to a few platforms, and its influence is far less than that of the national theaters. By comparison, it is not as direct as the micro-short dramas. And it has a greater cost advantage and can invest more resources in publicity.
online movie, hanging in the air.
The collapse of the 2023 Spring Festival stalls is a concentrated expression of the embarrassing situation of online movies. The action movie "Blind Combat" created by
production team Yunshui Fangzhi was broadcast exclusively on the iQiyi platform in 2022. It topped the annual box office championship with a cumulative box office of 33.02 million that year. During this year's Spring Festival, the action movie "Evil", also launched by the same team, currently has a box office of only 7.793 million on iQiyi, with a share of 4.91 million. According to the official disclosure of the film, the entire film production investment was 15 million yuan.
What should I do with online movies? At present, the only option is to save ourselves.
The first thing that is certain is that online movies cannot go back and follow their own old path of attracting audiences with novel themes.
On the one hand, according to the data from 2023, Internet users seem to have become desensitized to horror, disaster, monsters, and tomb robbing themes. Previously, the first works of the IP series "Orochi" and "Xing'anling Hunter" have achieved enviable results in the Internet market, but their more sophisticated sequels "Orochi 4" and "Xing'anling Hunter 2" have been in the market one after another. Failed in 2023.
On the other hand, the platform has changed its previous supportive attitude and forced Internet universities to embark on the path of excellence and innovation, using content to feed back platform traffic.
On December 18 last year, iQiyi announced that starting from January 1, 2024, the online movie split model will implement new cooperation rules. All exclusive cooperation members’ first-run movie revenue, and cloud cinema premiere movies will be in the member split period ( svod)’s income will be adjusted from “accounting based on time length” to “accounting based on time tiers”.After the adjustment, for online movies exclusively launched on the iQiyi platform, if members watch more than 10 million, over 6 million, and less than 6 million hours during the billing period, the corresponding tiered billing prices for 10,000 hours are 3 yuan, 2 yuan, and 1 yuan respectively. The final total box office is the sum of the income of each tier.
The payment is divided according to the time scale, which means that the revenue of the film side will be completely decided by the audience, and the platform will not bear any risks.
This is not good news for many online film teams that are still in the exploratory period and have just made some achievements. Their previous relationship maintenance with the platform will be invalidated. Not only will their future works not be supported by high billing prices from the platform, Each work has to be started from scratch, and it must also bear the risk of greater losses due to "step-by-step accounting".
What’s even worse is that after the platform withdrew its support for online movies, it will invest in other film and television fields, especially the emerging micro-short drama track. In a sense, is supporting their opponents.
For online movies, the box office results of the 2023 Spring Festival period undoubtedly released a bad message. The industry must find a competitive point between theater movies and mini-series as soon as possible to seek a breakthrough.
There will be more than 40 new online movies released during the Spring Festival in 2021, more than 20 movies will be released in 2022, and by 2021 there will be only 15 movies left. If the situation continues to worsen, the 2023 online movie Spring Festival will not only be the best in quality, but also have the lowest box office, and it may also be the last.
