Rhino Entertainment Original
Text: Xiaofu Editor: Pu Fang
The dark horse of the summer file, which has been waiting for more than a month, finally rushed out.
The screening was opened half a month in advance, and the word-of-mouth exploded on the first day of the screening on July 18, and the attendance rate continued to rise in the last few days, and on July 21, the last day of the first round of screenings, it won the double championship of the day's attendance rate and average number of people per game with an ultra-high attendance rate of 81.1% and an average number of people per game of 80.6, becoming the film with the highest average number of people per game in the summer of the past five years.
This movie, called "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century", can actually point out the effect of short supply in 2024.
Due to the fact that the first round of screenings of the film far exceeded expectations, the film immediately added the second and third rounds of limited screenings in 53 cities from July 24th to 26th and limited screenings nationwide from July 27th to 28th.
This project, which was almost not favored by anyone before the screening, can be said to rely on the word-of-mouth explosion of the first round of screenings and the real attendance rate to break out of the encirclement. Even if it has not yet entered a large-scale release, it is already a certainty to become a word-of-mouth little dark horse.
The dark horse arrived late
Like many viewers, "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" seems to us to be a film that is difficult to describe in words. Its temperament is too special, and it is almost impossible to find a benchmark project in the Chinese film market in the past.
We try to describe this film without spoilers:
First of all, it is certain that "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" is not a work suitable for a "logician" audience.
Under the framework of the proposition, the director recklessly tells a youth adventure story with thin logic, full of loopholes, but with a lot of brains. His unrestrained use of two-dimensional special effects and fragmentary narration is rambling and incoherent, but it is surprisingly convincing when placed in this nonsensical story. In a film like this, you lose if you are more serious.
Through the director's unbridled imagination, the story theme of "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" has landed.
It is essentially a precious youth memory belonging to the post-80s and post-90s generation. From the protagonist in the film, to the games he played in his childhood and the TV shows he watched, these fragments together form the youth we have lost but cannot forget in middle age. The film is both unfettered and personal.
It's just that the biggest difference from mainstream commercial films is that the genre of "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" itself is an innovation. Regardless of whether this story is really so gripping and emotionally resonant, just aiming at the strong audio-visual aesthetics and unique freshness on the market is enough to make the audience's eyes shine.
If you insist on benchmarking, "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" is more like a "Instant Universe" written by a Chinese creator.
In front of the right audience, the content and theme will not become the limitations of the film. It's a complete "radio wave" movie – if you can match the director's brainwaves, "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" can turn into a good movie that will be impressive.
And back to the industry dimension, to a certain extent, this film also allows us to see another possibility of domestic youth films in addition to love and love - although it is difficult to replicate.
Old acquaintances do a "big job"
Although it will not be released until 2024 that this feature film debut in the true sense of the word is released, the name of director Li Yang will not be too unfamiliar to both practitioners and fans.
He became an overnight hit on the Internet in 2009 with the animated short film "The Adventures of Li Xianji", and later released a live-action short film "Bad Future" in 2013, which is regarded as a masterpiece by many netizens. Born as an animation director, Director Li Yang has a creative system that is completely different from that of traditional professional directors, and has created his unique "live-action animation" narrative style.
Although the young director has been "precipitated" for more than ten years after this film, the audience has never forgotten this advanced creator over the years, and from time to time on the Internet, netizens have urged the director to change. It wasn't until this difficult birth for many years that "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" was finally announced.
For those viewers who are familiar with director Li Yang, they may be able to understand the temperament of this film more smoothly.
If you have seen director Li Yang's previous two works, it is not difficult to find a high degree of consistency in the core of his works. And this "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" is still the Li Yang we knew in the past.
We can see this film as a spiritual sequel to "Bad Future", or a continuation and upgrade of the audiovisual style and narrative temperament in "The Adventures of Li Xianji". To some extent, he has been preparing this work for more than ten years.
Ten years ago, his concept was a bit out of place in the entire film industry, and even in 2024, Li Yang's works are still bold in the theater market. But fortunately, today's film market has been able to carry different kinds of creators more inclusively, and the screening performance of "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" can already speak for itself.
Breaking out of the fan circle?
If director Li Yang is the confidence of the quality of this film, then the fan group can be regarded as the confidence of the box office of this film.
Among the 25 cities in a round of screenings, the box office in Beijing, which has the highest concentration of fans, is unbeatable. Judging from the final attendance, "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" has accumulated a high enough reputation and enough influence among the fan base in high-tier cities. A solid core audience will become the basic plate of this film, and it will play a greater role in the subsequent release process.
Of course, from the perspective of the market, "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" is not without hidden concerns at this stage.
The first is that the genre style of this film is too far behind traditional commercial films. For audiences who do not accept Japanese comics, two-dimensional and other styles well, or young audiences who are completely decoupled from the aesthetics of the post-80s and 90s audiences, a high threshold for watching movies objectively exists.
Secondly, at the schedule level, "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" is about to face a backwater battle. On the same day, he collided with director Chen Sicheng's new film "Decryption", and the next week, there was also a reality-themed work "Retrograde Life" directed by Xu Zheng.
And this is the main reason why the industry generally did not have high expectations for this film.
However, it is relatively optimistic that the film is quite precise in its distribution strategy. On the one hand, in the stage of strong market uncertainty, a small number of films in high-tier cities are tested for word-of-mouth, and on the other hand, after word-of-mouth is fermented, it is also promoted to expand the scope of screenings in a timely manner, and at the same time, with the help of roadshows and other activities to accumulate popularity and spread word-of-mouth for the film, which is expected to lay a good momentum for the film.
As of today, the total box office of the film's screening and pre-sale has approached 10 million yuan. With the further expansion of the scale of screenings in the future, the market trend of this film will also be clearer.
What is certain now is that no matter how high and far "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" can go in the market or word-of-mouth level, this time, the creator named Li Yang is destined to be remembered by more people.