Author: Wu Yalun Editor: Gao Qingxiu
This year's Spring Festival stalls are much "clean" compared to previous years, and there is no "grand event" of multiple films with the same screening, basically only "Mermaid", "Three Dozen White Bone Essences" and "Macau Storm 3" are dividing up this cake. Such an ending is destined to be joyful.
From the current point of view, the total box office of the three films in the three days before their release is nearly 1.6 billion. A few years ago, "Mermaid", which star master personally set the hunger marketing plan, came out on top, and "Macau Storm 3" and "Three Dozen White Bone Essences" temporarily ranked second and third.
Frankly speaking, the performance of "Three Dozen" made Xiao Yu a bit surprised. In the view of Xiao Yu, although "Three Dozen" has many shortcomings, it is still a commercial film that meets the requirements of family fun. However, considering the audience's various complaints about the special effects of the Journey to the West series "The Great Haunting of the Heavenly Palace", being pulled on the hind legs for filling the pits of the previous work may be the reason why "Three Dozen" is currently temporarily lagging behind.
Before the release of "Three Dozen", Xiao Yu once interviewed director Zheng Baorui. In the face of the frustration of the first part's reputation, he admitted that he lacked special effects thinking at that time, resulting in many and expensive special effects in "The Haunting of the Heavenly Palace", but the effect was very poor. This time, the special effects shots of "Three Dozen" are less than a thousand of them in "The Haunting of heavenly palaces", but from the perspective of the effect of the finished film, "Three Dozen" is a complete victory.
However, the extra points on the special effects did not make Zheng Baorui more confident in the reputation of "Three Dozen". Just like the fiasco in the special effects reputation of "The Haunting of the Heavenly Palace" made Zheng Baorui cautious when filming "Three Dozen". During the conversation, Xiao Yu could still feel his lack of confidence. "How much the box office can reach, I really can't predict." After all, whether "Three Dozen" can be accepted by the audience will not be known until after the release. ”
Three days after its release, "Three Dozen" distanced itself from the box office of "The Mermaid", and even the box office was not as good as Macau Storm 3. From a more objective point of view, Xiao Yu believes that perhaps "Three Dozen" is too decent, too in line with the standards of popcorn commercial films, and also lacks self-style.
"Three Dozen" did not meet expectations at the box office, is the audience turning over old accounts?
"Three Dozen" is the second Journey to the West IP work jointly produced by Zheng Baorui and Xinghao Pictures. The first is "The Haunting of The Heavenly Palace", which has been released in the Spring Festival file in 2014, and the box office has exceeded one billion, but the Douban score is only 4.2 points, and the five-cent special effect is even more insulting. The huge contrast between word of mouth and box office makes people resent the unprovoked feelings of this film, and many literary and artistic young people use this as an example to hate the sinking of the Chinese film market and the stupidity of Chinese film audiences.
In order to make up for the "debt" of the first part, "Three Dozen" actively did on-demand screenings before the release, trying to accumulate word of mouth, and the actors' cooperation was also very high, and the overall publicity momentum was much higher than that of "The Mermaid" and "Macau Storm 3". But "Mermaid" surpassed 250 million on the first day of release with its hunger marketing and Stephen Chow's "gold signboard", leaving "Macau Storm 3" and "Three Dozen" behind.
The backwardness of "Three Dozen" at the box office, in the eyes of Xiao Yu, is mainly "dragged down" by the word-of-mouth of the previous work. In the process of watching the movie, some viewers in the theater also mentioned that they gave 1 star on Douban because of the poor special effects of "The Haunting of the Heavenly Palace". In order to fill the pit of the previous work, it is not surprising that "Three Dozen" is currently frustrated.
In addition, as a decent commercial film, the lack of self-style also makes "Three Dozen" the last choice of the audience in this Spring Festival file. Xiao Yu observed the comments on Douban, Zhihu and Weibo, and many netizens chose "Three Dozen" because they could not buy tickets for "Mermaid".
With the original team of "Big Trouble Heavenly Palace", the special effects cost of "Three Dozen" is only half of it
"The first part, ah, was scolded miserably. In the end, I had to fill up the picture because I didn't have time to modify it. In the interview, Zheng Baorui was very calm in the face of the failure of the reputation of "The Haunting of the Heavenly Palace", especially the special effects part.
Zheng Baorui is accustomed to shooting Hong Kong-made thriller action films, and "The Haunting of the Heavenly Palace" is his first film to test the waters of the mainland market, and this is a large-scale production, magical genre film. Because of his lack of experience, Zheng Baorui used a lot of blue screen and green screen, and there were more than 2,000 special effects shots, but because of the lack of good communication with the special effects company in the early stage, coupled with the low budget and tight time, "The Haunting of the Heavenly Palace" became the object of public crusade.
Fortunately, "The Haunting of the Heavenly Palace" is very successful commercially, so it can be said that "Three Dozen White Bone Essences" is Zheng Baorui's second chance, "We feel that the first part is not done well, which must be admitted, many things are in the groping, if these problems are not solved, there will be no second part at all." ”
From "The Haunting of the Heavenly Palace" to "Three Dozen", in the production of special effects, Zheng Baorui made some adjustments. The first modification is that the essence is not expensive, that is, "reduce the scenery and reduce the amount". The first "Haunting tiangong" has too many scenes of the heavenly palace, Zheng Baorui did not build too many real scenes, but relied on post-production stunt production, the result is that things are expensive and the effect is poor.
In the second part, Zheng Baorui put the focus back on the real scene construction, and tried not to have special effects as much as possible. The special effects of "Three Dozen" are less than 1500 shots, and the overall special effects cost is less than half of "The Haunting of heaven".
Second, choose the strengths of people. From the beginning of the preparation of "Three Dozen", the special effects company entered the crew, and Zheng Baorui assigned and arranged work according to the directors of each special effects company. The special effects of the entire film were completed by six companies, of which three Korean companies completed more than 1,000 special effects shots, including the tiger, little white dragon, and white bone cave that appeared in the film, which were all produced by Korean teams.
To say that the biggest change should be that the overall staff of "Three Dozen" has brought special effects thinking. Although the effect of the first part was not ideal, Zheng Baorui still used the special effects of "Big Trouble in tiangong" to produce the whole class when filming "Three Dozen". "Our team, even the art teachers, the film lighting, the special effects producers are all powerful, the key is how do you communicate with them and really release their energy." In the production process of "Three Dozen", it should be said that the communication is relatively good. ”
Korean special effects make Western-style magic, can the Westernized special effects style of "Three Dozen" be accepted?
Zheng Baorui likes the 86 version of "Journey to the West", and even the background music of the ending of "Three Dozens" has been interpreted as Zheng Baorui's tribute to the 86 Journey to the West. However, the special effects of "Three Dozen" present a very gamified and Westernized style. The white bone battle in the last battle of the film, the Iron Man possession when Sun Wukong arrived, many scenes let netizens have the feeling of "3D game modeling".
In the face of a traditional Chinese super IP like "Journey to the West", can the Western-style magic special effects style made by the Korean team be accepted?
Perhaps focusing on the quality of the special effects shots, Zheng Baorui obviously did not think much about the issue of special effects aesthetics. "A lot of the lens processing we are biased towards the power type, I think we don't think in the direction of Western aesthetics, just want to be able to bear something, so this feeling is not surprising." The old version of "Journey to the West" is handled very well, but I think the era is different, and we have to find some ways to have a combination with modern people. ”
In Zheng Baorui's view, Chinese special effects are just born, so it is inevitable to learn a lot of Hollywood and even Korean things, "special effects movies are really just starting out in China, and for domestic movies, they must accept some Western things, which is a fact." ”
Many netizens have complained that just looking at the picture does not look at the monkey, it feels that "Three Dozen White Bone Essences" is telling the story of "Journey to the West", and he is entirely likely to be a Korean costume magic film. Zheng Baorui did not think so: "There are already many original Oriental movies, and "Three Dozen" can provide another different style for the audience to choose. ”
In the view of Xiao Yu, the special effects movies in the past two years have made a qualitative leap, but a good special effects blockbuster must have its own independent special effects style, such as successful cases such as "Dragon Hunting Recipe" and "Wolf Totem", and failure cases such as "Nine-Story Demon Tower" and "Zhong Kui Voldemort".
In this year's Spring Festival file, "Three Dozen" is a qualified popcorn commercial film. But compared to "The Mermaid", its pass is somewhat boring. As China's largest ancient magic theme IP, borrowing and even accepting Western things and forming their own unique special effects aesthetic style are two concepts, balancing these two, the "Journey to the West" series may shine.