文|Linghu Boguang
The 2024 Spring Festival has officially arrived, and it is not a "joke" of Chinese movies.
Bo Guangjun, what should I say after watching two movies on New Year’s Day? Neither "Article 20" nor " Hot " are absolute bad movies, but they are not much better. In particular, Jia Ling 's weight loss and personal perseverance are very worthy of recognition, but this Spring Festival show still exposed a serious problem.
(I won’t write a separate analysis of the two movies today, I will write more when I have a chance)
The 2024 Spring Festival schedule has been known as the weakest Spring Festival schedule from the beginning. The reason is that the six movies scheduled at that time, except for the ten thousand year "Bear" "Infested", the remaining five or six movies did not include an action blockbuster, a science fiction blockbuster, a fantasy blockbuster, or any other commercial special effects blockbuster. Everyone's concerns are justified. If a comedy made from Internet jokes can be a hit, it really doesn't require top-notch practitioners to produce it. But it must also be said that we have not reached the level of reaching the sky in one fell swoop. We are not yet capable of mass-producing commercial special effects blockbusters.
The " Wandering Earth " series is good, but we only use it to compare with our own past. "Shanghai Fortress" is our general level. The "Wolf Warrior" series and "Operation Red Sea" are good, but we must also say , there are additional factors to get such a high box office, and everyone knows what it is.
The 2024 Spring Festival movie is indeed weak, and it is indeed excusable
In fact, the fact that the 2024 Spring Festival movie is weak is not because the comedy is bad, or the drama is not good. Just like " Wolf Warrior 2", "The Wandering Earth" and "Li Huanying" can all get high box office, there are probably three reasons.
The first is emotional resonance: whether it is the large-scale industrialization of films such as "Wolf Warrior" or the low-cost production of "Li Huanying", the main factor in their success is that it arouses emotional resonance among the people.
The second is that the audience for Chinese movies has already Growth: High-cost publicity can obviously only affect a small number of viewers; in addition, capitalists’ excessive and streamlined commercial publicity is likely to arouse resolute resistance from the public at the level of public opinion (from CCTV News to some private sectors such as The media are all recommending "Li Huanying".
"Tang Detective 3", which was competing on the same stage at the time, was very good at the beginning, but you are looking at the quality of "Tang Detective 3".
Third, large capital investment is very important. The industrialization of movies is very important, but it is far less important than the first two points mentioned above, especially in socialist China! It is not unreasonable to worry, but it is a bit too much to worry about.
First of all, the box office is a metaphysics. To a large extent, it is closely related to the schedule. The quality of the film is high. If it is released at the wrong time, it will be difficult to have a high box office. The high box office of "Li Huanying" that year was actually a lot of luck in the release time. ;
Secondly, the schedules that can generate high box office are only the National Day schedule and the Spring Festival schedule. After all, the number of films that can be released is limited. Neither theater chains nor movie investors are "fools". They do not People who invest in only one type of movie will be like "putting their eggs in one basket". Usually, they will be involved in every type of movie. After all, they have to find a balance between risk and return;
movies are, after all, A cultural product is very dependent on the individual creator. It is also a metaphysics to a certain extent. Therefore, it does not mean how much investment or output will produce a high-quality product. Take online novels as an example. There are thousands of online novels. Thousands, but there are only a few that are relatively high-quality.
Finally, for heavy industry movies such as "The Wandering Earth", technology is just a tool to assist storytelling. The actual use is not just to serve the film industry, even if there is no film application , technology will also spill over and be used in animation, television and other industries, so don’t worry too much that without industrial film shooting, heavy industry film technology will be useless and will not develop.
But this is "Li Huanying" and "Tang Detective 3" "Comparison between " Azolla " and "Ball 2".
2024’s weakest Spring Festival stall? Because it does not have a "commercial special effects blockbuster"
Remember, what is said above is that there is no conflict between feature films and industrial blockbusters. After all, your feature film has a good reputation and a high box office, while an industrial blockbuster has a poor reputation and a poor box office. This proves that the audience uses their feet. Voted, it’s the market’s choice. What is the biggest problem with the 2024 Spring Festival stalls?
I have described it before, it is equivalent to "Man Jiang Hong" crashing into "Li Huanying", but there is no "Tang Detective 3" or "Ball 2".
What’s even worse is that the remaining four inferior films do not include industrial blockbusters such as "Crazy Alien" and "Assassination of Novelists". There is not one this year, and almost all of them are comedies, and the investment is not too high. high.
There was a precedent of tens of millions leveraging four to five billion. Everyone has a mentality similar to that of American retail investors: that is, a small gamble will make you happy, but a big gamble will hurt your health, so it is better not to gamble once. A small gamble It’s okay if you lose dozens of times. You don’t need to be so rational in every bet. If you win a small bet once, you can make dozens of times the profit and become a god.
There is such a precedent, just like ordinary people winning the Mark Six lottery, countless ordinary people will buy the Mark Six lottery, ignoring the vast majority of people who do not win, then countless people will follow suit. It will not be like the previous trend of costume blockbusters driven by "Hero", which will only take a few years. Because martial arts movies generally require large investments, the most successful representative only has a few hundred million yuan, and the highest profit expectations are basically certain.
The focus of the 2024 Spring Festival top movies "Hot and Furious" and "Article 20" is not whether the background of the movie is a sketch. It’s the filmmaker’s passion for movies. The audience can tell whether the production team makes the movie according to the routine of making movies, or whether it makes the movie according to the passion for the script and the movie.
Personally, through the movie "Li Huanying", I can feel the feelings that Jia Ling wants her mother to convey as a daughter, and I can also feel the attitude that Jia Ling wants to convey to the audience as a director towards her relatives. . I can feel the director's passion and I feel a sense of gain after watching it.
The importance of this script to Jia Ling, they are also devoted to it wholeheartedly. Li Huanying's script started as a sketch and became a drama in the middle. From the time he wanted to make a movie to the time it was made, the screenwriting team seemed to be six people. Six people prepared for four years, including Jia Ling herself. This is intentional. Therefore, the entire plot, details, and reversal logic are rigorous.
Jia Ling also said in the interview that she did not plan to change her career to be a director or make other movies. She became a director because she wanted to make movies, not because she made this movie because she wanted to be a director. What about the result of
? You see, she followed up with "Hot and Furious" and then went to remake it if the script didn't work. It's exactly like Happy Twist. The marketing campaign of losing 100 pounds before the movie was released was very popular. Even if the movie was not that bad, it still became the biggest selling point of the movie, and in the end it fell into the trap of capital.
As for Zhang Yimou, he has not pursued it since he gave up one scene in "Man Jiang Hong", so let's not mention it.
"Li Huanying" won "Tang Detective 3"? But "Hot and Spicy" became a "joke"
The failure of "Tang Detective 3" is a typical example of the intervention of multiple capitals. "Tang Detective 1" became popular, and it will be released every year until 3 comes out. There are many illogical things , inserting many advertisements. The director and screenwriter are not celebrities in the field of detective novels or theories, and all that is left in this film are plot holes and pretentiousness.
If you look at "Order of the Samurai God" and "Qing Ya Ji" in the same year, they did it because of the popular IP "Onmyoji". Do they know "Onmyoji"? Even though Onmyoji is a completely fictional story, in the beginning It must be based on some kind of Asian culture, and then it became a popular game, and the game has its background.
There is no shikigami in "Qing Ya Ji", but it just borrows some frameworks from the game. The shikigami in "Samurai God Order" are also weak.Audiences who don't pay attention to the game can't understand the meaning of these shikigami, and each of them has almost zero combat power. Audiences who pay attention to the game do know a few shikigami, but in the game, the normal attack is Yamasagi who uses a fan. In the movie Just throw a pebble, what's going on? The peach blossom demon in the game will be resurrected, and the movie will become a tree. Yuan Boya used bows and arrows, but in the movie he used a spear to fight Wu Zha. Kagura can be considered a ladylike little girl, but from the beginning to the end of the movie, she is a tomboy who hugs her thighs and lies on her back.
For these adaptations, how long it took them to ponder the script, how long it took to choose the right actors, big scenes, and strong special effects are all bonus points, but they are not the determining factor for success. It's just that it's too industrial and prevents the audience from feeling the production team's love for the movies they made themselves.
When watching "Tang Detective 1", I could feel that the production team loved detective reasoning. The detective works that paid homage also deserve a lot of talk, and the final twist was also surprising. "Tang Detective 3" just seems to be very high-end. As a viewer, I can't feel the enthusiasm of the characters and the production team for reasoning.
"Li Huanying" and "Hot and Spicy" have become the best examples of a boy who slays a dragon and turns into a evil dragon.
Although "Li Huanying" is just a sketch movie, it has sincerity and sincerity, which ultimately moved the audience. As for "Hot and Spicy", remake, inspiration, boxing, dreams, marketing, anyway, capital all worked together on this one. Even though the movie itself isn't particularly bad, it's not as good as the marketing makes it sound.
The Spring Festival release in 2024 taught Chinese movies "a lesson"
In 1997, Feng Xiaogang's "Party A and Party B" was launched on the market as a commercial film. At that time, many people in the film industry exclaimed and then lamented: Job-stealers are coming. Now that small-budget comedies are about to break the box office records of big-budget commercial films, someone else is coming out and exclaiming: Job-killers are coming.
"Wolf Warrior 2" and "Red Sea" are war action movies, "The Wandering Earth" is a serious heavy industry science fiction movie, "Nezha" is a cartoon, and "Li Huanying" is a comedy. Their genres are different, but the same thing is the atmosphere. Run the bonus, promote positive energy, and make movies with heart.
Why did "Tang Detective 3" fail? The reason is a typical example of the chaos of capital. This film can be said to have the perfect start at the right time and place, with a box office of 1 billion on the first day. However, various capitals turned the film into a hodgepodge, making the plot not good enough. In the end, it started high and then failed. Being caught up. If "Tang Detective 3" has a better reputation and maintains its reputation, it will hopefully surpass "Wolf Warrior 2".
The 2024 Spring Festival release is "Hot and Spicy", not "Li Huanying", but "Tang Detective 3". Zhang Yimou is still Zhang Yimou. The capital side is messing around and following the trend, not paying attention, playing tricks, and not protecting capital in any type. Jobs are just a matter for those with vested interests.
They are holding flags and archways in their hands, shouting slogans and lies on their lips, carrying copper coins and banknotes in their pockets, and thinking about business and transactions in their hearts.
If we continue to do this, we will not be able to make good movies, but we will not respect the audience and art.
In the end, it will be like "Hot and Spicy" and "Article 20". You can't earn sympathy by crying and shouting, and you can't deceive people.
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