"In the Octagon Cage" went to two billion, what is Wang Baoqiang's magic weapon?

The part that "In the Octagon Cage" does right may also be another "emotional puzzle" that complements "Disappearing Her" and is scarce in domestic commercial films.

Text | Zero One

Since the summer season, the surprises brought by domestic movies have been one after another. "Disappearing Her" finally exceeded 3 billion at a level of less than 1 billion expected before the screening, entering the top ten global box office in 2023; "I Love You" such an unpromising old love movie can also get out of the long tail effect, and the box office has exceeded 400 million; "Chang'an 30,000 Li" Douban scored 8.0, and it is also likely to become the highest-grossing movie of chasing light animation so far.

And the strong performance of "In the Octagon Cage" is also very surprising. This film opened a super-large-scale screening almost at the same time as the release of "Disappearing Her", with a time of more than ten days and hundreds of thousands of screenings, and more than 400 million yuan to become the highest-grossing film in the history of Chinese films. Originally, many people thought that the viewing demand of "Octagonal Cage" has been released more during this period, and the reputation has long been stable, and there will not be too high an increase after the official release. But the results so far exceed that expectation:

On July 8, the third day of its release, "In the Octagon Cage" surpassed "Disappearing Her" for the first time with a single-day box office of 134 million, with an attendance rate of 29.4%, close to twice that of "Disappearing Her" and "Drug Sweep 3"; On July 9, the box office continued to increase to 168 million yuan, and the cumulative box office easily exceeded 800 million yuan. After the box office has continued to decline, the Maoyan prediction box office of "In the Octagon Cage" has increased to 1.9 billion+.

What kind of emotion does this not-so-fancy movie hit the audience? The part that "In the Octagon Cage" does right may also be another "emotional puzzle" that complements "Disappearing Her" and is scarce in domestic commercial films.

1

The sincerity of "only belongs to Wang Baoqiang"

The starting point and core of all the advantages and moving parts of "In the Octagon Cage", Reading Entertainment Jun believes that Wang Baoqiang, who is also a director, starring actor and screenwriter, has great love and sincerity in this movie.

The story of "Octagon Cage" is adapted from the real incident of "fighting orphans" reported by the media in 2017, in the video that attracted public attention at the time, two children fighting hand-to-hand in the cage, adults watching outside the cage, netizens and media launched a verbal attack on the founder of the fighting club behind Enbo; That is, in the same year, Wang Baoqiang's directorial debut "Big Trouble Tianzhu" landed in the Spring Festival file and won more than 700 million yuan at the box office, but also left a reputation of 3.7 points on Douban and the past of personally receiving the "Golden Broom Award".

The commercial film market recognizes Wang Baoqiang as a "comedian", from "No Thief in the World" to "People on the Road", to the "Detective Chinatown" series of old hats and exaggerated expression behavior. Although Mr. Shu in "Hello! Mr. Tree", the robber San'er in "Destiny", and Feng Yuxiu in "One Man's Martial Arts" endorse his acting skills, the commercial performance of these films is mediocre, which means that genre films such as "In the Octagon" are difficult to get investment favor, and this background also makes Wang Baoqiang's transformation from "Big Trouble" to "In the Octagon Cage" even more rare.

But in the end, "In the Octagon Cage" has a script that naturally fits Wang Baoqiang, and it's hard to even think of anyone who can replace him - the story is an orphan in a poor area, who trains hard to get out of the mountains in order to eat a bite and get out of the mountains, and enters the cage fighting performance, while Wang Baoqiang, who is outside the play, was born in rural Hebei and went to Shaolin Temple at the age of 8 to practice martial arts as a lay disciple; In the story, Xiang Tenghui was tortured by the media and public opinion after the exposure of the fighting video, and his exhaustion was fully displayed, and the real-life Wang Baoqiang also encountered career confusion and great changes in his family after "Big Trouble".

Whether from the perspective of the children in the story or Xiang Tenghui, Wang Baoqiang may have a deep resonance and personal expression space, which actually constitutes the "bottom force" that can trigger emotional resonance in the entire film - the personal experience of poverty and the bottom, the incompatibility and difficult adaptation to the modern city and cultural context from the primitive and simple state, and the sincere recognition of hard work and hardship to gain, these seemingly ordinary dramatic conflict points, Wang Baoqiang has joined many personal, Extremely sincere expression.

In the same movie, you may feel rough, contrived, and superficial when other people make it, but the effect of Wang Baoqiang's shot is straight to the heart of sincerity and some simple positive temperament. This sincerity even makes the genre film routine of the entire film and the narrative rhythm lacking exquisite design become vivid, and the roughness also becomes like a part of the construction of the sincere temperament of the entire movie.

Not to mention that Wang Baoqiang himself played this role naturally and freely. In the scene where Xiang Tenghui returned home to see his mother and forced himself to cry silently, the release of emotions was enough to move countless audiences; And in the subtle "sense of performance" in the interview dialogue, and the close-up of the almost expressionless cigar lit in the last scene, Wang Baoqiang conveys the right feeling through restraint.

So the biggest success of "In the Octagon" is that the right story meets the right people.

2

From "in the cage" to "the world"

In addition to Wang Baoqiang's extreme fit with the story and characters, "In the Octagon Cage" also has a lot of merit in its creation.

When the utopia built by Xiang Tenhui is presented to the masses of modern society, it is unfashionable barbarism, it is the unseeliness of the people at the bottom who covet profits, and it is the discomfort when urban society sees that poverty breeds cruelty. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the civility and nobility of the masses, but the embarrassing fact has been there for many years, and has never been paid attention to before. Wang Baoqiang's expression of this plot is straightforward and brave, he does not use posture to judge and look down on the height of sociology or civilization, but truly poses a certain separation behind reality and reality.

The title of "In the Octagon Cage" and the image of the cage are obviously a metaphor. The cage is deep in the mountains, which also means poverty and other factors that limit children; But in another sense, the cage is also protection and isolation, a more primitive, pure environment itself.

Therefore, the process from "cage" to "world" will not be a simple beautiful and positive thing. What once bound children was the isolation and poverty of the mountains, and after getting out of this cage, the complex rules of modern society have become a new cage to some extent - the principal who demands sponsorship fees, the public opinion and the media who stand on the moral high ground and judge wantonly, the big club with first-class conditions and facilities but unscrupulous results... Stepping out of the mountain does not mean the end of an idealized story, but a new layer of reality.

The way in which the two layers of reality leap is also expressed through the image of "changing faces". It is worth mentioning that Luo Pan, the director of photography of "In the Octagon Cage", has brought a great improvement to the texture of this film, almost naturally matching some of the deep emotions that Wang Baoqiang is trying to express.

For example, in the night play on the battlefield, the sky is full of stars, but the children have no feeling of the beautiful scenery and stand on the sand dunes. This kind of layering of the picture and extremely vivid audiovisual language expression is very common in the film, the overlap of the Sichuan opera's changing face on Wang Baoqiang's face, and the final scene sees the disciple light a cigar after winning and then go to the dark, and the emotional strength of the film is supported by appropriate shots.

The last climactic fight scene is the emotional outlet of the entire movie, and Yomiyujun thinks it also performs well. There are obviously two considerations for the black and white color, one is to avoid the bloodiness of the picture and not cause some unnecessary trouble; Second, the change from black and white to color can also be regarded as the change of the mood of the characters in the movie, and the sense of presence and tension is extremely emphasized during the fight.

"In the Octagon Cage" is not without its flaws. The rhythm of the whole movie is slightly better in the first half, coherent and focused, and the second half is slightly chaotic, the director tries to talk about too many things from different angles, and these topics are not strongly related, or the film fails to successfully connect these topics, resulting in the second half of the film becoming a combination of paragraphs, and the design of characters such as Li Chen is too instrumental, and the paragraph in which the child "returns to the old business" is also slightly deliberate.

But overall, "In the Octagon Cage" is definitely a rare sincere work in the Chinese film market. Some commentaries are judged from a high moral or academic point of view, and sometimes it is inevitable to feel that it is a kind of arrogance, and the use of terms such as "pseudo-realism" to make outrageous criticism is actually as conceited and ignorant as the foodie in "Ratumulius".

But fortunately, "In the Octagon Cage" went to nearly two billion, and the market is always the most real and effective feedback.