"Mission Impossible 7" broke at the box office, and the Hollywood hero was late
Wen 丨 Yuan Shixu
On July 14, "Mission Impossible 7: Fatal Reckoning (Part I)" was released in the mainland, two days later than in North America. As the most watched spy action movie in the past decade, "Mission Impossible 7" has a good reputation, with a Douban score of 8.2 and a freshness of 99% on Rotten Tomatoes.
However, the high word-of-mouth feedback at home and abroad has not received high box office returns, and the box office in the mainland in the first week of release is only 184 million, which is predicted to continue to decline at the box office, and imported films will collapse in the Chinese market, subverting the public's box office expectations for Hollywood action blockbusters.
According to the American entertainment weekly "Variety", the production cost of "Mission Impossible 7" is as high as 290 million US dollars, and it has experienced many difficulties such as action real shooting, epidemic control, multi-location locations, and upper and lower co-production.
Helplessly, "Tom" Tom Cruise insists on the spirit of filmmakers in real shooting, just like the last afterglow of the action film industry, which allows the outside world to see the darkest moment that the entire Hollywood is about to face. The Hollywood IP masterpieces represented by "Mission Impossible" are also no longer favored by the film market in the impact of the transformation of audience thinking.
Heroes are late
The American narrative is no longer selling
Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunter is the absolute protagonist of the "Mission Impossible" series, with a 27-year character screen career, whose charm lies in the traditional Hollywood sparing no effort to create classic personal heroes.
This is a set of market-tested success templates - through the mysterious and calm agent traits, the positive portrayal of righteousness and the amorous male perspective, it smoothly transports the audience into the action of saving the world, and experiences the refreshing feeling of being born into death and then being born.
Usually, blockbusters need enough conflict points to cover up some logical leaks, as long as the action is wonderful, the actors are good-looking, the scenes are magnificent, and each film delves into new marketing highlights, you can capture the hearts of fans and pay for the IP stories you know again and again, "Terminator", "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Fast and Furious" series are typical.
Mission Impossible 7 is no exception, and even plays brilliantly. The biggest highlight of the Mission Impossible series is the ultra-difficult action stunts that Tom Cruise personally plans and realizes every time, and he insists on a unique view of the real view of the movie that belongs to action stars: to present the visual spectacle of action movies in the form of real shooting, quite the legacy of Buster Keaton, the master of film comedy stunts in the silent film era.
In the face of unprecedented dangerous stunts, 62-year-old Tom Cruise personally went into battle and completely rejected CG special effects, which is unique in today's unprecedented technology in the film and television industry.
In "Mission Impossible 7", a shot combination of riding a motorcycle off a cliff and completing a fixed-point skydive was planned and prepared for several years, and Tom Cruise became an expert in the field of extreme sports as an action star, worthy of the title of "Hollywood's last superstar".
The sincerity of "Mission Impossible 7" has gained high media reputation, but it has encountered Waterloo in more intuitive box office data. Is Tom Cruise unimpressed? Or is the consumer subject changing from generation to generation, and the current audience has forgotten the legend of Ethan Hunt?
It is true that Brother Tom, who is not confused in his old age, is much less fierce, and his love dramas are not as good as they were back then; There are too many previous works in the series, which also raises the threshold for viewing movies to a certain extent ("Mission Impossible 6" is a work released five years ago); But at the end of the day, it's audiences around the world who are beginning to disenchant the narratives of individual heroism that Hollywood is good at.
"Mission Impossible 7" integrates the current hot topic artificial intelligence into the play, which seems innovative, but is actually conservative. The imagination of "intellectual body" thinking stays on the setting of big data algorithms to deduce the future. Modern society has reached the technological node where AI changes life, and people are living at a time when ChatGPT is reshaping the form of the Internet, and the so-called "one key changes the world" approach in the main plot of "Mission Impossible 7" will only feel commonplace and old-fashioned.
In order to intensify the obvious contradictions, the film abandons deeper textual exploration, and the ultimate goal is to serve Ethan Hunt's heroic action to save the world.
The film theme of the American personal heroism narrative has slowly lost its market appeal worldwide, the movie formula of superstar + action spectacle no longer works, Hollywood is unable to maintain the box office evergreen, and Tom Cruise's "Mission Impossible 7" is just a dinghy that capsized when the Titanic capsized.
Compete on the same stage
Hollywood can't fight the new mainstream
In the Chinese film market, "Mission Impossible 7" stirred up even smaller splashes.
On the sixth day of release, the daily box office fell to fifth place, and the earlier release of "Chang'an 30,000 Li" and "In the Octagonal Cage" still maintained a high box office vitality, ranking in the top two; The animated film "Tea Ah No. 2", which is small in size and has few films, surprisingly surpassed the daily box office and ranked third when the ratio of films was lower than that of "Mission Impossible"; And the fourth is "Disappearing Her", which has been in theaters for twenty-eight days.
The box office prediction of "Mission Impossible 7" continues to decline, in stark contrast to the box office reversal of "Chang'an 30,000 Li", "In the Octagon Cage" and "Disappearing Her", the latter three have entered the Chinese mainland box office billion club, but the former has stopped at 400 million, and Hollywood's box office myth has been shattered.
These three films rely on publicity and marketing to continuously open up the audience, guide social hot spots, and improve the box office progressively, not so much that Chinese filmmakers know Chinese audiences better, but that feelings have no emotional value. Hollywood series with IP as the selling point are far less attractive than mainstream commercial films that can mobilize social discussion.
The first hit of the summer file "Disappearing Her" hit the sensitive nerves of the current gender issues, with the marketing slogan of "specializing in treating the love brain", which triggered a movie-watching boom; The realistic base of "In the Octagon Cage" is tear-jerking and moving, and it belongs to the inspirational spirit of the Chinese grassroots; "Chang'an 30,000 Li" sings the poetry in the blood of Chinese, calling for popular figures in history.
The subject matter is very different, but the marketing strategies are similar, and emotions are the biggest selling point, whether it is anger, sadness or emotion, it is important to be able to generate discussion on social platforms and attract the attention of a wider audience. As a result, the three domestic films in the summer have found their own positioning in different aspects, carving up the territory of the Chinese film market and making the market space for imported films more and more narrow.
In fact, not only "Mission Impossible 7", Hollywood blockbusters in recent years are difficult to escape the fate of sluggish box office. In Hollywood's top sequence, "Avatar 2" and "Fast and Furious 10" also suffered a box office crisis in the mainland, these two films mainly play the family card, not for money, not for profit, only for the family, which is the output of a standard American family concept.
It is undeniable that Hollywood's film industry is indeed the world's first echelon, pushing American films to the world in gorgeous special effects, and also pushing the Hollywood film box office to a climax, winning high box office around the world. However, the core of the story created according to American values is increasingly not in line with the expectations of China's young generation of moviegoers, and Hollywood still insists on its own cultural output, and the misalignment of supply and demand has led to the film market no longer being the era when blockbusters are king.
The mainland and North America have always competed for the actual position of "the world's first ticket warehouse", and are naturally the two most important distribution regions for Hollywood big-budget films. Hollywood's share of the Chinese mainland film market is getting smaller and smaller, and the audience's choice to buy tickets is voting with their feet, illustrating the transformation of movie-watching psychology, and the Chinese's movie-watching taste has shifted from spectacle longing to narrative identification - not only visual impact, but also emotional pleasure.
Chinese films began to dominate the aesthetic taste of Chinese audiences, and the emergence of the new mainstream film model means the combination of the main theme values and the commercial plot, which is undoubtedly more in line with the viewing expectations of Chinese audiences, and the box office password is now in the hands of domestic films, which is a situation that Hollywood cannot change.
Facing the crisis
Where will Hollywood go?
Judging from the current situation in Hollywood, it is simply fanciful to intervene in changing the pattern of the Chinese film market, and Hollywood is experiencing an unprecedented crisis.
On July 13, the Screen Actors Guild SAG announced that negotiations with the production company had broken down and went on strike from now on. Earlier, the American Screenwriters Guild WGA began a strike on May 2, and at least 100 American dramas and more than a dozen films have been forced to stop filming.
The filming of "Mission Impossible 8" is also among them, the film was originally scheduled to be released on June 28 next year, but now due to the screenwriters' strike and stopped filming, due to the production cost of up to 290 million US dollars, "Mission Impossible 8" will face the greatest box office pressure, even with action superstar Tom Cruise pressing, the prospects are not optimistic.
In this general strike, in addition to actors and screenwriters fighting for salary levels from producers, the threat that artificial intelligence may replace actors and screenwriters has become the main reason. The producers tried to get SAG to sign an agreement to transfer the image rights of the actors, use new AI technology to scan the faces of all the actors, and the digital rights to the modeling generated belong to the film and television company, and all the income obtained from the use of the copyright has nothing to do with the actors.
Therefore, this is not only Hollywood's first industry-wide strike in 63 years, but also considered the first collective action by humans to resist the threat of artificial intelligence.
The intellectual crisis in Mission Impossible 7 corresponds to the reality of Hollywood across the Pacific Ocean at the moment. If the intellectual body in the story has developed an ideological consciousness and attempts to control the world by violent means, then the artificial intelligence in reality is manipulated by people at the top of the pyramid, and greed drives capitalists to use artificial intelligence to further squeeze the labor value of film and television practitioners.
The so-called hero is Ethan Hunt, who acts out of a sense of personal justice; But the so-called real life is those screenwriters and actors who protest and support their own rights and interests.
The crisis in Hollywood marks the gradual elimination of a typed assembly line business model, which contains new possibilities. As a 27-year-old IP, "Mission Impossible" was released at this time, just like surviving in the cracks, and its fate is intriguing.
Although "Mission Impossible 7" failed at the box office, it still represents the spirit of traditional films, the dedication and love of traditional filmmakers. Tom Cruise, who tried the risk, may be the last person to practice this production model - after all, it is neither economical nor practical. It is conceivable that if the portrait rights no longer belong to the actor, then the value of the superstar will be no different from the group performance, who will do the thankless action stunt real shooting?
"Mission Impossible 7" real shooting scene
The experience of American capitalists in the face of strikes and their own deep pockets make them fearless. The profit-seeking nature of Hollywood capital has plunged the entire industry into labor-management conflicts, and the fact that the strike came so quickly and decisively is a wake-up call to the technology mastered by mankind.
The deep and complex causes of the strike are an unprecedented challenge, and it is unclear where the crisis will lead Hollywood's future. Is it the last straw that crushed the camel's back, or is it a turnaround of reform that does not break and does not stand? We'll see.
Mirror Entertainment (ID: jingxiangyuler) original
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