Author|Apo
The movie "Hourglass" is set. This is Rao Xueman's third film and television IP to be broadcast in 2024.
It's just that the first two adaptations of "Left Ear" and "Leaving Song" did not have good results, and the highest popularity on the station was only 4227 when the latter was broadcast, which is less than half of the popularity of the standard "breaking 10,000" of the popular drama. The movie version of "Left Ear" once praised Ma Sichun and Chen Turin eight years ago, and now the drama version has been launched online after eight years, and in the end, no one cares about it.
Therefore, the finalization of the movie "Hourglass" seems to have failed to attract attention from the public except for Huang Minghao's fans.
Just like Xin Yiwu's novel "Xu I Show You" has just been announced and is about to be adapted, in addition to sighing "Ye Qinghui", the audience does not seem to pay much attention to the project itself.
"Young audiences don't watch this kind of IP nowadays, right?" Zhong Lei, who has a lot of experience in the marketing of popular dramas, bluntly said to Entertainment Capital (ID: yulezibenlun) that the "this kind of IP" in his mouth is the early IP represented by Rao Xueman's youth and pain literature.
"Youth Pain Literature" is the style that the market once gave Rao Xueman, and the characters' painful experiences and painful feelings are the result of his literary pursuit, and the bloody plots such as single-parent families, car accidents, amnesia, and young pregnancy set up the basic structure of these novels.
About 20 years ago, in the era of physical book reading, many romance authors captured young readers at that time with this theme, and reached the altar with millions of sales.
20 years later...... "This kind of IP is outdated, right?" This kind of IP has repeatedly suffered Waterloo on the road of film and television adaptation, and has become Zhong Lei's most headache when receiving marketing projects.
It seems to be a consensus that film and television dramas adapted from ancient youth literature are no longer a "popular" theme in the current film and television market, and cannot cause a lot of heated discussions that break the circle.
Judging from the online rate of adaptations of ancient youth pain literature, we can also see that this kind of theme is not optimistic. After 2018, the iteration of the overall film and television market has accelerated, the romance track has been crowded by sweet pets, the focus of creation has shifted to realism, the "suspension" atmosphere has been weakened, and users in the era of online dramas no longer like "pain".
Ancient youth literature, IP data is good, but it is becoming more and more difficult to do film and television......
How is the big IP, ancient taste, and painful youth literature "outdated"?
"Who dares to use film and television dramas to create pain for the audience now?"
Producer Ye Zi put forward the pain point very bluntly, the so-called "outdated", this "time" represents the taste of the audience in different eras, the mood of society, and the values of the market.
The Internet era provides young people with a way to "deconstruct everything" entertainment, and the current film and television form is bred from Internet film and television, and film and television content naturally hopes to meet the highlights of "deconstruction" and "fun". The social and economic situation in recent years has also increased the audience's demand for positive emotional value from entertainment products.
"Everyone is having fun, but you want me to 'hurt to the bone marrow', isn't this unpleasant for me?" Ye Zi said with a smile.
Screenwriter Pei Wen, as a screenwriter with rich experience for more than ten years, often encounters invitations to adapt early best-selling novels and young adult novels. In the adaptation of this type of youth novel, there are usually two ways: one is to highly restore the content of the novel itself, from the content to the later promotion, focus on the original fans of the novel and the preferred audience of this kind of theme, and make the effect of vertical crowd;
What is the effect of the vertical crowd in Pei Wen's mouth? You can see the two IP adaptations of Tonghua and Jiuye Wei that will be broadcast in 2023.
Judging from the number of ratings on Douban, Tonghua's IP adaptation of "Those Young Times That Can't Go Back" and Jiuye's IP drama "When Zeng Boy" only has more than 20,000 ratings, and even "Zeng Boy" about Xiaotong and Zhang Yishan is only more than 50,000, which is comparable to many waist dramas.
However, the Douban score can be more than 7.5 points or even more than 8 points, which is an obvious small circle with a high reputation.
Moving the timeline further, the most popular years of youth dramas in the era of online dramas are from 2016 to 2018, August Chang'an's "Zhenhua Trilogy" and Zhao Qianqian's "To Our Small Series" are in the limelight for a while, "The Best of Us", "Hello, Old Times" and the youth label "Little Sugar Man Film and Television" complement each other, not only playing a label effect for film and television companies, but also promoting the new youth theme to flourish again.
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In the impression of producer Ye Zi, the "Zhenhua series" still has some shadows of youth pain novels, but in the process of adaptation, the "pain of the original family" has been greatly reduced, and the "throbbing of secret love" is expressed through lighter details and image aesthetics, which are all signs that the film company sees that the market needs more positive emotions.
And by the time of Zhao Qianqian's "To Our Simple Little Beauty", "To Our Warm Little Time" and "To Our Sweet Little Happiness", it was already the time when the theme of "sweet pet" was popular, and this series also happened to take advantage of the east wind of "sweet pet" and created a lot of beautiful "campus saccharin".
On the other hand, the adaptation of pain IP, Rao Xueman's previously launched adaptation "Little Demon's Golden Castle" was already in 2018, and the new version of Ming Xiaoxi's last online youth novel adaptation "Bubble Summer" was also in 2018, and Xin Yiwu's film and television adaptation finally stayed in 2019 "Shanyue Doesn't Know the Bottom of My Heart", not only did it fail to get the effect of being a hit and a hit, but the adaptation of other IPs in the future was also difficult.
"In the era of online dramas, the values and emotional needs of youth themes must be positive. Ye Zi remembered that in the two years when the suspense theme was just hot, some high-level executives of the platform vaguely expressed that even suspense dramas should beware of producers using negative emotions and values to attract attention, let alone youth dramas for young people?
Ye Zi also bluntly said that a large part of the eight-year backlog of the drama version of "Left Ear" is caused by objective reasons caused by values.
So it is not difficult to see that early best-selling youth novel authors such as Rao Xueman, Ming Xiaoxi, Xin Yiwu, Jiuye Wei and others, the most influential time period for IP adaptation of film and television dramas was before 2016, and the film and television content led by TV stations has many urban dog blood themes and wide coverage of TV station simulcasts.
Adaptation of an ancient youth novel,
Professionalism and timeliness are the most "deadly"?
The author's transformation into a screenwriter is often considered to be more secure for "mother-in-law", including the explosion of "Sauvignon Blanc", which is also believed to be related to Tonghua's personal adaptation.
Scripts and novels are both the logic of text creation, which is somewhat similar, but when it comes to film and television production, it is "interlaced like a mountain" with text creation.
Rao Xueman is a little confident in the film and television of words, after all, as a rare post-70s author among the best-selling novel authors at that time, some of her commercial minds came earlier than many post-80s. In 2003, the audition of book models was opened, and the inner pages were used with photos of real book models, which were completely different from the popular comic pictures and aesthetics at that time.
Lin Gengxin, Ma Sichun, Chen Yihan, Wang Ziwen, Wu Qian, Wu Xin and other actors who are now popular were once her book models. The novel "Leaving Song" was published in 2008, and it was accompanied by the MV "Poison" directed by Han Han and starring and sung by Hu Ge and the micro-film "Ma Zhuo" starring Chen Yihan.
It's just that later youth novels were constantly put on the big screen, but Rao Xueman's film and television road still stayed in the stage of book derivation, and at this time she was "conservative" again, this conservatism is based on a kind of mother's cherishing of her own works, and it is also an author's absolute control over IP, which has had a profound impact on the film and television results of all her works.
The birth of "Left Ear" was because her friends complained about her, """Left Ear" will not be filmed again, and "Small Times 6" will be filmed", Rao Xueman finally decided to start the road of IP film and television, and also enjoyed the first wave of dividends.
At that time, it was an era when IP prices were rising, and the writers of best-selling novels came to a "crossroads" of IP monetization.
Tonghua's costume novels "Step by Step", "Desert Ballad" and "Song in the Clouds" were successively sold to leading film and television companies to shoot TV series, and at the same time reaped the opportunity of cooperation between high ratings and head actors; Ming Xiaoxi's "Whirlwind Girl" walked out of today's first-line celebrities such as Yang Yang, Wu Lei, Bai Jingting, Tan Songyun, etc.; Xin Yiwu's "To Our Dying Youth" directly made youth films popular again when they were made into movies, and they achieved good results in the Academy Awards, Golden Horse Awards, and Hundred Flowers Awards.
The participation of professional film and television companies is indispensable, and the market experience of the head film and television companies and the results of the actors' code plates are not comparable to the "Jiangsu Xuemanshe Film Co., Ltd.", which was only established in 2016.
"Although many book fans will complain that film and television companies buy IP magic changes, novels and film and television do have walls, and if you want to succeed in film and television, you still have to be led by professional film and television companies. ”
Ye Zi took Tonghua as an example, Tonghua cooperated with Zhejiang Dream Star Park in 2013 after "The Most Beautiful Time", and launched a long-term cooperation with it, planning for many film and television dramas of Dream Star Park to learn film and television experience, if it is their own IP adaptation, they will participate in the form of a screenwriter, but in the overall casting, creation or Dream Star Park development, including how to fully discuss the adaptation method.
From Dream Star Garden to Xinglian Film and Television, Tonghua has always been deeply bound to the team
Until the new company Xinglian Film and Television adaptation of "Sauvignon Blanc" of the original team of Dream Star Shengyuan exploded, it was not difficult to see that the probability of success under the combination of the advantages of the author and the film and television company was quite high. Tonghua's youth coming-of-age novel "The Young Years That Can't Go Back in Those Years", it is not difficult to guess that it is because of the successful adaptation of the "Zhenhua Trilogy" that Little Sugar Man Pictures has achieved word-of-mouth success.
After all, the screenwriter's text creation is only the foundation, and there are too many follow-up shooting, post-production, and publicity links, and each link must be done without deducting points to ensure the basic success of the work. ”
In addition to "professionalism", "timeliness" is still another fatal wound of youth IP.
In 2018 and 2019, maybe we can still see the adaptation of the last version of the TV series of Ming Xiaoxi's "Bubble Summer", the "Youth Side Story" of Xin Yiwu's "So You Are Still Here" can still cause discussion because of the age-appropriate performances of Hu Xianxu and Li Landi, and "Shanyue Doesn't Know the Bottom of My Heart" can also attract the partners of first-line actors like Song Qian and Ou Hao.
So starting in 2020, it seems that the early romance divas, IP has begun to be labeled as "old-fashioned", and the adaptation cycle has become long.
For example, Xin Yiwu's "Waiting for You in Memories" and "Ukiyo Floating City" have experienced several IP changes, and "Waiting for You in Memories" had a copyright company that failed to successfully adapt the IP until it went bankrupt. Ming Xiaoxi's "Bubble Summer" has been adapted several times, but it has not been able to win a good reputation by the film and television company, and the last one to appear in front of the audience is "Fire Like a Song" starring Di Lieba by relying on the theme of ancient puppets.
In August, Chang'an relied on Little Sugar Man Film and Television to produce "The Best of Us" and "Hello, Old Times", laying the foundation for the high-quality campus drama "Zhenhua Trilogy", but unfortunately the last "Orange Life Huainan Secret Love" was adapted in just three years and the two drama versions and one film version were fully Waterloo.
Is there still "salvation" in ancient youth literature?
When it comes to the IP of ancient youth literature, "the first reaction is that it is a big IP, and the second reaction is that it is a difficult big IP." Literary planner Zhao Xiang said that the audience's tastes have changed, the theme trend has changed, and the adaptation is difficult for the author, the IP is very well-known, and the difficulty of adaptation has also increased, and the most troublesome thing is that "the result is unpredictable".
Zhong Lei also agrees, because the novel is quite different from the aesthetic deviation of the current market, and he believes that it is not easy to forcibly connect the values of young people in the two eras through marketing methods.
Zhao Xiang, as a literary planner, has seen many producers who like this kind of IP very much, which has a high sales base of physical books in the bestseller era, and is a national IP for real teenagers. But now, it is "IP is difficult to change".
For example, Xin Yiwu's "We" can only be presented in the form of a small-scale waist drama, and Rao Xueman's "Leaving Song" can only be financed by the producer in the form of copyright sales. Zhao Xiang believes that only if the author himself recognizes the real situation of the market and lowers his expectations for the adaptation of his IP, he may still be able to maintain a place in the film and television market.
Misestimating the market can also easily lead to difficulties in adaptation communication by the authors themselves.
"Now even the authors of online literature have a greater say in the adaptation, not to mention the great writers of the early best-selling novels, it is often difficult to convince them when communicating the adaptation plan. ”
Screenwriter Xiao Jiu has also encountered invitations to adapt early best-selling novels and youth novels. However, after Party A and the screenwriter reached an agreement on the adaptation plan, they never got the approval of the original author, and the final adaptation cooperation had to be abandoned. This is similar to the tug-of-war when planning Zhao Xiang's "communication change plan", of course, Party A must be the person with the strongest right to speak, which is also respected by the screenwriter.
From the perspective of literary planning, Zhao Xiang hopes that the author can "listen to persuasion", if there is an obvious generational difference between the IP itself and the current market values, then it is inevitable that there will be substantial modifications.
For "substantial revision", the restoration of famous scenes is actually only a shallow restoration, and the screenwriter must grasp the core of the relationship between the characters and restore it to achieve respect for the novel. ”
However, Pei Wen also emphasized, "I have always disliked the use of words like 'ancient' to describe literary works, and the film and television market may need more commercial works that pursue the taste of the audience, but diversification must have its necessity." ”
Capital may not pay for works that are not commercialized for a long time, but Rao Xueman, the main screenwriter and Xuemanshe, can insist on a kind of vertical theme output in the moment, and screenwriter Pei Wen feels that this is a practice worthy of the admiration of creators.
As for how long such a practice can be sustained, and how many "youthful pain-themed film and television dramas" can we see?