Author | Dorothy
After three years, the Spring Festival film market has finally become lively for a long time.
Whether it is the box office glue battle between "Manjiang Red" and "The Wandering Earth 2", the word-of-mouth storm in which "Nameless" forced Douban to post disclaimer tips, or the box office cannon fodder crisis of "Chinese Table Tennis Jedi Strikes Back" (hereinafter referred to as "China Table Tennis") and "Exchange Life", and the box office crushing "Deep Sea" by the box office of "Bear Haunted: Bear Core" (hereinafter referred to as "Bear Haunted") in the animation track, the film market covered most of the hot topics during the Spring Festival holiday.
As of the third day of the Lunar New Year (January 24), all seven films in the 2023 Spring Festival have arrived, and the box office has accumulated more than 3.7 billion yuan, although the overall value has not reached a new high, but it has met industry expectations. The major film parties breathed a sigh of relief that the darkest hour had passed.
And light and shadow coexist, behind the seemingly lively and festive box office carnival, the marketing dark war surging between movies is also more intense. The pre-sale of the Spring Festival file officially opened on January 14 this year, compressing the marketing time of 7 movies to one week. This kind of extreme operation is not uncommon in the past two years, but it is still a little nervous in the Spring Festival stall. This means that when major filmmakers face the largest box office potential of the year, they must release the greatest publicity in the shortest time to complete the box office transformation.
So the audience can feel that in the week before and after the Spring Festival, from short video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, social media platforms such as Weibo and Douban, to Internet ticketing platforms such as Maoyan and Taoqiao, and even video communities such as Station B, topics and content related to Spring Festival movies are constantly being renovated, and various marketing methods have appeared intensively, such as material exposure, video second creation, main creator live broadcast, cross-border linkage, etc.
The greater the box office ambition of the film, the greater the marketing momentum. And the box office marketing war of various film parties in the 2023 Spring Festival file is constantly expanding.
Extreme operation, film marketing more and more publicity standard
Observing the marketing methods of the 7 films in this year's Spring Festival, you will find that all film parties have this account in their hearts, no matter how varied they are, they are pursuing two core purposes - on the one hand, competing for consumer attention, ensuring popularity, and maximizing the popularity of movies with various material exposures such as posters, short video clips, and movie OSTs; On the one hand, it is to lengthen the long-tail life of the movie, deepen the value of the film content with content reputation and emotional resonance, and promote the transformation of the box office.
In terms of heat fermentation, each piece is already a familiar road. Taking "Manjiang Red" and "The Wandering Earth 2", which are now inseparable from the box office battle, as an example, the marketing methods of these two films are almost the epitome of the entire Spring Festival movie.
"Manjiang Hong" is director Zhang Yimou's second impact on the Spring Festival file after the movie "Sniper", "The Wandering Earth 2" is the sequel to the only IP masterpiece of domestic science fiction "The Wandering Earth", and the single-day box office champion and runner-up position of the two films was reversed overnight, which can already show the current tension in competition.
"Manjiang Hong" is deeply bound to Maoyan, Weibo and other platforms. On Maoyan, "Manjiang Hong" launched auxiliary functions such as character description cards and sound cards on the movie ticket page to increase the exposure of movie content, and at the same time cooperated with Weibo to carry out live broadcast publicity such as micro-premieres and KOL dialogues with the main creator. On the short video platform, release more funny tidbits to highlight the elements of comedy, entertain the movie, and package it into a large-scale script killing game.
On station B, "Manjiang Red" began a video manuscript solicitation activity from January 16, encouraging the UP owners of station B to edit the film, explain and recommend, and jointly with the film and television official number "Beeska Awards" of station B released a series of film trailers and other materials for content exposure.
"Manjiang Hong" is publicized with the plot content and character actors as the core, highlighting the genre characteristics of "suspense + comedy", with Shen Teng, Yi Yangqianxi and others as the fulcrum, trying to reduce the dull seriousness brought by the large-scale black and white color matching of film materials, and reducing the threshold and cognitive difficulty of the public's viewing mind.
"The Wandering Earth 2" has the support of the first part, and it already has advantages in recognition, and the movie highlights the genre advantages and emotional labels. In order to highlight the characteristics of science fiction, "The Wandering Earth 2" director Guo Fan interacted with netizens on Zhihu, and at the same time, Guo Fan had a dialogue with six head UP masters such as "Film and Television Hurricane", "Astrophysics Doctor Liu Boyang" and "Admiral Wang Situ" of Station B, comprehensively analyzing the relevant special effects, physics, cosmic astronomy and other issues in "The Wandering Earth 2" in the form of UP main questions, while Station B launched a second creation call for papers on the station, and the film was analyzed and evaluated.
Emotionally, "The Wandering Earth 2" focuses on the feelings of home and country, and it is not uncommon for movies on short video platforms to be related to "Chinese science fiction re-start" and "science fiction belonging to Chinese itself", linking movies with national pride and sci-fi giants. This point "Chinese Table Tennis" is basically similar, the movie uses sportsmanship, headwind reversal and other keywords to pry the public mood.
It is worth noting that before the release of the movie, "The Wandering Earth 2" cooperated with the Oriental Selection Live Broadcast Room, and Guo Fan and the starring Wu Jing and Sha Yi were now in the live broadcast room, and the 50,000 tickets for the live broadcast were quickly sold out. The same operation also appeared in "Exchange Life" and "Nameless". "Exchange of Life" was also sold on the Oriental Selection, Lei Jiayin chatted with Dong Yuhui for two hours, selling 130,000 tickets, and "Nameless" teamed up with another head anchor, Li Jiaqi, selling 850,000 tickets.
"Bear Haunted" and "Deep Sea" two animated films, the publicity volume is relatively small compared with "Manjiang Red" and "The Wandering Earth 2", but the former is already the winner of the Spring Festival file for 10,000 years, monopolizing the children's animation track, family viewing, family fun, parent-child interaction is the first choice, "Deep Sea" in the early stage because of the "particle ink" technology to attract the attention of domestic animation groups, ""The Return of the Great Sage" director Tian Xiaopeng 7 years of new work" attracted a group of animation fans to enter.
And these two films are also very aware of the particularity of their own animation themes, and they have cooperated with Station B. Lin Yongchang, the main creative director of "Bear Haunted", Zhang Bingjun, the dubbing voice of "Xiong Er", broadcast live on Station B, sharing the creation story and opening the second creation activity, "Deep Sea" launched a behind-the-scenes documentary of animation production, and the producer Fang Color Stripe House released a series of teaser materials to encourage UP owners to interpret the content and edit the second creation.
It can be perceived that online marketing activities such as short video marketing and live broadcast ticket sales have become a necessary means of film publicity. The film industry may have been discussing how much value these methods can provide for film content and box office retweets a few years ago, but now it is a "standard" that is not investigated.
But there are always new changes in the norm. Looking carefully at the battlefield of Spring Festival film marketing, Maoyan, Douyin, etc. are already veterans, but in the past two years, the frequency of B station has become higher and higher, this year's Spring Festival file, 7 movies basically held a film interpretation second creation activity at B station.
That could be a signal. The film side must know how to compete for the audience's attention, divide the heat, and complete the first core goal, but how to complete the film's word-of-mouth fermentation, increase the long-tail value, and achieve box office conversion is still a blind spot. At this stage, the Douban movie score has been stirred up into a quagmire by various trolls, and the various interpretation videos based on station B are a new opportunity.
The box office of the movie relies on the commentary video to continue its life, can the dream plot be copied?
Everything is traceable.
Maoyan Professional Edition data shows that there will be 41 works with a box office of more than 100 million in the domestic film market in 2022, and the most impressive film among them is not "Shuimen Bridge of Changjin Lake" that harvested the box office during the Spring Festival at that time, nor "Walking on the Moon Alone" that broke out in the summer, but the niche movie "Hidden in the Dust" that exceeded 100 million box office miracles 50 days after its release.
A niche film with a rural theme, due to the fermentation of word of mouth, has become a hot discussion work among the whole people, and has completed box office monetization. At the 12th Beijing International Film Festival in 2022, scholar Dai Jinhua mentioned the reason for the film's box office counterattack, "The miracle of "Hidden in the Dust" is that it first found its audience, and then expanded to non-audiences through its audience. ”
At that time, the opportunity for "Hidden in the Dust" to find audiences and expand to non-audiences was a series of in-depth interpretation videos. The film and television UP masters on station B were the first to interpret the film in the first wave to mobilize public emotions. For example, the interpretation and recommendation video of the UP master "Wang Xiaoqi Fire", for the arrangement and withdrawal of "Hidden in the Dust", attracted the attention of fans on the day of upload, and then entered the popular video list of station B, and within a month, short video platforms and movie-related media reports continued to follow up, and the movie completely broke out.
In the film market of the Spring Festival file, there will be no film party who does not want such a dreamy plot, and everyone is indeed trying to replicate it.
Movies such as "Manjiang Red", "The Wandering Earth 2" and "Nameless" have released many commentary recommendations, high-gloss CUT and other videos, or KOL professional text analysis on various platforms. However, most of these videos are still hot marketing ideas, mainly fragmented, emotional, large-scale short videos, highlighting the cast or special effects shots, etc., which can quickly attract the attention of peripheral audiences, such as as the writing time, the topic of "The Wandering Earth 2" on Douyin has reached 3.34 billion views, but it may not be able to precipitate content and form word-of-mouth transmission. Long-form text, on the other hand, requires the patience of the audience and lacks direct audiovisual impact.
In this case, it is not difficult to understand why Station B appears more frequently in the Spring Festival stall.
The Spring Festival file has been open for three days, but a lot of Spring Festival movie-related content has appeared on station B. For example, UP's main "small film says blockbuster" commentary video on "The Wandering Earth 2" [Clearly, "The Wandering Earth 2" is more explosive than the first part! ] ], in-depth analysis of the long shots of the movie, space elevator special effects presentation, etc., the video playback reached 2.77 million, while UP master "Leviathan" on the "The Wandering Earth 2" trailer of the frame-by-frame analysis video, digging deep into the details of each picture embedded in the Easter egg, the number of views is close to 1.7 million.
Guo Fan's dialogue video with UP main "Film and Television Hurricane", about 15 minutes, from special effects production, story rhythm, virtual shooting to the shaping of the macroscopic volume of the movie, the design of the lunar engine, etc., discusses the details of the movie, so that the audience can intuitively feel the energy invested behind the movie. In the comment area, there are comments from B site users, "The movie is essentially an industry and science in the end. ”
"Chinese Table Tennis" Deng Chao and Yu Baimei appeared in the rice challenge video with the UP master "Brother Yu Running Around" and "Li Yuanjun", there was no carefully choreographed shot, the star and director played rock-paper-scissors and table tennis with the UP main in the shot, and the video quickly entered the top of the popular video list of station B after it was released on January 24.
It is not difficult to see the difference between these video content and traditional short videos, the videos of the B station UP master carry a private creator's imprint, they are longer, through the interpretation and analysis of the UP master, to provide the audience with supplementary information, such as the story behind the director, the special effects production process, and point the audience to pay attention to some details that may be overlooked, these videos are more like a video-style film review. It may not be aimed at veteran fans, but it can provide viewing reference and content nutrients for ordinary audiences who lack time and energy, and these contents are currently unique to the content ecology of station B.
The box office battle of the Spring Festival file is still in full swing, and it is still impossible to determine who is the absolute winner. After experiencing this Spring Festival file, the thinking of all parties in the film industry on content marketing may appear new changes, the film side needs to pull more people into the box office market through heat fermentation, and also needs to find the real audience with high-quality content and meticulous analysis of the second creation, so that the film can produce a long-tail reputation and complete content promotion.
The method is not divided into high and low, only hope that under the lively battlefield, good content will be well rewarded, the cycle will continue, and the market will continue to be lively.