Written by | Changfeng Editing | Yang Bocheng
IP has become an indispensable part of the Youaiteng film list.
A few days ago, Youaiteng successively held the Spring Merchants Association, and also announced its own latest film list. As in the past, no matter what the theme of the series, you can see different IP themes in the selection of materials.
Most of iQiyi's "blockbuster main promotion" plays and Youku's suspense theaters are IP adaptations. "Ideal City" starring Sun Li and Zhao Youting, "Ace Troops" starring Huang Jingyu and Xiao Zhan, as well as "The Gate of Rebirth" and "Five Elements Family" are all based on popular online novels. Tencent Video, which relies on Tencent to obtain a large amount of IP resources from Reading, has directly formed an expansion strategy based on IP ecology, and launched a number of original remakes such as "Ancient Dust" and "Green Hairpin Line".
Not only video websites, but also film and television companies such as Noonday Sunshine and Perfect Film and Television have spent high prices to buy IP copyrights. And produced "Langya List", "Fragrant Honey Sinks Like Frost" and other works out of the circle.
The reason why the industry is keen to adapt IP is that such dramas bring huge benefits to themselves. Remakes of popular online novels such as "Notes from the Tomb Robber" and "Qing Yu Nian" have prompted video platforms to open up the copyright payment market and the follow-up advanced on-demand payment model, which has driven the growth of membership revenue of iQiyi and Tencent Video. Even the short video platform can not hold back, Kuaishou reached a cooperation with China's "Online Literature +" conference in August last year, starting from the film and television drama adaptation of 10 high-quality online IP, and will jointly develop 100 high-quality online text IP in the future.
However, with the continuous improvement of public aesthetics, the problem of shoddy IP dramas has surfaced. Remakes such as "Phoenix Prisoner" and "Choosing Heaven" that only have no traffic and no quality have been abandoned by the audience. The industry gradually realized that it was not feasible to develop IP in the style of gambling horses, and turned to refined operation.
It can be seen that although the market is still very concerned about big IP in the past two years, according to third-party platform data, the overall proportion of such episodes is shrinking. In the context of the benign development path of IP adaptations embarking on a benign development path of quality and quantity, original dramas have also ushered in new developments, although the entire original drama market is still facing many problems.
The essence of adapting IP is traffic conversion
According to the "2020 Blue Book of Chinese Online Literature", the scale of Chinese online literature users in 2020 reached 467 million, the total number of works on the whole network was about 28 million, the average daily update word count of national literary websites exceeded 150 million, and the cumulative number of new words added throughout the year exceeded 50 billion. The total output value of the downstream cultural industry is more than 1 trillion yuan. This includes film and television adaptations.
This part of the industry has brought great benefits to major video websites, and iQiyi can be said to be one of the first players to eat crabs.
In 2015, iQIYI launched the IP adaptation "Notes from the Tomb Robber" starring Li Yifeng Yang Yang, which brushed 24.6 million hits in only 5 minutes after going online, and the traffic exceeded 100 million after 22 hours, creating a record for the fastest online drama to break 100 million. iQIYI has taken this opportunity to tear open the mouth of the membership payment model.
When the full episode of the show was officially opened to iQIYI VIP members, there were 160 million instantaneous playback requests within 5 minutes. Because the platform could not withstand such a large-scale traffic "attack", the iQiyi server was "paralyzed".
This allows the market to see the power of IP, major video platforms and film and television companies began to hoard popular comics, online novels and other copyrights, according to Phoenix Cultural and Creative Insights, in 2017, online IP dramas won 70% of the market share of Chinese TV dramas. These IPs have also given the platform a certain return, for example, in 2016, 100% of the web dramas with more than 2 billion plays were adapted from the web text IP.
In the past two years, IP has continued to exert its effect, and several blockbuster dramas have even further promoted the monetization of video websites.
In the middle of last year, iQIYI successfully launched the "Advanced On Demand" charging model and Star Diamond membership through two popular dramas "Qing Yu Nian" and "Chen Qing Ling", broadening the membership payment consumption scenario, so that the platform's membership service business revenue in the case of a decrease in the number of members still increased by 7% year-on-year to 4 billion yuan in Q3 2020. Among them, the paid on-demand volume of the finale of "Chen Qingling" reached 5.2 million, and the final on-demand revenue reached 156 million yuan.
Tencent also said in the first quarter of 2021 that some IP adaptations into animation and live-action dramas are widely popular, such as "Douluo Continent", and the membership retention rate is high.
Why are IP adaptations so popular? This is closely related to the characteristics of IP with its own traffic.
The head online novel "Notes from the Tomb Robber" gained a large number of fans when it was serialized online, and driven by it, the total sales of the nine physical books published by the novel exceeded 12 million; Other "ancient" popular online articles have also been able to achieve good listening volume in the emerging audio field with the help of fan power; This is also the reason why today's IP remake dramas are easy to make explosive models.
This kind of remake drama can enter the public eye under the impetus of the original traffic. IP such as "Son-in-law" and "The Biography of Zhen Huan" were not broadcast first in the remake, from casting arrangements to fuhua Dao, and various details of the problem may be on Weibo hot search, which attracted the attention of some passers-by after causing heated discussion on the Internet and harvested new traffic.
However, the adaptation of IP is not a hundred and one hundred.
The IP operation is insufficient, and the adaptation will eventually destroy the original work
Since the first year of IP in 2015, the platform and production companies have indeed produced many blockbuster dramas, but they have not turned over.
"His Highness the Wolf" is referred to as "hot eyes" from the plot to the lines, and the public rating is only 4.3 points; After the broadcast of Zhang Yishan's version of "Deer Ding", he was criticized for his actor's acting skills, plot settings, and editing, and suffered word-of-mouth Waterloo, with a public rating of 3.3 points, becoming the "worst Jin Yong martial arts remake drama". "Sweet Critical Strike", which adopts the classic "IP + traffic artist" routine and adapted from the popular Korean comic "Wild Girl", has also been ridiculed by netizens as "I didn't see the sweetness, every second is a critical hit", and the "proverb" of "adapting and destroying the original work" was born.
Previous popular online novels such as "Silent Reading" and "Blessing of Heavenly Officials" caused resistance from many fans when it was rumored that they were going to be remade into dramas, and the IP explosion theory eventually became the IP failure theory. For this phenomenon, producer Yu Miao attributed the reason to the blind development of the industry.
Yu Miao told DoNews (ID: ilovedonews), "Some IPs are not suitable for adaptation, and when these IPs are developed, if they are completely based on the original book, they may be difficult to support because of the lack of many things." However, the big knife and axe to change will also produce a lot of problems, such as whether the screenwriter's skills are strong enough, and doing so means that the entire IP is equivalent to buying in vain, and fans will not accept it. "This has been a lot of lessons learned before.
"Phoenix Prisoner Phoenix" is a typical example of the magic reform drama. In order to avoid the sensitive traversal plot, the producers deleted many related plots, basically deviating from the core points of the original IP, and the final Douban score was only 3.7. It greatly consumes the loyalty of fans to IP and reduces the commercial value of the original work. As a beautiful novel, "Fourteen Years of Chenghua" also added the BG (heterosexual) line in the remake, which discouraged a large number of fans of the original.
After learning the lesson, the industry changed its previous adventurousness. "Now the entire industry is becoming more and more cautious about the choice of IP. In addition to traffic, the industry pays more attention to whether this IP is a good story and whether it is operable. "But even with these qualities, it's still difficult to create quality work due to the immaturity of the industry."
Cheng Wu, CEO of Yuwen, once said that the current industrialization capacity of China's IP industry is still in its infancy, and there are still many problems in IP operation capabilities and IP talent reserves. On this basis, it is proposed to cultivate more directors and screenwriters.
In the context of bidding farewell to the trend of extensive and high-quality products, the pace of IP drama development has slowed down.
According to the Ai Media Data Center, from the perspective of the proportion of IP dramas in the Chinese market from 2017 to 2019, the proportion of IP dramas in the Chinese market shows a downward trend year by year. In the past three years, the number of online drama IP dramas in the Chinese market accounted for 42%, 32% and 29% respectively.
For the first time in 2021, the trend continued. According to the data provided by IP values, there were about 76 new episodes in the first quarter of 2021, of which the number of IP dramas was about 44, accounting for about 58% of the whole, while in the first quarter of 2020, there were about 48 new IP dramas, accounting for about 77% of all new dramas in the current season.
The decline in the proportion of IP dramas means that the original market has more opportunities to emerge.
An original script that sinks underwater
Last year, the original market produced blockbuster dramas such as "Twenty Not Confused" and "Thirty Only". Among them, the final hits of "Thirty Only" exceeded 7 billion, more than 170 million users watched, and the topic discussion volume of Weibo and Douyin exceeded 20 billion. This year's "Age of Awakening" is to make the original reach a new height.
However, in contrast, there is still a certain gap between the original combat effectiveness and the IP adaptation. In 2019, there were 27 episodes with an average popularity of more than 70 bones, of which only 4 were original episodes, and the number of IP adaptation episodes was as high as 85%. According to the "2020 Domestic Drama Market Research Report" released by Yien, the number of IP adaptations in the head drama in 2020 has decreased slightly, but it still exceeds 60%, that is to say, there are still very few original dramas that have become blockbusters.
Is this happening because there are too few high-quality original scripts? In the view of Wang Heming, CEO of Script Supermarket, this is not the case. "There is no shortage of good original scripts on the market, the problem is how to find these scripts. Because the original is the part that sinks under the water, unlike the IP, which floats on the surface of the water because there is a data reference, it can be found. Because it is impossible to distinguish, the market misses a lot of good works. ”
At the first "Chinese Screenwriters Golden Week Conference" in 2019, the "Research Report on the Current Situation and Development Trend of China's Screenwriting Industry" released by the organizers also pointed out that the number of professional screenwriters is conservatively estimated to exceed 140,000. Only 3% of the screenwriters who have works broadcast every year, and a large number of scripts are in a state of inability to be shot.
Digging into the script is only one part of creating a high-quality original drama, in addition to finding a good production team for the script.
"Because the platform does not receive scripts but films, a good script also needs to be given to a good producer, a good director and a good production company, and the chain in between is too long." If the screenwriter lacks such ability, it will eventually lead to a good story failing to make a good work, the platform will not buy it, and eventually it can only be buried. Therefore, I hope that more intermediary platforms connecting screenwriters, scripts and film and television companies will appear to provide a path for original scripts to be discovered. ”
As such a platform, Script Supermarket has established in-depth cooperation with more than 4,000 companies such as Aiyouteng and Huayi Brothers, and launched works such as "Trumpeter in Place".
In addition to external blessings, if the original market wants to develop further, it is also necessary to improve the innovation ability of screenwriters from the inside. iQIYI CEO Gong Yu said at this year's "Screenwriter's Night" that iQIYI has several review meetings every month, and each time it looks at several projects to more than a dozen projects, but the projects seen have a sense of déjà vu.
Whether it is to do IP adaptations or original dramas, the ultimate goal of the platform and the producer is to produce more excellent works and create more blockbusters. In the case of policies to crack down on water injection dramas and the level of audience appreciation is getting higher and higher, the concept of traffic that the industry believed in before is no longer effective. Only by further improving the operation of the entire industry chain and making every link of the author, director, screenwriter and so on do a good job can we output recognized film and television dramas.
As Yu Miao said, "As an online text IP, "The Hidden Corner" is not a head work, but under the good operation, the effect that the adapted film and television drama can bring can be said to exceed expectations, and the public has begun to review the novel under the impetus of the drama. "And the development of the entire industry will eventually return to content and operation."
This article originated from Donews