1905 Film Network Special Article The film market in April can be described as very lively, from the good start of the Qingming file to the future "May Day file". Not only in important schedules, but also in weekday schedules, there are enough film supplies.
This past weekend alone, 17 films were released to audiences, with new films coming every day from Thursday to Sunday, with as many as 11 of them being released on Friday (April 19).
The films with high overall attention are the Chinese-language films "Youth Diary" and "Fairy Tale World", which have received high recognition at international film festivals, as well as overseas films "Crazy Monday" and "Jin's Video Store", which were sold out early during the Beijing International Film Festival.
Together with the previous "Under the White Sun", as well as "The World of Grass and Trees" in the Qingming file, Hayao Miyazaki's animation "What kind of life do you want to live" and other films, many netizens jokingly called this the "fan carnival season".
After all, since March's "Removing Three Evils Around the Week", this wave of light and shadow has swept in.
It is worth noting that the "fan carnival season" pointed out here is because most of these films started from film festivals, and the director's past works, or film genres are relatively niche, and in the early stage of promotion, they are mostly discussed in the fan circle.
From the current point of view, the box office of "Removing the Three Evils in the Week" exceeded 600 million, becoming the box office champion of the film market in March, and the box office of "The World of Grass and Trees" exceeded 100 million after its release for half a month......
However, the value of social issues is extremely high, "Under the White Sun" has barely exceeded 10 million since its release, and "Young Diary", which has also been nominated for many nominations at the Hong Kong Film Awards, has a box office of 7.184 million in the first week, and the outside world predicts that it will be less than 20 million.
Based on the current market observation of these films, it may be a new direction for the promotion and distribution of literary and artistic films - making good use of screenings to guide word-of-mouth.
Starting from the summer of 2023, the phenomenon of on-demand screenings has long been commonplace, but it is often more effective in commercial films.
For small and medium-sized films, especially those with a more limited audience, there was not much spark in this way in the past. However, films such as "Removing the Three Evils Around the World", "Under the White Sun", and "Youth Diary" all use the mode of screening, trying to maximize the effect of screening and achieve a word-of-mouth reversal.
The pre-screening scores of the three films "Removing the Three Evils Around the Week", "Under the White Sun" and "Youth Diary" have been as high as 8 points, and after the screening, the scores have all risen more or less. Especially in "Removing the Three Evils Around the Week", in two days of the movie, the Douban score soared directly from 8.1 points to 8.4 points, which is difficult to surpass.
The cities in which the three films are screened have a high degree of overlap, with first- and second-tier cities and box office cities, among which "Under the White Sun" and "Young Diary" are Hong Kong films, which have also strengthened the film schedule in Cantonese-speaking regions. It can be seen that this distribution strategy gives priority to meeting the needs of fans.
Here is a special mention of another relatively failed screening case, "Galaxy Writer".
The film previously gained public attention at the Golden Rooster Film Festival and was considered the most interesting newcomer work, but at the same time, many people questioned whether this story about the screenwriter would fall into the industry's self-esteem again. Although the entire publicity is trying to avoid this problem as much as possible, after the screening, this problem is still exposed to the public.
After the film was finally released, it was officially scored on the platform, but compared with the reputation of other films, the score of 7.1 seems to be a little lacking.
The topic is popular, and the main topic is the main topic.
"Removing the Three Evils Around the World" is definitely a dark horse, although the outside world predicted that it could be as high as about 200 million in the early stage, but the audience who has watched the film, carefully recalling the film itself, it is still discussing human nature as a whole, which is the core of relatively humanistic expression.
The film avoids this concept, but focuses on the film genre, especially combining the narrative rhythm of the first and second acts, strengthening the crime action movie genre and opening up the audience span between fans and the public.
At the same time, the propaganda uses the curious topic of cults to arouse curiosity, which is quite similar to the propaganda model of last year's summer file "All or Nothing" with pyramid schemes as the core. Facts have proved that this model has been successful, and even made "Eliminate the Three Evils Around the World" attract the attention of relevant anti-cult organizations and spread the topic.
is similar to the movie "The World of Grass and Trees". But the difference is that "The World of Grass and Trees" extracts the core of the second act of the movie - pyramid scheme, as the most topical value in the early stage of the film, as well as the commercial selling point, and even many materials of the film are centered on it, which has proved that the model has a certain effect, and the film is quite popular before the release.
However, the finished film is not a commercial film with a traditional concept, and the expression techniques at the beginning and end still continue the author's expression of director Gu Xiaogang in his previous work "Spring River Plumbing", which is far from the sense of departure of "Removing the Three Evils Around the World", which more or less makes the general audience feel that the film is separated, which eventually leads to the film's opening score of 7.3, which drops to the current 6.5.
"Galaxy Writer" also tries to make the audience empathize, and from the perspective of publicity, it avoids the screenwriting experience as much as possible, as well as the self-esteem of the film industry, and strengthens it into the spirit of beating workers, or it is suspected of copying "The Annual Meeting Can't Stop!". However, "Galaxy Writer" only tells the antagonistic emotions of Party A and Party B, and does not continue the latter's extension from the "black words of Dachang" to a more sinking and universal emotion of workers.
Compared with the topicality of the above films, "Under the White Sun" and "Youth Diary" are closer to the core of the issue.
The former is the fermentation of real events in Hong Kong, while the latter takes the growth environment of East Asia as the core point, hoping to use this emotional point to strengthen the interaction with the audience and try to drive the content dissemination of the film.
In particular, "Removing the Three Evils Around the World" is to put the highlights in front, but the story of "Youth Diary" has a certain turning point, and it can be seen that it strengthens the growth and falls on a single little boy, which also contributes to the emotional value after the screening.
Emotional resonance leads to interaction.
As one of the current social media, movies need more possibilities and generate more social currency when facing the public.
The movie "Youth Diary" uses other dimensions and "unmissable high-scoring movies" as the core, trying to stimulate the audience's desire to buy tickets after the screening. But the problem is that the emotional source of the film's high scores is relatively private, and it is difficult to stimulate the audience to have emotional communication.
In this regard, "Eliminate the Three Evils Everywhere" is the best case, and even the best example for the coming year.
As mentioned above, the film's propaganda point is almost strengthened in the cult passage in the third act, and even the film takes the initiative to take the lead in creating memes. First of all, before the screening, he took the initiative to play #Movie Week to eliminate the three evils of the theater", put an end to anti-piracy, accurately captured the social hotspots at the time, and drove the emotions of the first batch of core fans. At the same time, it also laid the groundwork for the later role to become an emoji.
In addition, although "The New Creation" in the movie is not a typical pop song, the melody of brainwashing and the source of the magic in the movie have become the core discussion topics.
Soon, various interesting remakes of this famous scene appeared on the Internet, which enhanced the dissemination of the film. However, it is worth noting that the core position of this kind of video communication tends to be in first- and second-tier cities, as well as new social platforms such as Xiaohongshu, and it can be seen that the proportion of movies in first- and second-tier cities will be relatively prominent.
In terms of the publicity mode of "Grass and Trees", it also tried to use the "good morning" of the MLM organization and the official local MLM poster, but unfortunately, these models were gradually weakened with the roadshow of the movie.
It is obvious that from the middle and late stages of the roadshow, the publicity topics of the movie are almost all focused on Chen Jianbin , continuing the current discussion of "The Legend of Zhen Huan", the result is that the audience remembers these events, but does not achieve a strong connection with the movie "Grass and Trees".
The movie "What kind of life do you want to live" is very clear in terms of emotional communication, and the big core is divided into two points - "Miyazaki's farewell work" before the screening, and "understanding the movie" after the screening.
Miyazaki's hotly discussed value is undoubted, but as his first new film to be released in China, the film has blindly strengthened this may be Miyazaki's last work since it was set, and it directly put the "farewell work" on various core materials, strengthening the scarcity of this film in the hearts of the public.
The concept of "final" also laid the foundation for the film's subsequent quality to be less popular - the film is different from Miyazaki's past fantasy fairy tale style, more realistic humanistic feelings, and also implies the willfulness of his later creations.
The pre-sale of the film was far ahead, but after the official meeting with the audience, the comments of "I didn't understand the movie" flowed out frequently, and in the follow-up publicity, either the official or the netizens, began to conduct an in-depth analysis of the movie, driving the core audience to brush more.
In addition to the above observations, in fact, there are still "Gone by Boat" and "Kim's Video Store" that are not mentioned in the form of these two films, which are not promoted in batches, but in the form of viewing groups and roadshows, with the purpose of reaching the core audience and penetrating the audience.
It is true that different films have their own publicity budgets, how to use high-quality content to match their own content publicity, and then find accurate audiences with effective distribution ideas, is undoubtedly the key to fermenting the film's word-of-mouth and achieving secondary and multi-dimensional communication.