Author | mia
Editor | Akagi Bottle
According to Beacon Professional Edition, the 2024 Qingming Festival (April 4-April 6) has a total box office of 841 million, refreshing the 2021 Qingming Festival of 820 million, the highest box office in Chinese film history. record.
data shows that during the Qingming Festival this year, the box office of Miyazaki Hayao's new film " What kind of life do you want to live " exceeded 390 million yuan during the period, contributing 46.4% of the box office and setting multiple records at the same time; "Brother" was released one week in advance "Zilla vs. Kong 2: Rise of an Empire" earned 237 million yuan, ranking second at the box office during the period, accounting for 28.2% of the total box office during the period; "Kung Fu Panda 4" ranked third at the box office with a box office of 48.3096 million yuan; " Grass and Trees World" 》《 oriole is behind! "" ranked fourth and fifth at the box office during the period with 44.7483 million yuan and 38.391 million yuan respectively.
The two popular foreign films carried the entire Qingming Festival. The appeal of Hayao Miyazaki's IP coupled with effective publicity and correct schedule selection created a series of box office records. The domestic film "The World of Grass and Trees" has attracted much attention, but the style of the first and last literary film mixed with a pyramid scheme story in the middle is inevitably "misplaced" and inconsistent with the expected management of the pyramid scheme theme. When the Qingming Festival is no longer unpopular and even heats up the entire market, the market should probably pay more attention to the small stalls.
"Author to Hayao Miyazaki" is still 5 days and 500 million: the right time, the right place and the right person
won the overall show championship and won the most votes. Miyazaki Hayao's box office appeal is still unmatched. The hand-painted images of
are still exquisite, and Joe Hisaishi's music is still pleasant enough, but the film is not an easy-to-understand family carnival. It can be called a willful "private film" and the personal expression of the author. As a famous left-wing artist, 82-year-old Hayao Miyazaki weaves his anti-war thoughts, childhood experiences, and thoughts on life and death in his later years into this legendary "final work":
The inspiration for the creation of the underground world may come from Bucklin's "Island of the Dead", Toshio Suzuki, a 40-year-old partner and chairman of Studio Ghibli, is the prototype of the "Heron" in the movie. The interaction between the two protagonists, the boy and the heron, is like the real-life interaction between Hayao Miyazaki and Toshio Suzuki. The prototype of the uncle is his deceased friend Isao Takahata. The real person is Hayao Miyazaki himself who was born during the war. Natsuko and Fumi represent his mother, and his own father also ran a military factory. The terrifying man-eating parrot symbolizes the fascist imperialist army, and the pelican represents the bottom soldiers who were brainwashed by the war.
Fans who are familiar with him can also see a lot of past traces: the image of wow wow is similar to the tree spirit in "Princess Mononoke", the theme of different space is similar to " Spirited Away ", and Huomei can be associated with "" Howl's Moving Castle " has a fire demon, the World Stone, and towers collapse, similar to "Castle in the Sky"; it starts with a real person moving to the countryside, consistent with "My Neighbor Totoro"; the old ladies appear as patron saints, and he is usual method. This may be creative inertia, or it may be intentional by the creator of : creates a comprehensive fantasy world as a "farewell".
This original story is taken from the novel of the same name published by novelist Genzaburo Yoshino in 1937. Compared with the Hong Kong and Taiwan translation of "The Heron and the Boy", the mainland translation is closer to its original meaning: The old world has collapsed, how can the new world be rebuilt?
's film reputation has not been immortalized. The current Douban score of "What Kind of Life Do You Want to Live" is 7.7 points, which is slightly lower than the 8.0 points when it was released. It is even among the 9-rated animated films directed by Hayao Miyazaki. It is the one with the lowest relative rating. The reputation of shows a trend of differentiation: many viewers of think it is obscure or seems to be self-repetitive.
If other directors were so "willful", there is a high probability that the box office would have been miserable. But Hayao Miyazaki’s domestic appeal has indeed been accumulated over decades. has re-released many classics in the past, and the box office has been quite successful. It belongs to the first-line IP of Japanese imported animation: "My Neighbor Totoro" 173 million yuan, "Spirited Away" was 488 million yuan, and "Castle in the Sky" was 135 million yuan. Only "Ponyo on the Cliff", which was affected by the epidemic and had incorrect schedule selection, and "Porco Rosso" with low IP awareness were 2000. 10,000+ level box office.
"生" is a new film that Hayao Miyazaki has been honing for seven years. It has been leading the schedule in terms of pre-release popularity and the number of people who want to see it early in the morning. It is the number one seed. is riding on the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film, " The emotional killing of "the final work" takes advantage of the right time, place and people.
Of course, it remains to be determined whether this will be the end of the story. After all, starting from "Castle in the Sky" in 1986, the old man expressed his intention to retire. After that, he announced his retirement seven times and came back seven times. The last one was "The Wind Rises" 》 also announced the end of this.
Alibaba Pictures' vigorous promotion of and Ghibli's emphasis on the Chinese market have also brought a lot of blessings. In January this year, Alibaba Pictures and Studio Ghibli reached a strategic cooperation. Studio Ghibli representative director and producer Toshio Suzuki and Alibaba Pictures President Li Jie announced their intention to sign a cooperation plan for the film. On the day the film was scheduled to be released in mainland China, the world’s first Studio Ghibli Story immersive art exhibition was also announced to be launched in Shanghai in April this year. On the day of the premiere in March, China was Studio Ghibli's only stop in the world to promote the film in person. Chairman and producer Toshio Suzuki was there in person, as were the Chinese dubbing actors Liu Haoran, Dapeng, and Zhu Yawen. The investment in publicity and development of
has also yielded corresponding results. According to Beacon Professional Edition, on the fourth day after the film was released, the box office in mainland China exceeded 443 million yuan, surpassing the box office in Japan and becoming the film's largest box office in the world.
To a certain extent, "What Kind of Life Do You Want to Live" is actually a film that is very suitable for the Qingming Festival: the theme content involves the discussion of life and death. From the perspective of complementary genres, its literary and artistic style attracts female audiences. The relatively large audience composition complements "Godzilla vs. Kong 2", which has many martial arts dramas and relatively large male audiences.
External films carry the weight, but the content of domestic films is misplaced again?
In addition to "Life", which took down nearly half of the box office for the period, another winner was the monster movie. According to Maoyan Professional Edition data, "Godzilla vs. Kong 2", which is expected to have a total box office of over 900 million, will become a strong contender for the imported film box office championship in 2024.
Compared with the "Transformers series" and "Fast and Furious series" whose IP has aged, Godzilla has unexpectedly become the savior of imported Hollywood films to turn the tide and halt the decline. This is related to the freshness of the IP and also to The film returns to the essence of a monster movie, a brainless and fun movie.
The Douban score of the previous work "Godzilla vs. Kong" in 2021 was 6.3 points, and this one has a better reputation, with 6.9 points, achieving the cathartic relief of "fighting monsters from beginning to end". Industry insiders were not optimistic about it before its release. After its release, it achieved the second-best North American opening performance among the "Monsterverse" series, far exceeding expectations. Compared to the first film, which had only 30% to 70% of monster and human scenes, the second film has adjusted the proportion of martial arts and monster scenes to 70%. The logic of any character is not important. The main focus is a simple and crude one. In the film, Mothra, "Mini Gang", The spider monster Scylla, the sea monster Tiamat, the war bat, "Barbie Godzilla" and other monsters are now available in luxury gift packs, destroying the world along the way and keeping you entertained to the end.
The foreign films are too good, but the remaining new domestic films are not enough to watch. The social media popularity and marketing efforts of "The World of Grass and Trees" are not directly proportional to the box office. The problem lies in "the wrong goods". Recently, the film's director Gu Xiaogang officially announced that he will direct the new film "Spring Dawn in the Old Capital", starring Chen Kun, Bai Baihe, Li Gengxi, and Huang Minghao, continuing the "landscape movie" aesthetic project. His debut feature film "The Spring River" was selected as one of the top ten films of the year by France's "Cahiers du Cinéma" and was the closing film of the 58th "Critics Week" at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. He personally also won the best director honor at the 13th First Youth Film Festival for this film.
As a director favored by the Cannes Film Festival, Gu's personal aesthetic style, which is deeply influenced by traditional Chinese paintings, is more prominent and has strong literary and artistic attributes. "The World of Plants and Trees", as the second part of the "Trilogy of Landscape Pictures", shows the shortcomings of "both wanting and wanting", and that literature, art and commerce are separated and pulled from each other. The film is divided into three acts. The first act has a literary style. The second act "Modern version of Mu Lian saves her mother" switches to a crime film. The third act is about rebirth and return after the scam is exposed, and it becomes a literary style again. . Its Douban score dropped from 7.3 to 6.7, with a large number of two-star negative reviews mentioning "procrastination," "fragmentation," "chaos," and "too much footage of Academy of Fine Arts graduates was put in the third act." The content positioning of
is offset, and accordingly there is offset and misalignment in the announcement. 's "The World of Grass and Trees" focuses on short video promotions, creating multiple Douyin materials with millions of likes, highlighting the novelty attribute, and giving people the expectation of a "MLM version of "All or Nothing"", but in fact the film has not really taken off. Audiences who enter the theater expecting "All or Nothing" may be disappointed and give negative reviews as "too literary and artistic". For fans of niche literary and artistic films, the middle section of a crime film based on commercial considerations is too fragmented. As Gao Zan wrote in a short comment, "It is better to delete all the middle-level pyramid schemes. The photography is good and the film can be a good one." "Landscape Movie".
From "The Last Night on Earth" to "The World of Grass and Trees", when domestic literary and artistic films collectively move towards "dislocation of publicity and distribution", it reflects the "gambling marketing mentality" of literary and artistic films in order to break the dilemma of limited audiences, adopting deceptive or partially exaggerated way to get more viewers. But after the first batch of audiences arrive and the first wave of word-of-mouth fermentation, this method is prone to overturning.
The suspense film "The Oriole Behind!" is currently ranked fifth in the schedule. ", starring Feng Shaofeng and Tao Hong, with the latter starring and producing. It was originally called " the victim " and was originally scheduled to be released during the Qingming Festival in 2022, but was forced to withdraw due to the epidemic. The dilemma that backlogged films need to face is whether the concept is not new enough. Especially when the suspense genre has gathered together in recent years, if the word-of-mouth fermentation is not strong enough, it will be difficult to break through the circle.
was re-released a week in advance, and " Let's Shake the Sun Together ", which was aimed at the Qingming Festival, did not stage a counterattack miracle. Entertainment unicorns have previously analyzed that whether it is "Mr. Red Carpet" or "Let's Shake the Sun Together", following the precedent of "Chinese Ping Pong", films that have been scheduled for release and then withdrawn and re-released have already received good reviews. The publicity and distribution has already been done, and the audience does not have much freshness and curiosity, and is usually relatively passive.
Bao Beier's comedy "The Villain" does not completely match the tone of the Qingming film. The box office of "Snow Leopard", the last work of Wanma Tseden, is set to be in the millions. This kind of literary and artistic film is not for the mass market, and may later be recouped through overseas distribution and other methods.
There are currently 12 films in the May Day collection, including "Howl's Moving Castle", "Peacekeeping Riot Squad", "Spy House Code: White", "Journey Across the Moon" and "Nothing That Can't Be Solved by a Hot Pot" "The Thing", "Thelma and Louise", "The Siege of Kowloon Walled City", "Xiao Qian", "Rescue", "The Pig Man Movie: Interstellar", "Stuntman" and "Go". In terms of genres, comedies and animations are concentrated. Many films choose the May Day schedule instead of the Qingming Festival. This may also be due to issues of schedule suitability and schedule popularity.
, the highest-definition video in history, has been warmed up in advance, and will also form a rivalry with Hayao Miyazaki this month: "Life" in early February and "Howl's Moving Castle" at the end of the month. It remains to be seen whether the popularity can continue again.
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