The positive aspects behind the hit
Text/Pang Hongbo
A piggy watch and a song "New Creation".
After the Spring Festival release, these are the two most profound "symbols" that the movie has left to the public. These two symbols come from the same movie " eliminates three evils in a week ". Chen Guilin's piggy watch of the same style is sold out on shopping websites, while "New Man" is collected by thousands of people on music platforms.
During the Spring Festival, half of the films have been rescheduled, and half of the films have jointly set new records. The fiercest competition for schedules throughout the year has just come to an end. The initial box office forecast for the action film "Zhou Chu Destroyed Three Evils" imported from Taiwan was only in the tens of millions. According to market practice, the entire market will enter a long period of indifference after the Spring Festival. Especially in the past two years, the box office appeal of imported films has declined. How the entire market can survive the "late spring cold" has actually always been a problem.
Before the release of "The Three Evils", " Argyle: The Mysterious Agent " was the largest new film in the market, and its box office did not exceed 10 million in three days. It was also the third day of the release of "Argyle: The Secret Agent", and "The Three Evils" started advance screening. With its high reputation during the screening, this film became the biggest hit after the Spring Festival. payment.
Nowadays, the box office of "Zhou Chu Destroy Three Evils" is expected to be around 600 million, making it the highest-grossing film this year in addition to the four leading films during the Spring Festival. The Douban score also rose to 8.4 points, making it the highest-grossing film in Taiwan. Movies introduced to the mainland hit a new box office peak. And after the release of " Dune 2", it still remains firmly at the top of the charts.
The reason why "Zhou Chu Eliminates Three Evils" is out of the circle is not just the satisfaction of Chen Guilin getting rid of "the first and second eldest brother on the list", but the redemption of human nature due to greed, anger and ignorance. In addition to the movie "Zhou Chu Eliminates Three Evils", in addition to gaining box office and word-of-mouth, more importantly, it allows us to see a positive trend for the market to improve.
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— market needs differentiated content —
and more diverse content supply to activate the market.
Although judging from the results, "Zhou Chu Eliminates Three Evils" has become the first typical case of using small to win big this year. But from the perspective of the process, this film can break through the circle, and there are actually many things worthy of attention.
First of all, this film started advance screening in ten cities across the country from February 24th to 25th. After the screening, the Douban score rose from 8.1 to 8.4. In any period of time, 's high reputation is always the first weapon to break the circle. There is a solid reputation guarantee, which creates the possibility of "Zhou Chu Eliminates Three Evils".
Secondly, "Zhou Chu Eliminates Three Evils" fills the audience gap after the Spring Festival. This year’s Spring Festival stalls are “he who wins the world”. Judging from the ticket purchase portraits, the overall bias is towards women. According to the box office report of the Beacon Professional Edition Spring Festival stalls, the proportion of female users in this year’s Spring Festival stalls reached 62.9%, which is the highest since 2014. The Spring Festival stall with the highest proportion of women. "Zhou Chu Eliminates Three Evils" is a film with a relatively high proportion of male users, and judging from the audience ratings, men are slightly higher than women.
Judging from the external temperament, "Zhou Chu Removes Three Evils" has obvious characteristics of "a cool movie". To put it simply, Chen Guilin, who is third on the most wanted list, decided to kill the first and second on the most wanted list in the hope of becoming famous before his death. The overall narrative of the movie is a gangster revenge road movie.
In the end, Chen Guilin became one of the most successful "three-dimensional villains" in Chinese films in the past two years. In fact, in the past two years, whether it was Pan Chengfeng in " Bomb Disposal Expert 2" or Qiu Gangao in " Fury·Serious Case ", the audience obviously valued more three-dimensional protagonists higher, and Chen Guilin also became One of the most out-of-the-box screen protagonists this year. Chen Guilin in the
movie is not just a gangster killer, he also kills not only the first and second eldest brother on the list. The English title of the film is "the pig, the snake, and the pigeon". Pigs, snakes and pigeons are regarded as the three poisons in Buddhism, corresponding to the three evils of "ignorance, anger and greed" respectively. Therefore, as a marginalized person in society, Chen Guilin ultimately accomplished the redemption of human nature.
's solid reputation, allowing the audience to fully explore more layered movie themes, novel perspectives and themes, make "Zhou Chu Destroy Three Evils" the first dark horse after the Spring Festival.
Last year, the film market began to intensify its appeal for weekend releases. Although the film market continues to recover, the entire market is still highly dependent on schedules. This has resulted in a market that is more clearly divided between hot and cold. While the big time slots are crazily rolling in, the small and medium time slots are too cold. At the same time, more than half of the audience only watches one movie a year during the Spring Festival. Compared with the box office, movie viewing is The recovery rate of visitors is relatively slow.
The fault tolerance rate of the entire market has been greatly reduced, which will inevitably lead to the inability to make rational decisions about film schedules. Blockbusters need to "guarantee capital" during the big time period, and it is difficult for small and medium-sized films to counterattack during the small and medium-sized time periods when market popularity is extremely low. Therefore, the release of "Three Evils" at this time has undoubtedly played a positive and important role in activating the market during the cold season, stimulating weekend movie viewing, and even the market getting rid of dependence on schedules.
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- "Atypical" imported film How to win big with small things -
In fact, "Eliminate Three Evils in Zhou Chu" is not an example of small and big.
In recent years, with the rise of domestic films and changes in audience aesthetic tastes, the box office share of imported blockbusters in the mainland has shown a downward trend. Correspondingly, there are many "atypical" imported films that have stood out.
in " wrestling!" Before "Dad ", Indian films were not very popular in the mainland market, but this film successfully led to a wave of film approval in India; and "The Invisible Guest" and "Genius Gunman" allowed Spanish and Thai films to enter the market. Mainland audience’s perspective.
Although "La La Land" has niche attributes such as musicals and art films, it still gained huge popularity in China and broke the mainland box office record for musicals.
" Green Book " won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2019. Alibaba Pictures "Lightning" officially announced that "Green Book" will be released in the mainland, creating the shortest introduction period for the Oscar-winning film to be released in the mainland. In the end, the film took home a box office of 478 million in the Mainland.
But before "Green Book", "Oscar Best Picture" was not a "master key", especially the movie was a road movie, which had strong box office barriers at the time. In addition to the "Oscar"-level word-of-mouth guarantee and "lightning" introduction, the film's publicity actions at the time still had many highlights. In particular, the Chinese version of the poster designed by Huang Hai has been widely praised by the audience.
"Taylor Swift: The Times Tour", which just ended its last day of release in the mainland on March 12, is also a representative of "atypical" imported films. This film, which earned a lot of attention on New Year's Day this year, finally earned 101 million in box office through ritualistic marketing, broke 35 film history records, and became the champion of music documentaries in Chinese film history.
Concert movies were obviously not mainstream in the market before, but on the day the film was officially announced, #张万sen你狠 Sister来了# became the top trending search, and the number of people who wanted to watch Taopiao Piao increased by 50,000 in a single day, breaking the platform After setting a record, the film received the number of new daily requests from Taopiaopiao platform for eight consecutive days. The number of people who wanted to watch the film exceeded 300,000 before its release, which shows that mainland audiences are eagerly anticipating the film.
It is not difficult to see from this that regardless of the size of the film, as long as it meets the needs of the audience and has excellent quality, films of different styles can find their own audiences in the market and win a competitive position.
But the emergence of "Qianlima" is inseparable from "Bole". How to find "quality" in "mass" and realize the big with small, for traders, unique content vision, accurate market positioning and effective publicity. Development strategy is indispensable. From this perspective, Alibaba Pictures, which has been behind many films such as "Green Book", "Taylor Swift: The Age of Concert Tour" and "The Three Evils", can be said to have a keen sense of smell and Proper announcement.
With the recent release of a new batch of imported films such as "Kung Fu Panda 4", "Judgment of the Fallen" and "Godzilla vs. Kong 2: Rise of an Empire", the competitive landscape of the film market may usher in new changes. In addition, "What kind of life do you want to live" is also scheduled to be released during the Qingming Festival.
As the new work of Hayao Miyazaki, who just won the 96th Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film, "What Kind of Life Do You Want to Live" is being released in the mainland, and Alibaba Pictures is also participating in it. It is reported that the latter will also launch an immersive art exhibition around Ghibli classic animation through film and performance linkage. We will also wait and see about the subsequent market performance of this film in the mainland and the effect of refined cross-sector user operations.
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— From an “isolated island” in the market to a “co-prosperity” with Chinese-language films —
The mainland market cannot just become a “domestic product store.”
In the past three years, the biggest feature of the mainland film market has been the serious imbalance in the box office share of imported films. In 2023, imported films will account for only 16.2% of the box office, a drop of nearly 20 percentage points from 35.9% in 2019. Although the progress of local films has helped the Chinese film market recover quickly, in the long run, as the world's second largest ticket warehouse, the mainland film market is the only way to deeply integrate into the global film market.
Due to the further narrowing of the box office share of imported films in the mainland market, the mainland film market's influence in the global film system may be declining, and the mainland market's box office share of the world's top-grossing movies has decreased. The most intuitive thing is that the box office results of the two top-grossing movies in the world in 2023, "Barbie" and "Super Mario Bros. Movie" in the domestic market, are obviously not particularly ideal compared to the leading domestic films. This is also the case for global blockbusters in the mainland. A microcosm of the market. The old head fell out of favor and the new head was given the cold shoulder.
From the perspective of the long-term development of the mainland market, first, it is necessary to enable the world's best-selling movies to be "sold" more smoothly in the mainland market and "zero distance" from Chinese audiences. Even if aesthetic differences will lead to changes in box office, the mainland market is still one of the most important ticket warehouses for the world's top-grossing movies. Secondly, it is to establish deeper industrial interaction through box office, thereby helping local movies to go overseas smoothly in the future. such as "Hello, Li Huanying" was remade by Hollywood and "Hot and Spicy" was distributed globally by Sony Pictures. If the box office of imported films in the mainland market remains sluggish for a long time, it will be difficult to maintain positive industry interaction.
In addition to the global market, the Chinese film market is also undergoing new changes. During the Hong Kong International Film and Television Fair not long ago, whether it was Louis Koo's strategic cooperation with mainland companies to develop Asian films, or Alibaba Entertainment's "Hong Kong Art Revitalization Plan", we saw closer industrial cooperation between the mainland and Hong Kong films.
As the Taiwanese film with the highest box office performance in the past five years, "Chou Chu Kills Three Evils" can actually make cross-strait film cooperation more likely. Among this year's top ten box office films, the Spring Festival films occupy the top four, followed by four Hong Kong and Taiwan films: "The Three Evils", "Goldfinger", "Provisional Heist" and "Stealth".
In the future, based on the mainland market, Chinese-language films may further achieve symbiosis and mutual prosperity through closer cooperation. This will be a huge benefit for both the diversified supply of film content and types and the sustainable development of Chinese-language films as a whole.
