According to online platform data, as of 19:25 on July 7, the total box office (including pre-sales) for the 2024 summer season (June to August) exceeded 3 billion yuan. " There is a canteen on the edge of the cloud " " Silently Kills " and " Inside Out 2" are temporarily among the top three in the box office list.
According to Maoyan Professional Edition statistics, as of July 3, a total of 102 films have been released in the summer season and have announced specific release dates. The total number has decreased from 136 films last summer. Judging from the film supply, " Catching a Baby ", " Under the Stranger ", " Legend ", "Decryption", " Retrograde Life ", " White Snake: Floating Life ", " Stop and Go " are expected The film screenings cover comedy, suspense, action, adventure, animation, drama and other themes and types of films, providing the audience with a wealth of viewing options.
Some popular summer movies
The box office of the 2023 summer season will exceed 20.6 billion
Can this year continue the good results of last year?
According to professional statistics, the cumulative box office for the 2023 summer season will exceed 20.6 billion yuan, setting a record in film history. One-third of this year's summer vacation has passed, and it seems that there is still a big gap between last year's excellent results.
recalls the summer of 2023. Audiences have "lived" in the cinema since June, and "The Vanishing Her", "The Octagonal Cage", "Chang'an Thirty Thousand Miles", "Fengshen Part 1" and "All or Nothing" have appeared one after another. A batch of hot items are waiting for them, all of which hit the hottest social topics at the moment. Industry insiders said that last year's large number of high-quality films in a variety of genres was to some extent a release of the backlog of inventory accumulated in the previous three years. This year, there is no such rich reserve of film sources.
Hu Jianli, secretary-general of the China Film Critics Society, believes that although there are word-of-mouth works such as "Stop and Go", "Dogs" and "The Negotiator" in the film market this year, they are not strong commercial blockbusters; secondly, last year was a complete period after the epidemic. In the first year of liberalization, the audience may still have some retaliatory consumption psychology; thirdly, with the European Cup and micro-short dramas becoming popular, many viewers are also attracted by other forms of entertainment.
Picture source: China Film News WeChat official account
The domestic summer film has a history of 20 years
has become a losing ground for military strategists after the Spring Festival film
The concept of the summer film comes from Hollywood. In the summer of 1975, "Jaws" directed by Spielberg became the first movie in history to have a box office of over 100 million US dollars, making Hollywood filmmakers pay attention to a group that has a lot of free time and strong entertainment consumption power in the summer - vacation students, the door to the film history summer program has since opened. Since the summer vacation in the United States lasts for more than three months, the summer schedule has quickly become the longest and most influential movie schedule in the American film market.
The first time China was inspired by summer movies was from high-quality Hollywood movies. 1995 is known as the first year of blockbusters. In the summer of this year, the Hollywood animated film "The Lion King" entered the Chinese market for the first time and became the childhood memory of a generation of mainland audiences. Animated blockbusters have not only made children regular visitors to movie theaters, but have also shaken the long-standing prejudice among Chinese audiences that "cartoons are equal to children's entertainment."
The first domestic company to test this schedule was the Shanghai Art Film Studio. The 1999 summer vacation hit " Lotus Lantern " not only reinterpreted the mythical story using advanced animation technology, but also invited Chen Peisi, Ning Jing, Stars such as Xu Fan and Jiang Wen voiced the characters, and it ultimately earned more than 24 million yuan at the box office. "Lotus Lantern" is a turnaround for Chinese animated films that fell into a trough in the 1990s.
Since then, as the output of domestic films has mushroomed like mushrooms after a rain, the summer season has gradually become a battleground for military strategists after the Spring Festival season, and excellent works that have left a mark on film history have appeared frequently. For example, the 2016 summer movie "Big Fish and Begonia", "I'm Not the God of Medicine" and "Nezha: The Devil Boy" released in July 2018 and July 2019 respectively, have become phenomenon-level works in the summer season. .
What kind of movie is needed for the summer season?
If you carefully study the summer movies with excellent box office, you can find several genre characteristics: action movies, comedy movies, horror movies and animated movies, or the fusion of several genres with each other, which is directly related to the psychological needs of adolescent children - releasing them Excess energy. Whether there is "student connection" is the key to whether the summer season can become popular.
data shows that from 2019 to 2023, the viewing frequency and consumption amount of viewers under the age of 24 showed a significant downward trend. Facing the new situation, the market must have a deep understanding of the changes in the aesthetic tastes and viewing demands of young people. Nowadays, Chinese audiences no longer blindly pursue big IPs and big productions, but pay more attention to intrinsic factors such as the core of a work's story, depth of thought, and emotional resonance. This provides more possibilities for domestic films to become "dark horses."
China firmly ranks as the second largest film market in the world. The film consumption needs of 1.4 billion viewers are increasingly segmented and personalized, making it the film market's most valuable potential. We hope that this year’s summer movies can accurately find the target market and audience, meet the challenges with more appropriate marketing methods, distribution strategies, and scheduling strategies, and sound the charge for summer movies.
Source: Economic Daily, China Film News, China News Weekly, Beacon Professional Edition
(Dazhong Daily·Popular News Client Reporter Zhang Mingyue)
