Text │ Bone Flower
2021 has entered the countdown. In this year, due to the repeated epidemics, policy supervision, intensified competition in long and short videos and many other factors, internal entertainment is facing a general trend of capital retreat and industry growth slowdown, but the market still maintains a certain scale of growth. Especially since the "Clear Lang Action" in June this year, after the "traffic theory" was broken, creators and production companies have also returned to rationality, with the creation of good works as a key chip to capture the market and the public.
Looking back at this year's drama market, on the one hand, from "Mountains and Seas", "The Age of Awakening" to "Rebels", "Sweeping Black Storm", "I Am Good in Other Places", "Ideal City" and other works with word-of-mouth popularity, it can be seen that this year's main theme of reality is frequently produced, successfully occupying the head position of the national drama market. On the other hand, traditional head types of dramas such as costumes, sweet pets, suspense, and fantasy have entered a relatively downward stage of steady development.
In the field of variety shows, the "rollover" of talent shows in the first half of the year, and the suspension and rectification of several works in the second half of the year have brought great shocks to the industry. From the perspective of data dimensions such as broadcast volume, popularity, and word-of-mouth, this year's variety shows a state of decline compared with previous years, but fortunately, from a local point of view, there are also some good works with high reputation and high popularity, as well as more vertical and innovative programs in terms of themes and types that often arouse industry attention. For example, the marriage documentary reality show "Goodbye Lover" received a high score of 8.9 on Douban, the director's competitive program "Director Please Advise" continued to detonate the discussion of online topics, and the suspenseful "Detective Detective" stood out by opening up the dimensional wall between classic film and television IP, script killing, and reasoning detective games, becoming a dark horse in this year's variety market.
Then, as the above-mentioned "Ideal City", "Detective Detective" and many other out-of-the-loop drama variety works behind the scenes of the pusher - passing entertainment (01326. HK), why can it maintain an efficient and high-quality output rhythm under the general trend of this year's cold winter and the retreat of capital, so as to be called "the 2021 drama comprehensive all-round king" by the industry?
Passing out the circle works:
"Ideal City", "Lady Hu Zhu"
《Moe Search Search》
Recently, "Ideal City" created by Conveying Entertainment and Houhai Culture was rated as the top ten most professional drama series in 2021 by Sina Weibo, and the drama also won the fourth Chuxin List Annual Influential TV Series, and was nominated for the 32nd Huading Awards for Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor.
From the beginning of the broadcast to the end in August this year, the popularity of "Ideal City" rose with the continuous fermentation of word-of-mouth: Douban opened a score of 7.7 and then rose to 7.8, the popularity of iQiyi station was once as high as 8257, the highest popularity of bone flowers also exceeded 76, and even astronaut Wang Yaping was chasing the drama in space.
The blessing of awards, high ratings and high popularity make this realistic theme work focusing on the profession of cost engineer become a veritable benchmark for domestic professional dramas. This is closely related to its advantages of grounded, non-suspended, no love brain protagonist, no mansion, no filter, simple and true service, etc., and it is inseparable from the producer's continuous polishing and persistent pursuit of good content.
Zhao Wenzhu, president of Transmission Entertainment and director of "Ideal City", once said that doing this drama is a challenge and breakthrough, "We hope to provide another possibility of workplace drama and do our best to reshape the audience's aesthetic and view of domestic workplace drama." When talking about the difficulties of doing this drama, Zhao Wenzhu believes that the difficulties are not a simple process establishment problem, but quality control and details. For example, the production of special effects, sounds, scenes, etc., "each piece can be subcontracted into several teams, and each professional team controls the quality and completes it with high quality through process management." Instead of relying on the director to do it himself and raise his face. ”
Zhao Wenzhu, president of Transmission Entertainment
She further explains that "telling stories and characters well is at the heart of the play" Therefore, when doing the selection of topics, she will ask the team to first start from their own ability, regardless of whether there is experience in related industries, they must be specially studied for the sake of industry dramas, and even stay for half a year to learn more about the most real situation. "The second is the audience, you must think clearly about which audiences the show is for, what elements the audience likes to watch, and can do a certain degree of innovation."
Starring Yang Mi and Chen Weiting, "Lady Huozhu" is another S-level drama produced by Houhai Culture, a subsidiary of Transmission Entertainment, in conjunction with Penguin Film and Television and Jiaxing Media this year. The drama premiered for 24 hours, the number of broadcasts exceeded 200 million, and the cumulative playback has reached nearly 4 billion. Bone data shows that since the beginning of the broadcast to the end, the popularity of "Lady Huozhu" has been in the first fault, and the highest heat in history is 85.34. The topic discussion caused by the drama on the Internet is extremely high, with more than 1300 hot searches on the whole network and 27 hot searches on Weibo.
Similar to the popularity fault of "Lady Hu Zhu" during the broadcast, an S+-level variety show "Meng Detective Detective" created by Transmission Entertainment, Houhai Culture and iQiyi often ranks first in the fracture list during the broadcast period. 3 months of hits, 12 classic IP adaptations, and hilarious reasoning again and again, "Detective Detective" has finally become an original dark horse in this year's variety market.
This dark horse program innovatively uses the model of "script killing + classic IP" to inject new vitality into the traditional reasoning variety show, and the "stupid cute" and "hilarious" family-style detective mode makes more viewers feel the fun behind the immersive story.
It is reported that "Detective Detective" took only a few months from preparation to launch, and successfully landed and became iQiyi's variety show S+ project; "Ideal City" was less than a year from start-up to broadcast, efficient and high-quality. As far as these two projects are concerned, it seems that there seems to be a lot of good luck in passing entertainment, and the projects that have been opened have advanced very smoothly, and behind the good luck is actually a set of "all-round methodology" of transmission entertainment.
Convey the methodology of entertainment drama synthesis omnipotence
In 2018, Delivery Entertainment acquired 100% of Houhai Culture. Since then, Zhao Wenzhu, president of Transmission Entertainment, has continuously mentioned in his external voice that the company has, as always, deeply cultivated good content, adhered to the "good story to find a thick sea", and at the same time, the two major business sectors of drama and synthesis have developed synchronously to create "drama comprehensive all-round".
After the completion of the bet, Houhai Culture has successively launched S-level drama works such as "Ideal City" and "Detective Detective", which is responsible for investors with market returns and sets a good example for the industry. After the integration of transmission entertainment, on the one hand, it solves the worries of Houhai Culture in terms of funds, so that the creative team can focus more on polishing the content, on the other hand, the transmission entertainment uses its own advantages, and through the integration of upstream and downstream resources of the industry, it can also lead the team to build its own high-quality content brand, and truly realize the "strong alliance".
Therefore, in 2020, a web drama adapted from a Japanese manga of the same name, "Chess Soul", with a high reputation of 8.6 points (24.4w people scored) on Douban, made Houhai Culture, a subsidiary of Transmission Entertainment, touch the ceiling of domestic comic dramas as soon as it made a shot.
Since then, Delivery Entertainment has entered a stage of stable development, and the company's overall business form has also developed rapidly from the initial "pyramid structure" to the "fan structure". Under the fan-shaped business model, the transmission entertainment group is the main control, the core business line of the film and television synthesis is the fan bone, and the talents and partners including directors, screenwriters and artists are the fans.
This year, the emergence of the three S-level works of "Ideal City", "Lady Hu Zhu" and "Detective Meng" and the remarkable achievements made the transmission of entertainment go through and smooth the "drama + comprehensive" drama comprehensive all-round track, and successfully established a good reputation for delivering the brand.
Not only that, in addition to the production of the drama, this year's passing entertainment signing actors have also emerged in many big plays, Yang Chaoyue and Zhou Cheng'ao have appeared in "Ideal City" and "Love is Delicious" respectively.
Yang Chaoyue, as the artist who attracts the most attention from the outside world under the transmission team, has a very complete plan for her, Zhao Wenzhu said, "In the choice of projects, we are extra cautious about what kind of themes and roles she starts from. On the one hand, because she is relatively young, the themes and roles of youth, fairy tales, and sweet pets will be relatively easy to interpret and control; but on the other hand, every year we still hope that she can participate in some good works of good directors, do not care about the position, the key is to learn, which is what we strive for. When she participated in "Ideal City", she learned a lot of acting skills and professionalism from the senior actors. ”
Another artist under the passing banner, Zhou Cheng'ao, became popular for starring in "Love Is Delicious". As this drama continues to be spontaneously amway in the audience, the Douban score is as high as 8.2 and gradually attracts industry attention, and the popularity is also rising. This proves that the vision of passing on the role of its artists is very accurate and sharp. In addition, shu Huan and Su Biao, well-known screenwriters who passed on the contract, also wrote the scripts of the costume comedy "Deyun Vashe" and the movie "Wash white" respectively. These works are all highly discussed on the Internet or have a good reputation of quality.
From the "pyramid" to the "fan structure", and then to the recent launch of the "scientific and technological attribute content company" sustainability strategy, the transmission of entertainment so that its screenwriters, directors, artists can participate in high reputation, good quality works, this investment, strategic layout of sharp vision, forward-looking, can effectively maintain the quantity and quality of works to improve, which is also Zhao Wenzhu's previous emphasis on the core value of "content is king".
Zhao Wenzhu said, "For content development, my principle is that there can be no hard cycle indicators, and I do not say that one thing must be completed every year. I often tell the planning team that instead of being anxious to develop three out a year, it is better to spend two or three years to make a work with good word-of-mouth ratings, and the value to the team and the company will be greater. ”
Looking back on this bumper harvest in 2021, Passing Entertainment has created its own strong reputation with its works and has become a veritable 2021 "Drama Almighty King". However, in the face of the current situation of the industry's cold winter and the fierce competition in the content market, maintaining a steady and steady business model and constantly tapping the interaction and production potential at the content level of dramas and variety shows is still the key to the sustainable development and breakthrough of entertainment.
It is reported that the dramas "Holding the Koi Xianggong", "Black Soil Without Words", "Abnormal Death", "Ten Million and Spring Residence", "Redemption on the Blade", "Half city Wind and Moon", as well as variety shows "Like You and Me Too 3", "Peach Blossom Garden in the City", "Worry Relief Photo Studio" and other projects are all in the planning of the future of entertainment.