Author / Xiao Bao
The Spring Festival stall drops at 6.035 billion yuan, leaving a lot of urgent thinking for the industry. For example, just when everyone thought that the "Bear Haunting" series was in a state of fatigue, the latest "Return to Earth" broke the box office record of the Spring Festival animation and also created a new box office high for the single film of the series.
At the same time, according to the data of Maoyan Research Institute, the proportion of people in the Spring Festival animation market of "Return to Earth" in 2022 rebounded to 83%, recovering the 80% level reached by "Primitive Era" in 2019.
It can be seen that even if there will be fluctuations, the success of the "Bear Haunting" series is not accidental. In general, the Intelligence Jun believes that the series grasps three key points, which are both timely and geographically beneficial:
1. Take the initiative to grasp the law of the market;
2. Replace the brand national nature of the Pleasant Goat series in a timely manner;
3. Pay attention to the story script and strive to improve animation technology.
However, all animated IP theatrical versions must have their limitations; mature operations such as Japan's "Detective Conan" series, "Doraemon" series, "Pokémon" series, etc., also have to face problems such as audience fixation, content solidification, and technical bottlenecks. Therefore, from the perspective of sustainable development, Intelligence Jun also raised two questions about the "Bear Haunting" series and Huaqiang Fantawild:
1. Can it stabilize the production capacity and content quality of the theatrical version of "Bear Haunting"?
2. Can I launch other successful IP other than "Bear Haunting"?
Success Point 1:
Take the initiative to grasp the laws of the market
It is said that "Return to earth" is the most stable movie in this Spring Festival file, and "stability" is "stable" in its active grasp of market laws. This is especially true of fares.
This is clearly reflected in the release price, average ticket price, and number of people of the eight theatrical versions of "Bear Haunting" since 2014.
First of all, from 2014's "Treasure Hunter" to 2022's "Return to Earth", the series's Class A 2D distribution price has been maintained at the level of 30 yuan for a long time. However, in 2019, the average ticket price of its Spring Festival slot jumped from the 30 yuan range to the 40 yuan range, so from 2021, the issue price of "Wild Continent" and "Return to Earth" has also risen, increasing by 5 yuan year by year.
However, thanks to the fact that the increase in the number of moviegoers far exceeds the increase in ticket prices, when the audience buys tickets for the "Bear Haunting" movie during the Spring Festival, it is likely that they will ignore the price increase at the mental level. Take the two years when the distribution price rose to 35 yuan and 40 yuan as an example, in 2021, "Wild Continent" attracted 7.942 million moviegoers with an average ticket price of 46.5 yuan, and this year's "Return to Earth" attracted 11.103 million people to buy tickets to watch the movie with an average ticket price of 46 yuan (the data given by the lighthouse professional version is 50.7 yuan). It can be seen that in the case of the overall ticket price of this year's Spring Festival file being unreasonably raised, "Bear Haunting" has not moved itself and has become the work that the audience's enthusiasm for watching movies is most unaffected by the ticket price.
It is true that the IP brand of "Bear Haunting" has accumulated a very fixed audience group for many years, and watching the "Bear Haunting" movie during the Spring Festival has also become a ceiling. But it is difficult not to say that the success of "Return to Earth" in this Spring Festival file does not have the credit of a relatively reasonable and stable ticket price, and the distribution team behind it should also make considerable consideration in the pricing strategy.
Speaking of which, the active grasp of the market law of the "Bear Haunting" series is also reflected in its adjustment to the main control company and the issuing company.
As we all know, "Bear Haunting" is an IP brand brought by Huaqiang Fantawild, and its theatrical version is also personally created by Fantawild Animation (it has not been outsourced to another production company since 2017"Adventure Diary like TV Animation). However, from "Treasure Hunter" to "Return to Earth", the film's production and distribution company is often in a state of animation adjustment.
For example, 2014-2017 was the time when Huaqiang Fantawild cooperated deeply with Lechuang Pictures, a subsidiary of Sunac Culture (and LeTV Pictures), and in 2018, the partner of "Metamorphosis" became Guangguang Pictures, and after 2019, it "rebuilt the old good" with Lechuang Pictures, and introduced new partners such as Hengdian, Lianrui and Maoyan.
In addition, it should start from "Primitive Times", and the theatrical version of "Bear Haunting" has also launched a dialect version. This dialect version (zeng) covers the languages of Henan, Shaanxi, Sichuan, Hunan and Guangdong, which not only increases audience expectations, but also enhances audience stickiness.
Success Point 2:
At the right time to replace the brand national nature of the Pleasant Goat series
In addition to the surprise performance of "Return to earth", the reason for the much attention in the animation aspect of this year's Spring Festival is that the former national IP Pleasant Goat has "returned" - this is the first time that "Bear Haunting" and "Pleasant Goat" competed in the same field, however, after many years of silence, the hero is late, the king is no longer there, and the 2D "Pleasant Goat" is difficult to look forward to the back of the 3D "Bear Haunting".
The evolution to such a result, there is the impact of the "Pleasant Goat" theatrical version since 2014 to the slippery slope, there is the "Bear Haunting" big movie in 2014 decided to enter the game, but also the background of the overall weakness of domestic animation brands in these years. We assume that the "Spring Festival animation film" and even the "domestic national animation film" in a broad sense is an industry environment with a relatively fixed scale and clear boundaries, then it can be seen more clearly by dismantling the classic method of analyzing the competitive environment, "Porter's five-force model".
First, the bargaining power of buyers and sellers affects the level of competition of competitors in the industry, and in "Bear Haunting", the audience environment can be said to be a seller's market.
Second, since the theatrical version of "Pleasant Goat" has been extinguished, the "Bear Haunting" in the Spring Festival file has neither the threat of new entrants nor the threat of substitutes, so as to accumulate its own brand effect for a long time. Narrowed to the "family fun low animation" track, the "one brother" status of "Bear Haunting" is more obvious. For example, in 2019, the box office ratio between "Primitive Times" and "Peppa Pig's Big Year" was 7:1, and this year's "Return to Earth" was far behind "Pleasant Goat and Gray Wolf's Basket Out of the Future" and "Little Tiger Dun Big Hero".
Third, jumping out of the entire Spring Festival slot, and then jumping out of the family fun low-child animation track, the national nature of "Bear Haunting" also makes it gap with adult animation with a high acceptance threshold. On this point, we can clearly see that the "New God List: Nezha Reborn" in the Spring Festival file in 2021 is inferior to the low-profile "Bear Haunting Wild Continent"; the perspective is widening, the "Jiang Ziya" is not up to expectations, the level of 400-500 million yuan of the "White Snake" series of chasing light animation, and the controversy and folding of "Lion Boy" all indicate that domestic adult animation still has a long way to go.
Success Point 3:
Pay attention to the quality of the script and strive to improve the animation technique
Finally, let's take a look at the highlights of the Bear Haunting series in terms of script quality and animation technology.
For a long time, "Bear Haunting", like "Pleasant Goat", was criticized by adults for being low and being complained about violence by parents, but it was very liked by children. Even though the two (radiating to the overall IP of the young animation) are related to the integration and transformation and upgrading of the elements, to this day, the "low animation" as the shell of its stereotype still exists. The most intuitive feeling is that when The Intelligence Jun watches "Return to Earth", he can find many absent-minded parents, WeChat chat, brushing Weibo is a small matter, and some even play online mahjong during the viewing process of holding children.
Despite this, Huaqiang Fantawild still strives for the quality of the script of the theatrical version of "Bear Haunting" (especially the works before 2017), and "does its homework" for its technical quality. For example, the more acclaimed "Treasure Hunter" and "Snow Ridge Bear Wind" in the series of animations are polished by a multi-person screenwriting team, and the director is also a model of Ding Liang as the main and the capable as the supplement. Technically, the works after "Fantasy Space" are more and more spectacular every year, cool and smooth to earn eyeballs.
According to the senior animation media people, the story content of the theatrical version of "Bear Haunting" seems to be repeatedly jumping between slapstick (emphasizing funny, absurd, and paragraph) and popular drama (melodrama, emphasizing the plot and emotions are greater than the characters), so the level is abrupt and not very unified.
However, hard work is not the same as doing well, and most viewers who understand the basic situation of Fantawild Animation and the "Bear Haunting" series know that 2015-2017 is an important time to affect the production level of the series.
On the one hand, around 2016, due to salary and other issues, some early voice actors and one of the important directors Liu Fuyuan (bald head strong prototype) left Fangte; at the same time, fans believe that Wan Qin, Xu Yun, Jiang Lin, Cui Tiezhi and other active screenwriters are still underheated, Ding Liang has retreated behind the scenes, and the "Bear Haunting" series has not returned to the peak of word-of-mouth that year.
On the other hand, the outsourcing changes that began with the TV animation "Adventure Diary" have also raised questions about Fantawild's production capacity level in recent years. According to statistics, during the period from 2013 to 2015, Fangte, which is at a high level of production capacity, can simultaneously complete high-quality TV animation ("Spring Confrontation of Bear Haunting"), theater animation ("Treasure Hunting Bear Soldier"), and special episodes ("New Year of Bear Haunting", "Bear Haunting New Year"), but now it can only make one New Year movie a year, and it has also become an alternate execution of directors Lin Huida, Lin Yongchang, Shao and Qi.
Question Point 1:
Huaqiang Fantawild's production capacity problem
Therefore, the first question about whether the "Bear Haunting" series can be sustainable and successful gives Huaqiang Fantawild's production capacity problem.
Judging from a cost-benefit chart widely circulated among the fans of "Bear Haunting", the production cost of the theatrical version of "Bear Haunting" has been raised over the years, which is relatively abundant, and it has a continuously improving spectacle technical level. However, as mentioned above, in addition to the theatrical version, in recent years, Huaqiang Fantawild has no longer promoted the "Bear Haunting" IP at the same time from the production level. According to the company's 2021 semi-annual report, the ninth and tenth theatrical versions of the hands-on "Bear Haunting" have entered the preliminary preparations, the second and third seasons of the outsourced TV animation "Monster Project" and the derivative animation "The Bear Gang" and "Curious Time" are advancing, in addition to allocating energy to the domestic operation of the Japanese animation "Miracle Girl" and the BBC animation "Space Rat Family".
From a positive point of view, we can think that Huaqiang Fantawild wants to use good steel on the blade and concentrate on doing a good job in each "Bear Haunting" theatrical version; but from a negative point of view, assuming that this practice is only capacity transfer, not capacity decline, we also wonder whether such an operation is cost-effective.
At present, "City of Servants" has undertaken a lot of transferred production capacity, but it is an attempt that does not meet the ideal.
Question Point 2: Huaqiang Fantawild's commercial law trend
Closely related to the transfer of production capacity is the direction of Huaqiang Fantawild's commercial law.
Nowadays, when it comes to the cultural industry in China, it is necessary to talk about IP, but it is not enough to have IP, and it is necessary to use appropriate business strategies to operate IP. In other words, with the accumulation of audience emotions in "Bear Haunting" over the years, it fully meets the definition of IP; but from the perspective of Huaqiang Fantawild's operating model, the company is still far from Kadokawa Commercial Law, which is famous in the world of IP operation.
What is Kadokawa Commercial Law? To put it simply, in the past decade, the concept of IP has been proposed in China, and it wants to use it to realize the "grandfather" routine of the multimedia operation model (media mix). Specifically, in the Kadokawa Business Law 1.0 period, the practice was "one source, multiple adaptations", and in the 2.0 period, the practice was "multiple sources, multiple adaptations", that is, taking a specific "world view" as the source and simultaneously carrying out multi-media creation.
▲Image source animation academic lie
The operation mode of Huaqiang Fantawild to "Bear Haunting" obviously belongs to the idea of Kadokawa Commercial Law 1.0 period, deriving manga, licensed toys, theme parks... The characters surrounding the original "Bear Haunting" can be biochemically adapted. However, from TV animation to theatrical version to spin-offs, has Bear Haunting formed a "world view" that can be created indefinitely?
In this regard, some people think that "Bear Haunting" has only a world framework and no self-consistent worldview. For example, "Snow Ridge Bear Wind" and "Return to Earth" can be said to be parallel universes, or they can be said to be unrelated plot divisions. Some people say that "Wild Continent" and "Return to Earth" are more than one science fiction (it is rumored that the ninth theatrical version is a marine science fiction theme), and can only go all the way to "science fiction" in the future.
In any case, the success of "Return to Earth" is the sum of the successes of the "Bear Haunting" series all the way, according to the current level, excellence in production, "Bear Haunting" theatrical version of the probability will become the Spring Festival Top3 sooner or later.
However, as industry observers, while reviewing its success and expecting more similar successes in the Chinese film market, we must also realize that its further direction is.