Approaching the Spring Festival, the Spring Festival stalls have become more and more lively.
Recently, with the "Changjin Lake Water gate Bridge" set for the first day of the Chinese New Year, the overall pattern of the Spring Festival file has once again ushered in new changes. Lighthouse data shows that as of now, the number of people who want to see the three films "Miracle Stupid Child", "Watergate Bridge" and "Four Seas" ranks in the top three of the schedule, which is a big gap with other films in the schedule.
Image source: Lighthouse Pro
Judging from the number of new people who want to see it in the latest week, the growth momentum of "Watergate Bridge" is strong, and the number of new people in a single day even exceeded 100,000 at one time. According to this trend, the number of people who want to see "Watergate Bridge" will most likely surpass "Miracle" and become the most concerned film in the Spring Festival file.
However, there are still nearly half a month before the Spring Festival, and with the release of more materials and the release of word-of-mouth, a variety of factors may affect the final direction of the box office of the Spring Festival film. However, with the overall siphon effect of the film market, it is foreseeable that this year's Spring Festival file will still not give too many film opportunities.
Box office carrying capacity increased
However, the number of films that can be accommodated is reduced
In recent years, almost every year the Spring Festival stalls have been called "the strongest in history". The reason is that the overall box office carrying capacity of the Spring Festival slot has been continuously enhanced, soaring from 1.452 billion in 2014 to 7.843 billion in 2021.
In this process, almost all of the most competitive films in China will choose the Spring Festival slot to maximize the box office space, which also makes the Spring Festival slot more and more crowded. However, from the perspective of the development trend of the schedule, the increased carrying capacity of the box office does not mean that more films can get the maximum box office in this period, and with the increasingly obvious siphon effect, the box office fault line between the films during the period is getting bigger and bigger, relatively speaking, the living space of more mid-waist films is constantly narrowing.
According to the data of Lighthouse Professional Edition, from 2016 to 2021, it has become the norm for films with the Spring Festival box office TOP3 to occupy 80% of the box office.
If you are more specific, since 2015, the top two films in the box office during the period have accounted for 50%-60% of the total, and under this premise, the third and fourth films at the box office can still account for almost 10% of the box office. However, in 2021, "Detective Chinatown 3" and "Hello, Li Huanying" two films took away 80% of the box office, and the respective box office proportions of the rest of the films in the schedule were compressed to less than 10%, and with the long tail effect of the head film, the possibility of a late counterattack for films with little box office space during the period is unlikely.
From this point of view, once there are one or two super-head movies in the Spring Festival file, the box office explosion potential of other films during the file period may even be suppressed, which is also the key to some films choosing to withdraw.
As of now, Happy Twist's "Super Family" and animated movies "Cherry Pills: Fantasy Notes", "I Am a Tyrannosaurus Rex", and "Jurassic Paradise" have withdrawn from this year's Spring Festival file. Among them, as one of the popular films in this year's Spring Festival file, the withdrawal of "Super Family" surprised many people, the film starred By Shen Teng and Allen, and the number of tickets that wanted to see before the withdrawal exceeded 400,000, which was once comparable to "Miracle".
With the withdrawal of "Super Family", "Watergate Bridge" entered, the latter under the influence of "Chosin Lake" the market attention continues to rise, the original competition pattern of the Spring Festival file has also been rewritten. Therefore, if with the influence of the pre-sale scale and the word-of-mouth of the on-demand screening, the trend of super head films during the file period is further clarified, before the Official opening of the Spring Festival file, there may be films that choose to temporarily leave the scene in order to ensure their own commercial performance.
Big Guide VS New Generation
The difference theme covers a variety of scenes
From the perspective of the main creators, there are many overall points of view for this year's Spring Festival films. On the one hand, due to the similarity of the film's theme, Chen Kaige behind "Watergate Bridge" and Zhang Yimou behind "Sniper", such a level of director will form a confrontation between them.
On the other hand, young directors will also face the big director and divide the same market. Previously, Wen Muye became famous in the industry for directing "I Am Not a Medicine God", which reached nearly 3.1 billion at the box office. In this year's Spring Festival file, "Miracle" directed by Wen Muye is also one of the popular films in the schedule.
In addition to the director's influence, the film starring Yi Qianxi also accelerated the expansion of the film's voice. Reflected in the user portrait, the female users of "Miracle" accounted for as much as 80%, which is much higher than other films in the same period. From the perspective of the overall consumption scene of the Spring Festival movie, the prominence of social needs during the holiday is also more conducive to the spread of the film. If the film gets a good word-of-mouth performance after its release, it is expected to come out of a good box office curve.
Similarly, in the camp of young directors is Han Han, who directed "Four Seas" is his fourth film, and this is also his third time to compete in the Spring Festival file. His novels once carried the collective memory of a generation, based on this, Han Han's films also have a certain audience base, the previous "After the Period", "Ride the Wind and Waves", "Flying Life" three films, the overall box office showed a growing trend, of which the box office of "Flying Life" reached more than 1.7 billion.
However, compared with the previous creative mode of adapting his own novel, this time "Four Seas" is Han Han's original script. However, in the film, the combination of Shen Teng + Yin Zheng in "Flying Life" was continued, and Liu Haoran and Liu Haocun, two new generation actors, starred, also brought a good pre-screening performance to the film.
The diversified creative group has also enriched the theme elements of this year's Spring Festival file, and the content as a whole covers love, comedy, entrepreneurship, war, sports, family, plot and other aspects, so that the distribution of themes meets the consumer demand of more scenes and avoids excessive overlap of the film's audience groups.
In addition, the satisfaction of animated films in parent-child consumption has also made such films gradually form a fixed market for the schedule. At present, there are 3 animated films piled up in the Spring Festival file, and 3 similar films with smaller voices have withdrawn in advance.
Among them, the "Bear Haunting" series has always been the best animated film in the Spring Festival in recent years, but this year will encounter the same big IP "Pleasant Goat and Gray Wolf Basket Out of the Future", although the latter returned to the Spring Festival file after 7 years, but in early 2021, the same series of "Sports Hero Legend of the Basket Out of victory" was once out of the circle. Based on this, "Basket Out of the Future" even shows a trend of breaking through the parent-child consumer group, and the number of people who want to see its lighthouse has now exceeded 180,000, ranking fourth in the file period.
And in the user portrait, the non-parent-child consumer group under the age of 24 has accounted for more than 50%, while the core consumer group of "Bear Haunting and Return to Earth" is concentrated in the parent-child consumer group over the age of 30. From this point of view, this year's animation IP is expected to go out of a different development route.
Big factory "casting a wide net"
Alibaba Pictures may become the biggest winner
At present, the phenomenon of film companies behind the head movie has not weakened, but there are still some new changes on the whole.
From the current industry trend, companies directly related to the main creator are taking back the initiative in film creation, not only participating in the production of the film, but even directly becoming the main controller of the film. The most typical is "Miracle", the bad monkey behind it is the company of supervising producer Ning Hao, and General Dream Pictures is the company of director Wen Muye. "Four Seas" is the same, the main controller of Tingdong Pictures is Han Han's company.
In this direction of development, the industry began to appear a new trend, traditional film and television companies and later Internet film companies, these large manufacturers in their own content layout, is gradually opening the "wide cast the net" model.
For example, behind "Miracle", "Watergate Bridge" and "Four Seas", Ali Pictures is one of the producers, and this is the film that currently wants to see the top 3 people. And in the list of producers of "Pleasant Goat", which ranks fourth in the number of people who want to see it, there are also companies that belong to the Ali system, such as Taobao Ticket and Youku. Even behind the "Super Family", which was previously announced to be withdrawn, Ali Pictures also participated in the investment. Such a "wide layout" also allows Ali Pictures to lock in a larger win in advance in multiple "seed players".
Not only Ali Pictures, this year's Spring Festival file, China Film holds "Miracle", "Watergate Bridge" and "Bear Haunting" three films, Bona in addition to the main control of "Watergate Bridge", Bona Runze is also one of the producers of "Four Seas", and Wanda is standing behind "Miracle" and "Bear Haunting".
The overall development of the industry has made more and more large manufacturers have to replace the "bet" model that was deeply bound to the main creator in the form of multi-point layout. Under this trend, creators will get more initiative space, and big manufacturers will share risks with multiple films to obtain more stable and sustainable commercial benefits. After all, as far as the current market environment is concerned, the epidemic has brought too much uncertainty to the development of the industry, and every enterprise in it needs to improve its anti-risk ability in a variety of ways.
At present, the pace of the Spring Festival is getting closer and closer, and the various films have also reached the final stage of publicity, as the most explosive and the largest box office carrying capacity in a year, I hope that the upcoming Spring Festival file can give a good start to the film market in 2022.