Author: Weinika
Editor|Li Chunhui
When the 52-year-old Wu Ershan led the crew of "Under the Stranger" to hold a concert, he probably wanted to reproduce the promotional template of "Fengshen", and this year's summer file should be stable. But who expected, Chen Sicheng came to a "sneak attack".
Originally, "Decryption" directed by Chen Sicheng was only released on August 3, but it was suddenly announced that it would be screened in the special effects hall on July 25, 27, and 28. This time, it directly snatched the first weekend special effects hall schedule of "Under the Stranger", which was not rich.
In other words, "Under the Inhuman" was robbed of the majority of the special effects hall by Marvel's new film "Deadpool and Wolverine", and now it is being robbed of a part of the share by "Decryption". Wu Ershan's "Under the Alien" filmed with IMAX may not have a few IMAX performances at all in the end, as if it was lonely.
still remembers that last year, in the second half of the release of "Fengshen", it was expected to hit the box office of 3 billion. Unexpectedly, "All or Nothing" opened a large-scale screening a week in advance, impacting the box office of "Fengshen" in the second half of the game. At that time, this kind of "sneaking screening" was also scolded on the hot search. In the end, "All or Nothing" was directly announced to be released.
This year, public opinion has become much more tolerant of all kinds of fancy "screenings". After all, the film market is bleak, and everyone from top to bottom is encouraged to show their ability to save themselves.
This summer, almost all of the movies scheduled to be released in August were screened in July, such as "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century", "Her Little Pear Vortex" and so on. There are also two screening contestants who pose a threat to "Under the Alien", one is the light-chasing animation "White Snake: Floating Life", which will be screened in the IMAX hall of Wanda Cinemas on the evening of July 30. The other is "Retrograde Life" directed by Xu Zheng, which may also be screened in the near future.
"Under the Alien" encountered not only the screening melee on the surface, but also the marketing and ticket supplement melee behind the scenes. Not only did everyone have a 19.9 yuan wool ticket to reappear in the rivers and lakes, Chen Sicheng went to Dong Yuhui's live broadcast room and directly hit the lowest ticket price to 10 yuan.
However, this time, ticket compensation and marketing also have more routines, and the audience needs to pay attention to screening. In short, Hard Candy Jun is still quite relieved, but he didn't expect such a fierce business war to be staged in the second half of the summer file with a bleak start and chaotic schedule.
are sneaking away from screenings, does the schedule still matter?
When other families are sneaking away, why doesn't "Under the Inhuman" not run? This is one of the most curious questions in the industry in the first half of this summer.
In today's situation, "you don't show it" means that you lack confidence and fall into the handle of being ridiculed by your opponents. And this kind of "only on-point screening" atmosphere has to start from last year's summer file.
Before the summer of 2023, "screening" is still a veritable "screening" - it is an early screening with a limited scope, time, and theaters, even if the scale is gradually expanding.
Until the summer of 2023, "In the Octagonal Cage" and "All or Nothing" set a precedent of unlimited "large-scale screenings". This kind of "large-scale screening" is almost equivalent to raising the file. At that time, the movie channel also held a special discussion on "Is large-scale advance screening disrupting the order of the industry, or is it a market choice?" Some experts believe that it is "normal market behavior", and some netizens in the comment area refuted that "large-scale screening" itself is a sick sentence. Coupled with the large-scale, it can't be called an on-demand screening.
This year, there is no voice even discussing the "sneaking screening". Mainly because the performance of this year's summer file, compared with the same period last year, has been directly cut in half by nearly half. The box office in June and July last year reached 12.3 billion, while the box office in June and July this year is currently only 6.3 billion. When looking forward to the summer file, Hard Candy Jun knew that there was a shortage of films in the summer this year, and the performance was not optimistic, but he didn't expect it to be so unoptimistic.
At present, the Chinese film market has entered a new stage of "no matter whether it is a white cat or a black cat, catching a mouse is a good cat". No matter how you screen it, it can boost the box office of the film market, which is the right market behavior.
In the first half of this year's summer file, seed players such as "Customs Front" and "Legend" hit the streets one after another, seeing that the box office market is getting colder and colder, "Silent Killing" chose to be released and "Catch the Doll" started a large-scale screening, which is called the "rescue" of judging the situation.
"Large-scale screening" has become a means for the filmmakers to adjust the schedule on the spot. The original schedule of the film is in vain, which means that in addition to the competitors on the surface, a film has many potential competitors, which tests the filmmaker's self and external cognitive ability.
Blindly following the trend of large-scale screenings may make the film go out early and die faster. For example, "Legend" starring Jackie Chan and Zhang Yixing opened a large-scale screening a week in advance, but the results were full of negative reviews, and the box office of the official release was worse than the screening. If it is released normally, it can sell at least 100 million, but now it doesn't even have a box office of 100 million.
Screening is a technical job, and the scale of the point is not large, but accurate, and the point is given to the audience who is most likely to give good reviews. Last year's summer little dark horse "Tea Ah No. 2 Middle School" and the box office champion "The End of the Road" in May this year are all typical Northeast comedies, so the filmmaker's screening strategy is to only point to Northeast cities, and after the film gained box office and word of mouth in the Northeast, it gradually swept the national box office in the later stage.
In addition to the slicing method, there is also the hall screening method. Last year's "Fengshen" and this year's "Decryption" and "White Snake: Floating Life" all adopted the special effects hall screening strategy. As we all know, the experience of watching a movie in an IMAX hall is very different from the experience of watching a movie on a small broken screen. Especially for special effects blockbusters, it is easier to have a good reputation in the special effects hall.
The 19.9 yuan ticket makes up for the scuffle, but the routine is very deep
The films released in August collectively ran away to be screened in July, and the most obvious benefit for the audience is that "the weekend seems to be a low-cost ticket".
The 9.9 yuan era that the audience misses the most can't go back, but 19.9 yuan is still there. At present, almost all kinds of films screened in fancy order have launched low-cost tickets of 19.9 yuan. It's just that compared with the previous extensive unlimited ticket compensation, the current ticket compensation is conditional.
First of all, many theaters have introduced tiered ticketing, and seats in different areas have different ticket prices. Although many movie theaters show the lowest ticket price of 19.9 yuan, if you click in, you will find that only the surrounding remote seats are 19.9 yuan, and the seat ticket price in the core area is still very expensive. Some Beijing audiences complained, and some theaters were shocked to see ticket checkers, and audiences who bought low-price tickets could not sit in the high-price area.
Secondly, unlike the previous ticket supplement - no matter when you click in, it is 9.9 yuan, and the current ticket supplement is basically available for a limited time. The IMAX ticket for "Decryption" that Hard Candy Jun bought for 19.9 yuan two days ago is basically gone now.
Finally, the ticket compensation strength of different APPs is different. "Decryption" issued by Maoyan and "Under the Inhuman" issued by Taopiao Ticket are all with greater discounts on their respective apps. Some filmmakers will also choose to invest in greater discounts on Douyin ticketing according to the situation. Internet celebrities often offer surprisingly low prices in the live broadcast room, for example, Chen Sicheng just went to Dong Yuhui's live broadcast room and gave a lot of "Decryption" superimposed coupons, and the audience can buy tickets for only 10 yuan.
Hard Candy Jun also noticed that the ticket compensation strategy of some films is also sub-zoned. For example, now there are netizens with Beijing IP who complain that the ticket price of "Catching the Doll" is expensive, but audiences in southern regions such as Jiangxi and Guangdong can still buy low-priced tickets for 19.9 yuan.
This may be the same as the screening strategy, northern comedies like twist have always performed strongly in the northern box office. After winning the northern box office in the first half, attacking the southern box office in the second half is more conducive to the long-tail effect. So now, "Catching the Doll" may not have any tickets in the northern region, but there are still tickets in the southern region. The effect of this kind of zonal ticket compensation is obvious, and from July 21, the single-day box office of "Catching Dolls" in Guangdong Province surpassed Jiangsu Province and rose to the first place.
After all, in the current film industry, there are no more wealthy coal bosses and financial capital, so you can only rely on your own words, and you still have to be careful with your own calculations.
It's just that for ordinary audiences, if they don't pay attention to the film market all the time, they may miss these offers. However, in the context of consumption downgrade, the market demand for low-cost tickets is very large, and the audience who has seen others buy it and do not buy it themselves is easy to be deceived into defrauding the APP. There are many unknown Mini Program purchase channels on the market, and the audience must be cautious to identify them.
How to order, how to make up, marketing is not all in vain
Regardless of what kind of issuance and ticket compensation strategy is adopted, the premise of wanting to be effective is that marketing is in place. Just like if you are doing business, the customers don't know that you have this store, so no matter how big the discount is, it is useless.
This year's Dragon Boat Festival film was wiped out because of this. At that time, "Sweeping Gang· Never Give Up" and "Negotiator" also started screening early, and the zonal screening method was also adopted, but no splash was made. When "Sweeping Gang· Never Give Up" was broadcast online, many viewers suddenly realized that there was such a film.
The same is true of the summer cartoon "Falling Dust". A week before the screening, its overall marketing data on the whole network was not even as good as the data of the same period of the foreign film "Tornado".
A movie with no IP, no stars, and no fan audience, if it can't do the step of "letting the audience know", what bargaining chips do you have to negotiate with the theater about scheduling? The theater gave "Falling Dust" 1.2-2.4% of the screening schedule, and the box office could be upside down, so it was completely a loss-making deal.
"Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" accounted for only 0.4% of the early screenings, but it could create a box office share of 6.7%. It is not difficult to see that the theaters selected by the filmmakers are mainly popular theaters with high box office, and they are only screened once. This kind of control is within the effective range, and it is easier to do word-of-mouth. At the same time, because of the limited scope, it is easier to attract the core audience of the film.
The screening must cooperate with marketing to spread word-of-mouth. "Falling Dust" and "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" attracted about 100,000 people, but the word-of-mouth spread is very different. "Falling Dust" scored a high score of 7.8 on Douban, and the audience still knows nothing about its story and characteristics. And the crazy "neurotic" style of "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" has impressed audiences who have not seen it.
The reason why "Thirty Thousand Miles of Chang'an" became a dark horse in the animation market last year was due to its marketing contributions. Before the screening, the short video of Li Baiyin's poem "The Light Boat Has Passed Ten Thousand Mountains" became a hit, and this sentence became last year's "annual stalk", which was quoted by many stars at the awards ceremony.
Secondly, marketing cooperation and word-of-mouth maintenance are also indispensable when screening. When "Thirty Thousand Miles of Chang'an" was screened, a large number of short videos of primary and secondary school students "reciting poems" in theaters flowed out, leaving a deep impression on netizens.
At least let the audience know that there is such a film released, so that it may reflect a bit of word-of-mouth and box office counterattack. Some theater managers believe that large-scale screenings are only suitable for two types of films, one is movies with fan audiences, and the other is movies with marketing out of the circle. Other movies are blindly screened on a large scale, and they may kill themselves instead. The reason why "In the Octagon Cage" and "All or Nothing" dared to be screened on a large scale last year was precisely because they had become popular in marketing on short videos in advance, and they wanted to convert marketing data into box office purchasing power as soon as possible.
Of course, Wu Ershan and "Under the Stranger" are determined not to be screened, perhaps because they trust their successful experience more - "roadshow mode". In the early stage of the business war with bells and whistles, it is better to do a long variety show roadshow, and sooner or later you can run out of the word of mouth and take a long-term line to catch big fish.
Then let's take a look at this year's summer file, whether Mr. Wu can turn the tables against the wind again.