Text/Yu Lianzhou
On October 22, a new film "Northeast Brother Lover" officially opened online pre-sale on iQiyi. On October 29, "Northeast Brother Lover" officially launched iQIYI's "Cloud Cinema" in PVOD mode.
The film is directed by Qin Xiaozhen, starring Bao Bell, Qiao Shan, Liang Songqing, and pan Binlong, Xu Juncong, Han Yunyun and Zhang Monroe. The price of the film is 12 yuan, and members enjoy a half-price ticket purchase discount. The story of the film takes place in the northeast in the late 1990s, and is intended to present the audience with a vivid and vigorous northeast jianghu and human sophistication.
"Brother Northeast Lover"
Prior to this, the image of online movies in the public's mind was quite limited: it was inseparable from fantasy, action, comedy, thriller, horror, war, adventure and so on, in short, how to stimulate how to come. But this time, the topic of "Northeast Love Brother" obviously jumped out of the way. To some extent, this not only shows iQiyi's ambition in the direction of online movies, but also reflects self-confidence: the production level of its online movies is gradually converging with the level of cinema. The subject matter is no longer limited, but more focused on reality, and begins to describe the sadness and joy of the little people.
The breakthrough of "Northeast Brother Lover"
"All of our standards are based on cinema films." In an interview with the media, Song Jia, vice president of iQIYI, said.
On October 15th, "Northeast Brother Lover" entered the 5th Pingyao International Film Festival, and the first audience gave positive evaluations on the film's texture, performance, regional style and other aspects, and the most intuitive emotional flow was reflected in the resonance of nostalgia. Songhua River, Sophia Church, Daoli Manhattan, Golden Sun and other well-known landscapes, the flea market, disco, game hall, or string, "spinning" beer and other "energetic" daily life, have aroused many northeastern audiences to the 90s hometown of the good memories. In the cultural and geographical details shown in the film, the audience finds a sense of belonging to home.
Song Jia said that the film has both love and elements of traditional male brotherhood. The reason why female director Qin Xiaozhen was chosen to direct this film is because I believe that female directors have more advantages in the presentation of love, and can take into account the needs of both male and female audiences.
Song Jia also told the media that this is the first project after the establishment of Qimai Studio. When the team first approached the project, it was just last year when the epidemic had just stabilized. After discussion, the team concluded that it could be done. On the one hand, at that time, the entire film market was relatively lacking in comedy projects, and the overall quality of some existing projects was not very satisfactory. On the other hand, at that time, affected by the epidemic, the mood of the whole society was relatively low, and from the perspective of the audience, the demand for comedy was also very strong.
So iQiyi found director Qin Xiaozhen, who was once the screenwriter of the classic film "Across the Sea" and "Blood Street", and has a unique understanding of "jianghu qi", and the director's "Are You Still Cute" and "Human Comedy" two Douban high-scoring masterpieces also show her unique social touch as a Hong Kong director. In order to ensure the film's pure northeast taste, "Northeast Love Brother" gathered the "Northeast Comedy Heavenly Troupe" - Bao Bell, Qiao Shan, Pan Binlong, Xu Juncong foursome, so that the audience's expectations for the movie soared.
All in all, the production idea of "Northeast Brother Lover" is based on the classic IP, a simple and grounded adaptation, and the bridge section about love and family affection is presented in a way that is closer to the expression of Chinese habits. From the selection of materials, project establishment, casting, production, marketing and other aspects of each link are quite product thinking.
Realistic content strategy
The core of the survival of long video platforms is content. Since its inception, iQIYI has launched a series of drastic measures in terms of content, such as vigorously developing self-made dramas, forming a mist theater, vigorously supporting cutting-edge screenwriters and directors, and taking the lead in withdrawing from advanced on-demand. Although the direction and emphasis are different, the essence is to create a better ecology and continue to work hard.
Taking the popular "theatrical" competition between platforms in the past two years as an example, its essence is to integrate the same category of network dramas as the main way, which is conducive to video websites to snipe the target audience more accurately with vertical content. Among the many works that have emerged on various platforms, the most outstanding one is uncontroversially belonging to 2020's "The Hidden Corner", which can be described as raising the ceiling of web dramas to a new height.
The Hidden Corner
Today, iQIYI's next move is to continue to exert efforts on online movies, and the first problem it faces is to break through the public's preconceptions about online movies and the restrictions that exist in the industry itself.
In recent years, realism can be described as the direction in which the film and television industry has concentrated its efforts. According to the "Research Report on the Development of China's Online Audiovisual Development" released in the first half of this year, 44.7% of users are willing to pay for online movies, which is the strongest willingness of users to pay among many online audio-visual content such as dramas and variety shows. The report data also shows that in 2020, there are 79 tens of millions of online movies, 41 more than last year, and the box office scale of tens of millions of films reached 1.39 billion, achieving a year-on-year increase of 125%.
However, the difficulty of limiting remains. For example, compared with the aforementioned "hot" genres, the audience of realistic online movies is not wide enough; subject to online broadcast channels, small-screen hardware and duration, it has been difficult to make a big leap in volume.
Some practitioners believe that online movies require the audience to concentrate on 90 minutes, and first put forward higher requirements for the polishing of stories and scripts. If you keep a book in two or three months as before, there will never be much progress. However, a longer creative cycle means higher cost investment, and puts forward higher requirements for actors, directors, and artists, and these pieces must be the first to make breakthroughs.
iQiyi has undoubtedly played the role of a breakthrough. From all angles, "Northeast Brother Lover" has taken a big step forward: adapted from the already successful IP, focusing on the blue ocean of realism of love + comedy, exploring the style type of northeast life, and introducing the production standards of cinema films. Coupled with a series of high-quality works such as "Chen Xiang's Folk Master at 6:30" which has previously been launched to interpret the spirit of sportsmanship, and "Our New Life", which tells ordinary people in the new era to strive for a better life, it not only sets a benchmark for high-quality online movies, but also creates realistic themes, reflects the voice of the people, tells Chinese stories well, and triggers the resonance and recognition of the majority of users.
In an interview with the media, Song Jia also said that the films produced by iQiyi are currently very rich and diverse in the selection of topics, and there are no special restrictions. The platform has been approved internally, began to plan, or has been preparing to start the project, the themes include suspense, martial arts, police bandits, disasters, youth, family plots, etc., and so on.
"The goal we set for ourselves is to first broaden the original track, for example, the form of "Northeast Love Brother" has not been done before, we try to do one; second, the original track is deeply cultivated, the theme may still be fantasy, folklore, monsters, but we polish it more finely, I hope that everyone thinks it is a complete thing after reading it, rather than just to pass the time to see it." This is our planning on the topic and on the track. Song Jia said.
Create a future ecology
In the past two years, the entertainment industry has become popular with a word: PVOD, which is an abbreviation for Premium Video on Demand, which is a form of pay-per-view. In this mode, a film can be launched on the streaming platform at a time close to the same period of the theater release, which shortens the window period between the theater and the network.
Although the rise of this model has long been a trend, it has officially entered the public eye, or it is inseparable from the global epidemic last year, the theater shutdown, and the blank theater environment. At that time, the global audience who could not enter the theater had a strong desire for new content, which naturally gave the PVOD model the soil to accelerate its development.
In February 2020, iQIYI introduced the PVOD model into the Chinese film market, creating a distribution space for a number of high-quality films, meeting the needs of users to watch new films online for the first time, such as the first movie to adopt the PVOD model, "Fat Dragon Across the River", and the horror masterpiece "Fatal Induction" broadcast simultaneously with HBOMax. Today, iQIYI has launched about 20 films in PVOD mode, covering foreign blockbusters such as "Marriage Story", Zach Schneider's version of "Justice League", as well as domestic commercial films such as "The Legend of Debao of shaolin temple" and "Mr. Monster", and online movies such as "Chen Xiang's Folk Master at 6:30", which are included in different genres and themes.
It is worth mentioning that this model has also opened up new revenue channels for many literary and art films and documentaries with limited box office ceilings in theaters. "Spring Tide" and "Spring River Plumbing", which were released online in 2020, broke the boundaries of distribution with the most appropriate scale and the most efficient payment model, and broadened the commercial space of the film. In addition, this year's "Dragon tiger martial artist" is also a typical example: this documentary has a box office revenue of less than 1 million yuan in theaters, but later the on-demand revenue on iQiyi Cloud Cinema completely covers all the deficits in the early publicity, which makes a good complement to the cinema ecology.
Dragon tiger martial artist
Nowadays, the film "Northeast Brother Lover", which is mainly controlled by iQIYI, has chosen to be distributed online, which is also a further development of the PVOD model. In the future, iQIYI will continue to launch higher quality movie content, continue to deliver to users, and jointly open up a broader market space. Song Jia said that this year, iQiyi has further improved the proportion of accounts for the film party, from 35% to 42%, hoping to give more profits to the film side, and also absorb more high-quality works.
As a platform, iQIYI's scope of work file does not only include content procurement and cooperation. In addition to putting the film online, iQiyi also assumed a considerable part of the role of operation, editing and publicity. Song Jia said that she hopes that in the future, every project will be launched, and the team will be able to formulate an exclusive marketing plan according to some of the characteristics of the project itself. "Our team has been training, and we will do some background analysis of the projects on the line... Our artificial promotion resources are relatively limited, how to distribute to the film through personalization to better promotion, we are now doing research work in this regard. ”
All in all, a series of actions have shown that iQIYI's focus is not only on short-term financial balance, but also on long-term development, and strives to deliver more good content for Chinese films and create a better ecology.
As Yang Xianghua, a member of iQIYI and president of the overseas business group, once mentioned: The current scale of online video users in China exceeds 900 million, and the innovative distribution model gives excellent film works the opportunity to stand out. Building a fair, transparent and healthy online movie trading platform is what iQIYI wants to do in the next decade, which is a long way to go and the focus of iQIYI's future work.
This article represents only the views of the author and does not represent the position of the journal.