Domestic love movies face a 12-year itch

Maoyan Research Institute, a subsidiary of Maoyan Entertainment, recently released the "Domestic Love Film Data Insight" (hereinafter referred to as the "Report"), which shows that after the two golden periods of domestic love movies, the total market value and single film box office have encountered challenges, and keywords such as "plot" and "realism" of the film have attracted the attention of the audience, and the market urgently needs to break the "homogenization" dilemma.

Highly homogeneous

Domestic love movies have entered a breakthrough period

The data shows that in the 12 years from 2011 to 2022, domestic love movies have experienced two golden stages, and have now entered the breakthrough period of the third stage.

From 2011 to 2013, various love films such as urban, youth, costume, comedy, and drama have excellent market performance, such as "33 Days of Broken Love" relying on the social attributes of love movies and the popular culture of the Internet to create the concept of "Singles' Day of the Century", and won the fourth place at the annual box office of domestic films in one fell swoop.

In 2014, the category of domestic romance movies began to diversify, "love + comedy" took the lead in achieving a leap in box office volume, Maoyan Professional Edition data shows that the average number of comedy romance movies released annually reached as many as 120, the box office proportion in the domestic film market reached a high of 49% in 2014, and the total box office value exceeded the 10 billion mark in 2015. In 2015, it directly ushered in the heyday of "comedy love", and produced classic and excellent works such as "Hong Kong" and "Charlotte Troubles".

After entering 2017, or due to aesthetic fatigue of "comedy + love", the annual total output value of romance films has declined significantly, but the average box office still maintains a high output. Films such as "Predecessor 3: Goodbye Ex", "Later Us" and "Young You" represent that love movies have won a single film billion for three consecutive years. At the same time, "plot + love" has shown a rising trend since 2017, and in 2018 and 2019, it has successively surpassed the number of films at the box office of tens of millions and the average box office, becoming the new mainstream of love movies.

Since 2020, the epidemic has had a considerable impact on the industry as a whole, the supply of film types has been limited, and the love film market has gradually declined under the influence of the big environment. Even when all data of the film market has picked up in 2021, love movies account for only 11% of the domestic market, which is still a gap compared with previous years. The average box office continues to decline, whether it is creation or market operation, there is a highly homogenized phenomenon, and domestic love movies urgently need to break the game.

"Tear gas wins" a lot

The public is already "tired of watching"

Domestic love movies from prosperity to decline, in addition to the impact of epidemic factors, release time, content, publicity all have an important impact on the box office of the film, the aesthetic fatigue caused by the homogenization of films is the biggest problem faced by domestic love movies.

In terms of opening performance, the box office of domestic love movies has maintained a high level, and the follow-up is generally weak. Among the domestic love movies with a first-day box office of more than 50 million in history, 6 seats will be occupied from 2020 to 2022, and the opening box office can still maintain a high level, but the overall box office momentum continues to decline. The core users in front of the popular schedule are one of the reasons, but the quality problem is also difficult to avoid.

From the perspective of audience feedback, "play" is still the core of the audience's evaluation of a movie. From the perspective of drama, the audience's mention rate of "tear points", "endings" and "love emotions" in domestic love movies is significantly higher than the industry average, which determines the basis of a movie. Taking stock of domestic romance movies with a box office of more than 50 million since 2020, most of the plot scores are below 7 points, and only two films have reached more than 8 points. This shows that the comprehensive score of domestic love movies in recent years is generally not high.

It has been observed that the plot commonality of high-grossing movies in recent years is "tear jerking wins", but users have experienced aesthetic fatigue. The tear-jerking plot relies on strong "love emotions" to resonate with empathy, and the "plot love" is endless, but in 2022, similar works are no longer paid by the public, such as "Ten Years of a Pint Warm as Words", "I Really Hate Long-distance Relationships" and other films with tears higher than the average of the genre, whether it is the mention rate or the box office, it is no better than in previous years, to a certain extent, the public has "tired of watching crying films", tear jerking is obviously not forcibly sensationalizing, but to achieve empathetic resonance.

The audience believes that the plot of domestic romance movies is insufficient, and generally focuses on the lack of realism, which shows that the audience's requirements for the plot are becoming more and more stringent. Among the 9 domestic love movies released this year, 4 of them have a high proportion of "plot" mentioned in the reviews, and the gap with the comprehensive score is large, which has a significant impact on the overall film. "The Myth of Love", released in 2021 to depict urban love in Shanghai, has been well received, which also shows the importance of the authenticity of love movies.

Judging from the number of domestic romance movies that have exceeded 10 million at the box office over the years, the performance of comedy romance movies has a recovery trend. Love movies with high laughs, such as "Still Think You're the Best" and "Love Mythology", have achieved excellent box office performance. As the highest-rated romantic comedy of 2022, "Still Think You're the Best" broke the curse of low scores for romance films in recent years, surpassing "Kung Fu" at the box office in Hong Kong and becoming the No. 1 Hong Kong comedy in the history of Hong Kong films, which proves the audience's aesthetic fatigue of "tear-jerking winning" romance films from another side. Audiences prefer to watch movies with fireworks, real plots, and down-to-earth atmosphere, and comedy love movies with tears in laughter are more likely to resonate than corny tragic love movies that sprinkle dog blood.

The title is less recognizable

General lack of memory

In addition to movies that change according to novel works such as "Ten Years of a Pint Warm as Words", among the domestic love movies released in 2020-2022, a total of 15 movies have titles greater than or equal to 7 words, and 12 use short sentence structures, such as "My Youth Has a You", "I Want Us to Be Together", "I Really Hate Long-distance Relationships", etc., "I" or "my" appear 11 times in 15 titles, "you" or "your" appear 6 times, "we" or "our" appear 3 times, and love, like, etc. appear 10 times. On the one hand, the titles of love movies are getting longer and longer, showing a tendency to be short; On the other hand, when multiple love movies are released at the same time, the short sentence title will make the audience difficult to recognize and generally lack memory.

The film title has four major functions: information dissemination function, expression function, aesthetic function and advertising function, and the short sentence title can meet the information dissemination function of conveying the type of film, but it generally lacks the aesthetic function of beautiful and fluent language and easy to remember, resulting in the film content is often lower than expected, or does not match expectations. Like "I Want Us to Be Together", "Stay with You for a Long, Long Time" and "The Love I Never Finished" are representative cases where the title does not match expectations, which to a certain extent also makes the film face a higher risk of word of mouth, and over time the audience will establish the stereotype of "long title = poor film".

Film publicity also faces the dilemma of homogenization. In recent years, domestic love movies have been publicized and issued with keywords such as "common feelings", "breaking defense" and "difficult to peace", or filming the audience's tearful viewing reaction, and the stimulating effect of homogeneous marketing methods on the desire to watch movies is getting weaker and weaker. At the same time, love movie marketing is in a white-hot state of competition in the ceremonial field. "The Last Night of the Earth" successfully created a "New Year's Eve file", and the sense of ritual is indeed effective, but on February 14 this year, the three love movies "I Want to Go to Your World to Love You", "Ten Years of a Pint Warm as Words" and "Don't Forget I Love You" operated 10 ceremonial venues on the same day. It can be seen that the homogenization of domestic love movies exists in the plot and creation, and is also significant in the market operation stage, and it is urgent to seek fresh publicity and distribution contacts.

Text/Reporter Xiao Yang

Co-ordinator/Liu Jianghua

Source: Beijing Youth Daily