Rhino Entertainment Original
Text|Fat Department Editor|Park Fang
Only half a month has passed since the popular Spring Festival of many popular dramas, and the drama market is waiting for a new round of heating cycle.
A batch of episodes launched in early February generally received a mediocre response. First of all, from the perspective of the market share list such as Yunhe Data and Lighthouse Professional Edition, "Crazy" still occupies the top spot, and the single-day continuous lead reaches 20%+, in addition to proving the success of this blockbuster, the fact that it can be on the list in half a month after the end also shows that there is some weakness in the broadcast drama.
Secondly, looking back at the performance of the dramas on the air, a batch of dramas that were launched at that time, such as Maoyan and other lists of popular "Dazzling You" and "Lady's Character", etc., the performance of the popularity on the station has never been outstanding.
The broadcast volume of "Lady's Character" Mango TV reached 131 million the next day, but the subsequent decline was serious, and the current average daily average is around 70 million; the popularity of "I Heard You Like Me" on Tencent Video Station is 26410, which is rare to reach the "small explosion" level in the same period. This kind of popularity on the site can be at the top of the rankings.
Second, combined with word of mouth, the dramas that have recently been scored, except for the Douban score of "The Silk Silk Case of Daming under the Microscope", most of the dramas are on the passing line. From the proportional trend of popularity and word-of-mouth in recent years, it can also explain the lack of performance of most dramas.
The popularity of major projects on the market is not high, causing the drama market to cool down after the Spring Festival. Fortunately, the popularity of dramas such as "I Heard You Like Me", "Heavy Purple", "Starfall into Sugar" and other dramas recently launched is acceptable, and it seems that it is expected to break the common market decline trend in spring.
In fact, spring over the years has been regarded as the off-season for long-form video platforms. However, in the context of the industry reducing costs and increasing efficiency, and audiences are accustomed to a market with high-quality dramas to watch, the cooling of "business as usual" this spring is still disappointing. Can the trend of industry dramas cure the annual "spring and autumn fatigue"?
How is "Spring Sleep" refined?
The long-form video industry forms such a "low season" every spring, which can be said to be a legacy of the TV era.
First of all, from the perspective of the market in spring, young audiences mainly students and white-collar workers have fewer holidays after the New Year, and basically do not have a large period of disposable time, relatively speaking, the audience age group will be more diverse, and the content will generally have the characteristics of more diversified audiences. In addition, some relatively competitive in the market, but do not have absolute strength to enter the summer, will also be placed in the spring to satisfy deep drama fans.
For example, before 2021, many costume dramas will be launched in the spring, because the production volume is high and can cover multiple people, such as "Brocade Like Jade", "Shangyang Fu", "Three Lives and Three Pillow Books", etc.; Since last year, with the increase in the production of realistic content, more family and life dramas have also begun to focus on the spring, including "Home of the Heart", "Meet the Season", "Dear Child" and so on.
From the perspective of type, the natural enthusiasm of these episodes for online discussion will be relatively low, but it does not affect the performance at the level of broadcast data, such as CCTV's set of "Our Day" on February 6, which tells the story from the 80s to the present, the online broadcast data is mediocre, but it can continue to win 1.9 ratings for many days on the TV side, with a market share of more than 12% for many days.
Similar life drama works such as "This Life is also the First Time", "Dazzling You", "Lady's Character" and other dramas seem to be able to explain the problem of mediocre Internet popularity from this perspective. But combined with word of mouth, the lack of these episodes this spring is actually inevitable.
The fundamental problem is still two key words: routine, levitation. It is obviously a women's theme work, and the female characters created include Kang Ziyu played by Yin Tao in "Dazzling You", An Xin of Liu Mintao in "Lady's Character", Yao Wei of Wan Qian, etc., but it can be said that they have stepped on a series of minefields that the audience has disgusted in recent years.
Although the theme has the label of female independence and female mutual help, the plot also involves the plight of women in the workplace and family, stereotypes from the original family or the outside world, etc., but in the end they are all reconciled in an inexplicable way, with the plot of catching juniors, sibling love, and relying on men as foreign aid in the workplace. There is no life in the life drama, which is already a stubborn disease in the industry.
In the sweet pet drama part, "I Heard You Like Me" is the best data performance in the episodes released this spring, and the online aesthetic has also made the heroine Wang Churan's popularity climb, but the script of crotch pulling is still the biggest problem, and the story with a medical background has once again returned to the extent that it cannot be watched with a brain, and it is difficult to go further in the current market environment.
And the costume dramas that are currently landing in the spring almost all have such and such problems. In the past two years, in the environment of reducing costs and increasing efficiency, and the industry as a whole has made efforts to make head content, the production volume is not low, but each has its own deductions.
"The Silk Silk Case of Daming under the Microscope" is remarkable from the production and innovation level, which is a relatively in-depth costume drama, but it does lack the degree of dissemination from the story level, resulting in good word-of-mouth and broadcast but poor discussion; And "Heavy Purple", which returned to the old routine of fairy master-apprentice love, has a good start of broadcasting, but the space for follow-up popularity improvement is relatively limited.
In the market environment of the past two years, the audience is showing an increasingly strong intolerance to routines and suspended content, and it has also made it difficult for some dramas with high production volume but mediocre quality to reproduce the high traffic of the past. For example, "Heavy Purple" was completed almost at the same time as "Star Han Splendid" in October 2021, and now it has just started broadcasting, and there may also be problems with the confidence of the platform's side broadcasting.
The weakness of reality-themed dramas is more evident this spring, and the problem of domestic dramas lacking life perception needs to be further solved with the improvement of the industry's production capabilities and more standardized mechanisms. And this may also be one of the key driving forces for the next stage of the development of Chinese dramas.
Where is this year's Menghualu?
On February 18, "The Abyss" was renamed "Light Abyss" and landed at 10 a.m. like "Gentleman's League".
The two dramas adapted by Yanmei IP have also quietly added #Six Gates to Siege Bright Top# on the hot search, including six dramas such as "There is You on the Left Shoulder" and "Mountains and Rivers" have been mentioned, and there is also news that "Beacon Flowing Gold" will be launched in March. Will these contents, which also belong to the backlog, become a fuel for the spring drama market?
But although the degree of discussion is not low, judging from the broadcast situation, it is difficult for this once popular genre to ignite a fire in the market. Does the drama market really have to wait until June to welcome this year's "Menghualu"?
Every year's summer vacation will be the golden time for platforms to take out the head S-level content to rush to land, and last year a number of blockbusters were achieved. This year may be better than last year, firstly, the industry's mechanism for promoting content upgrading is more mature, and secondly, in the environment of cost reduction and efficiency increase, the platform will further amplify the promotion of head content.
For example, the ancient puppet types that pick big beams every summer, Tencent Video's "Jade Bone Yao", "With Fengxing", "Qing Yu Nian 2", iQiyi's "Fox Demon Little Red Lady Moon Red Chapter" and "Changfeng Du", Youku's "Anle Chuan" and "Long Moon Ember Ming" and Mango TV's "Da Song Youth Zhi 2" and other dramas, most of them were completed from the end of last year to the beginning of this year, and the problem of entering the summer is not big.
In addition, this year will also be a big year for suspense spy warfare, from previous years may be scheduled in June and July, including "Lurker", "Lonely Boat", "Infernal" and other platforms respectively to make efforts to the head content, "Rebel" results can also be expected; It is also not ruled out that the main theme content with strong market attributes such as "Public Prosecution Elite", "Bionic World" and "Back Wave" will be ended to warm up the scene.
Rhino Jun has previously judged that 2023 will become a "big year" for entertainment, from production, operation capabilities to content reserves, and today's film and television industry deserves more confidence. But is the problem of "spring sleep" really incurable?
At present, most of the airborne scheduling methods in the industry are difficult to determine which projects are still in the spring, and can only be analyzed in combination with limited data.
First of all, there will be suspense content filling every spring, iQiyi's "Mist Theater" should have works entering, and subsequent works such as "The Disappearing Eleventh Floor" and "Detective Chinatown 2" will be broadcast; There will be no shortage of sweet pets in ancient costumes, and it has recently been reported that "Ning An Like a Dream" has been certified; In addition, it is not ruled out that some backlog episodes will be parachuted into the spring later, including "Blossoms".
More importantly, the industry needs to improve its ability to tell the stories around the audience, and make up for the shortcomings of family, workplace, and social issues in life dramas, so that this traditional genre suitable for the spring market can regain its quality.
With the further development of the market, the demand for good content filling at different times will be stronger, and the "normal" of not seeing good doors every spring is indeed the time to change.