interface news reporter | Hu Yujing
interface news editor | Zhang Youfa
suspense films now seem to have become a powerful box office pill for domestic movies. Last year, the box office of "The Disappearance of Her " was soaring, and finally reported a revenue of 3.5 billion. During the quiet summer season in June this year, the average daily box office was less than 100 million. The first to save the market was the suspenseful movie " Silence Kills ". 26 days after the release of
, "Silent Kill" still remains in the top five at the single-day box office, not only ahead of films such as " legend ", " Fall of the World ", " Despicable Me 4" and other films released in the same period and later, but also It has demonstrated a resilient long-tail effect in the competition with a number of new films such as "Underworld", "Deadpool" and the widely screened "Decoded" and "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century", and is currently ranked Ranked 6th on the box office list in 2024, Lighthouse AI predicts a total box office of 1.370 billion.
In contrast, the popularity of domestic suspense dramas is sluggish and they are facing a round of audience loss. The recently completed iQiyi Mist Theater new work " dislocated ", starring Ma Yili and Tong Dawei, is adapted from the novel "Intersecting Scenes" by the famous Japanese mystery novelist Matsumoto Seicho. The description of the crime novel overlaps with the real crime scene, so The setting is also considered novel among domestic suspense dramas.
However, on the day after "Misplaced" was aired, Yunhe Data had only 16.121 million effective views, which not only lagged behind popular dramas such as "Life of Love", "You Are More Beautiful than Starlight", and "Sauvignon Blanc Season 2", but it also took many days to complete. "Days of the Rose" also topped it with 22.881 million views.
"Dislocation"'s downturn is not an isolated case. Prior to this, iQiyi also scheduled another drama series from Mist Theater, "The Boy Who Can't See Shadows" starring Zhang Songwen and Rong Zishan. The drama is also not very popular and will be broadcast on June 7. After that, the single-day broadcast market share only hovered around 5%, and there was no discussion until the end.
both belong to the suspenseful detective genre. Why is the movie so much more popular and topical than the TV series?
film industry analyst Lin Chao told Interface Entertainment that thanks to the genre audience cultivation of " Chinatown Detective ", the suspense audience is almost equal to the general movie audience. People over 14 years old are the target audience, which is currently the second largest audience. Indispensable genres - the most attractive genres and element labels other than comedy that attract audiences.
In his opinion, suspense films are the "rising stars" of domestic films, and the market space is opened up by imported films and remakes. "Before "The Invisible Guest", suspense was a relatively narrow and small category." Since then, films such as "The Invisible Guest", "Detective Chinatown", "Manslaughter" and "She Disappeared" have gradually developed Suspenseful nationality. According to the film library data of
Lighthouse Professional Edition, the three highest-grossing movies with suspense genre tags in 2017, "The Legend of the Demon Cat", "The Devotion of Suspect 2.4%, and the combined box office of the top three domestic suspense films in 2018-2019, 2021, and 2023 accounted for 8.7%, 2.9%, 14.1%, and 17.2% of the total annual box office respectively. The importance of the genre in the domestic film market is visibly increasing.
Stills of "Silent Kill"
In this process, short videos have played an amplification effect that cannot be ignored. Lin Chao believes that suspenseful creations can easily run out of inspiration and become routine. Short videos are popular for watching movies quickly in a few minutes. They have a strong story logic. Bizarreness, novelty and reversal are the main elements to attract audiences. This content compression logic is transferred to the film creation end, which manifests as "a surprise" and a constant flow of emotions. Reversals and various sensory stimulations can continue to capture the audience's attention.
"Silent Killing" begins with a case of a missing girl. The story is filled with topics such as campus bullying, domestic violence, child abuse, sexual assault, family education, juvenile crime, quasi-religious organizations, etc. It seems to be a hot topic in society. A hodgepodge of topics, any topic can be expanded into a movie.
For this reason, the promotion of "Silent Kill" relies heavily on short videos, highlighting elements such as reversal, sadism, and cruelty.There are three videos on the official TikTok of "Silent Kill" with over a million likes. One is Lin Zaifu crying bitterly after learning the truth about his daughter's death; the other is Li Han rushing to the basement of the school to see his daughter Xiaotong being bullied; the third is Xiaotong and Lin Zaifu The eyes indicate the start of the revenge plan, and the three clips are connected one after another, using the same logic as the quick-view sliced episodes of the short video.
suspense dramas cannot follow this logic. First of all, from the perspective of genre, there is a certain attribute mismatch between the suspense genre and the drama. In Lin Chao’s view, the volume of the drama series is too large. Once there are too many watersheds or sub-plots, it will consume the audience’s patience. “Romance movies can break up, have an affair, a third party, a fourth party, and then go abroad or study abroad. There are many life-oriented things.” The content can be added, but adding more suspense is just pure water injection. "
The currently popular short series and unit dramas can be said to be attempts to adapt the suspense theme to the drama genre. Among the suspense dramas aired this year, "Gloomy Fire" is filled with branch elements such as small town youth, employment, teenage love, domestic violence, etc. The duration has been shortened to 28 episodes. Compared with the 40 episodes of idol dramas, it has already is the limit. "The Boy Who Can't See the Shadow" and "Dislocation" have 16 and 15 episodes respectively, and "Rebirth", which has a relatively compact plot, only has 10 episodes.
"Rebirth" stills
Secondly, suspense dramas also lack a relatively systematic talent training system, cannot continuously produce excellent works, and have not built the audience's continuous memory of this genre. "The most important reason is that we don't have so many 'Xinshuang' and cannot build scale," Lin Chao believes. "The root cause is that the industry does not have a complete system, and everyone from screenwriters and directors to platforms and actors are responsible."
reasoning Writer Wu Fei also expressed similar feelings to Jiemian News: On the one hand, the two benchmark suspense dramas "The Hidden Corner" and "The Silent Truth" are both adapted from Zijin Chen's novels, with a single source and insufficient originality; on the other hand, On the other hand, audiences value the logical rigor of suspense reasoning works and like to find bugs. Once the level of the work sequence is uneven, the audience will easily develop a sense of distrust in the genre.
Additionally, the suspense segment types that the episodes match are limited. Lin Chao believes that the protagonists of cops and criminals and police detectives have a positive image and are relatively suitable for domestic dramas. He places the characters such as Lin Zaifu and Chen Guilin in "Silent Kill" and " Weekly Determination of Three Evils" in the context of the drama. , belongs to the "stained protagonist".
However, in the past two years, domestic suspense dramas have tried to break this restriction in character creation. Feike, played by Jing Boran in "Rebirth", was described by others in the first half as a habitual fraudster who is good at pua and self-disguise, which is reminiscent of Holmes in "Bad Blood" and the Korean drama "Anna" heroine. However, when the case entered the mystery-solving stage, Feike retreated to the good guy camp, the tension of the core characters was greatly diluted, and the audience's discussion of "Rebirth" gradually cooled down.
Stills of "Zhou Chu Eliminates Three Evils"
This contradiction between genre and media form is reflected in the ancient puppet show in the form of a mirror image. The drama versions of "Three Lives Three Worlds Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms" and " Flowers and Thousand Bones " have reached national popularity. However, even with the popularity of IP and drama versions, the movie version of "Three Lives Three Worlds" has a box office of 535 million. The movie version of "Bone" only had a box office of 6.55 million. The big screen amplified its shortcomings such as special effects, costumes, and actor looks. Its reputation is not as good as that of the drama version, and its box office performance also lacks genre competitiveness.
After "Silent Kill", suspense films further verified their market space, but at the same time, they fell into a crisis of storytelling overdraft. "The Wandering Blade", "Walking through the Angry Sea" and "Silent Kill" all tell the story of parents avenging the tragic death of their children, and the narrative structure of "Silent Kill" is similar to "Zhou Chu's Killing Three Evils", both of which It is a three-part movie. Lin Chao believes that the narratives of these films have traces of "routineization", but "fortunately, these films (box office) have not yet exceeded 2 billion, and there are still a large number of people who have not seen it."
Audiences also feel this. Under the "Silent Kill" entry on Douban, under the cries of "refreshing" and "shocking", many high-profile comments said that the film's topics are densely assembled and the logic is poor. The movie market is more like a kind of overdraft therapy, using addictive doses of stimulation without restraint. The movie theater is more like a coffee shop than ever before. "
The natural media differences between movies and dramas make it possible. The subject of suspense is different in the two media in terms of audio-visual impact, narrative rhythm, and tension between good and evil characters, but these differences also extend to different typing paths and dilemmas.
For suspense dramas, the strategy of modern suspense is to reduce the volume, increase the density of information loading in a single episode, and move closer to movies; the solution to costume suspense is the unit drama model, where a case is solved in 3-4 episodes, and the characters appear in turn. The themes are different. Last year's "Lotus Tower" and this year's "The Strange Story of the Tang Dynasty: Journey to the West" are all unit detective dramas. They combine elements such as roads and monsters, and have found a successful path that is different from modern suspense.
How to use differences to drive the growth of suspense film and television dramas, the rope still has to be handed over to the creators.
(Note: Lin Chao is a pseudonym)
