Rhino Entertainment Original
Text|Xiaofu Editor|Park Fang
Another Hong Kong film ended flat.
The main creative team of the head Hong Kong film, the exclusive schedule dividend, and the pre-screening point reputation of 9.2 originally made "Broken Network", a new Hong Kong film in the cold schedule, get a start performance that exceeded expectations. However, only two days after its release, the film's reputation and box office dived, exposing the current situation of the film's poor market trend.
In this "Broken Network", what fails is not only the market appeal of "Kwok Fucheng", but also the significance of "point screening" for a film.
High point reflects word of mouth into a decoration
Let's sort out the process of "Disconnection" gradually falling back to mediocrity from exceeding expectations.
The first point is to say bluntly, compared with super-head Hong Kong stars such as Andy Lau and Donnie Yen, Kwok Fucheng's market appeal is indeed worse.
In the current mainland and Hong Kong film box office list, the highest box office project starring Kwok Fucheng is still 1.198 billion yuan from 2016's "Journey to the West: Monkey King Three Dozen White Bone Essence" - which is largely added to the Spring Festival file. In addition to the recent "When the Wind Rises Again", Kwok Fucheng's last Hong Kong-produced film "Mai Roader" has a cumulative box office of only 18.027 million yuan.
Therefore, although "Broken Network" seems to be the largest of the new films released in the past two weeks, with an excellent team configuration such as Hong Kong-style crime theme + producer Zheng Baorui, director Huang Qingxun + Kwok Fucheng, Ren Dahua, Lin Jiadong three actor combinations, but in the early popularity, it did not cause much market repercussions.
The film side may also have considered the popularity, and decided to let "Broken Network" change the word-of-mouth route, and took the lead in releasing high-quality word-of-mouth in the form of small-scale screening before the screening. This did exchange for the high-quality reputation of Mao Tao Dian Ying 9.2, but this action also buried a greater thunder for the subsequent film follow-up.
This is the second problem of "Disconnection", the ineffective publicity strategy.
In the pre-screening stage, the popularity of "Disconnected Network" has always been at a low level, on the one hand, due to the limited traffic of the starring actors, and on the other hand, the unbrilliant publicity strategy.
First of all, although "Disconnection" formed an exclusive trend on March 3 and has an extremely relaxed schedule environment, the release date of the film is generally still in the cold schedule of March, and the next week is Women's Day, which is basically impossible to get an additional schedule bonus for a male-oriented movie.
Secondly, as we all know, the film is screened in order to rush and ferment the popularity of word of mouth in advance. But this "Broken Network" can almost be described as an invalid point screening, firstly, the filmmaker lacks matching marketing actions in the process of point screening, and secondly, this point screening has not been able to ferment the word-of-mouth, and the existence of the entire movie can be described as thin.
The start of the film at 18 o'clock on the first day is actually not conducive to fermentation and dissemination for a project with a good prior reputation.
The last problem with "Disconnected", and the fundamental problem of this film, is that the content cannot support ambition.
At the end of the day, the quality of the content of "Disconnection" is still not good enough. In this film, we can see the bold progress of the main creative team's intention to innovate, but at the same time, there are also old Hong Kong film routines that cannot be removed. The theme of cybercrime has not become a bright Hong Kong film new blood, but has been assimilated by those old-fashioned and mediocre Hong Kong-style crime frameworks, trapped in the creative trap.
After the official release, the cat Taotao score of "Broken Network" has dropped to varying degrees, and the Douban score is only 5.2. For such a poor quality project, the minimum issuance ticket price is 35 yuan. The mismatch between the actual quality and the word of mouth and even the high ticket price are all important factors that have become an important factor in the dissuasion of the audience of "Disconnected Network".
The so-called falling diving is actually just peeling off the layers of packaging of "point screening high score" and restoring the appearance of the film.
How do Hong Kong films sell?
Up to now, two of the three Hong Kong films that have been released this year have failed. If "When the Wind Rises Again" belongs to the wrong goods and fails to make waves among the target audience, then "Disconnection", as a commercial film, is pure content that is not as expected.
When the viewing standards of mainland audiences are getting higher and higher, and the old Hong Kong stars who once swept the country have also fallen to the point where they cannot bear the box office, what kind of Hong Kong films do mainland audiences need now?
To sum up, it is nothing more than a three-layer standard.
First, IP, type.
There is no need to repeat the IP effect, no matter in any film market, the appeal of a successful IP to the audience is obvious. In a limited market such as Hong Kong films, the industry will concentrate its efforts on successful IP series development, and then form a hot fermentation overlay in the mainland market. A big IP Hong Kong film is always the premise of sales.
As for ordinary original scripted Hong Kong films, mainland audiences show obvious differences in preferences in terms of genre.
Action crime films should be the favorite Hong Kong film genre in the mainland market in the past five years. Looking at the box office list of mainland and Hong Kong films, the top four films at the current box office are all classic Hong Kong action crime films, and two of them belong to the series. Although with the proliferation of homogeneous creation, mainland audiences have gradually experienced aesthetic fatigue with crime Hong Kong films. But it is undeniable that, at least at this stage, this set of creative templates is still selling well.
Prior to this, the mainland market also had a phased pursuit of Hong Kong-style fantasy films and costume films. However, for some "non-traditional" Hong Kong films, the difference in acceptance of mainland audiences is very significant. For example, music, comedy, drama, which are more likely to show the cultural differences between the two places, are far more likely to encounter dissatisfaction in the mainland market than to succeed.
Second, actors.
Actors are also a general criterion for judging a movie's pre-screening popularity and even box office volume. For Hong Kong films, a familiar big coffee filmmaker starring may be better than all fancy publicity. Andy Lau, Chow Yun-fat, Donnie Yen, Koo Tianle, Kwok Fu-shing, Leung Ka-fai, Nicholas Tse, Liu Qingyun... This batch of head actors is the living signboard of Hong Kong films.
The fly in the ointment is that in recent years, homogenization has also begun to affect the appeal of Hong Kong film actors.
Compared with the mainland film market, the Hong Kong film market is much smaller, so the number of filmmakers active in the market and even the choice of creative genres are far smaller than those in the mainland. In addition, the overlap of the types of Hong Kong films imported from the mainland is very high, and the types of Hong Kong films preferred by mainland audiences are relatively single, and the demand side promotes the production side, which ultimately aggravates the homogenization of some imported Hong Kong films and Hong Kong filmmakers.
Faced with the infinite permutations and combinations of the same group of actors in similar theme projects, swinging left and right between good and bad films, many mainland audiences have long been tired. The failure of Kwok Fucheng's box office appeal this time is also reflected in the result of homogenization and superposition again and again.
Another potential crisis is the iteration of the audience group. It is already a consensus that Hong Kong actors are seriously disconnected, and the people who are currently active in the mainland market are basically the same people who were 20 or 30 years ago. The actors have not changed, but the audience has slowly grown up.
In the past, the post-80s and post-90s audiences were a generation that grew up watching Hong Kong films, and they had childhood filters for the old Hong Kong stars who were currently active in the mainland market, and when the Z generation audience grew up to become the new main moviegoers, there was no so-called Hong Kong film feeling, which naturally reduced their attention to these filmmakers.
Third, word of mouth.
It can be seen from the box office list of mainland and Hong Kong films that "Angry Heavy Case", "Bomb Disposal Expert 2" and "Drug Sweep 2 Heaven and Earth Showdown" currently ranked in the top three box office all have a strong reputation foundation without exception. There is no doubt that good reputation is still the core element of the project's big sale.
Good reputation can even make up for the niche "shortcomings" of actors and genres. Just like "Still Think You Are the Best" and "Poisonous Tongue Lawyer", two typical word-of-mouth strong films, there is no Hong Kong actor who is most familiar to mainland audiences, there are no eye-catching action scenes, and the story content is completely Hong Kong, but it can still achieve box office results far beyond its due volume in the mainland market, which is the power of good word-of-mouth.
However, this is not absolute, just as some IP sequels with a sparse reputation can also rely on the basic market to win the box office, and some projects that have gained a good reputation in Hong Kong may not be able to be bought by mainland audiences.
But at least it is certain that if a Hong Kong film does not have a real and excellent reputation, then word of mouth cannot become their selling point, just like "Broken Network".
In the Hong Kong film market, which is full of movie stars, Kwok Fucheng, stale content and the quality of works that fail to meet the passing line have long been unable to please mainland audiences.