In June, two sports films were released, Breaking Bad Munich and Heart of a Champion.
On the day of its premiere on June 13, "Kill Munich" was only a dismal 4.9%, far below the 22.6% of "The Best of Us", and the box office was naturally unsatisfactory.
With the passage of time, the film relies on word-of-mouth bonuses, box office and scheduling appeared a short "counterattack", on the sixth day of release, the attendance rate surpassed "Chasing the Dragon 2", and the publicist also once played the slogan of "give me 10% of the schedule, return you a miracle".
However, the counterattack is only relative. After the release of "Spirited Away", the schedule of "Kill Munich" began to decline again, currently hovering around 5%, and the box office rally is nearing the end, it is difficult to exceed 80 million.
But compared with "The Heart of a Champion" directed by Liu Zhengli and starring Yang Kun, "Killing Munich" has indeed created a miracle. The former claims that the script was written for five years, but the box office was only 700,000, and after only five days, it was almost impossible to find the theater line of the film. Because of the lack of viewers, there is not even a rating on Douban.
In recent years, many entertainment practitioners have tried to "combine style and style", but there are almost no successes. Why are sports movies that should be surging with blood always unsatisfactory at the box office?
1
"Kill Munich" tells the story of the men's basketball team at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. In that match, the Soviet Union defeated the United States team, which had never been defeated in the Olympic Games, with a score of 51:50, and won the Olympic gold medal for the first time.
Although the film restores real historical events, the director and screenwriter have done a lot of artistic work considering the arc of the characters.
In the movie, the young player Alexander Belov suddenly fell seriously ill and was once dying, and the head coach took out the money for his son's medical treatment to pay for his medical expenses, so that Belov could recover his life. The head coach's son suffered from cerebral palsy and urgently needed money to send him abroad for treatment.
If the team wins the Olympic championship, the Sports Committee of the USSR will award a prize money. In the end, Berov completed the final kill at a critical time and became the hero of the team; after winning the championship, the players felt the help of the head coach to Berov and donated the prize money to the head coach.
Captain Paulskas is from Lithuania and, in the film, is set up as a calculating anti-Soviet figure, always thinking of defecting. Before the final, he had already contacted the fleeing helpers, and at the last moment he found out in his conscience and returned to the team.
Most of these plots do not conform to historical facts, so they are opposed by the parties. In fact, Alexander Belov, who completed the extermination, was very healthy at the time, free of disease. Suffering from a terminal illness and dying young, it was later. The head coach did not think of sending his children abroad for medical treatment, and Paulskas was loyal to the Soviet Union and never thought of defecting.
However, from the perspective of the play, these changes, although deliberate and slightly old-fashioned, are necessary.
In sports movies, sports elements are only appearances, and the core lies in solving the problems faced by the protagonists in life - most of them are poverty or the illness of relatives - so as to gain social recognition and further complete psychological redemption. When the audience enters the perspective of the protagonist, it will produce a "I can do it" mood and be inspired. This forms the psychological basis for watching sports movies.
It can be summed up like this: When we talk about a successful sports movie, we look at not only sports, but also life.
2
According to the different projects, sports movies will also be divided into many sub-categories, the most common and most far-reaching of which is undoubtedly the fighting movie.
Although there are many sports films in other sports, football, basketball, rugby and other fields have their own masterpieces. But compared to the fight genre, these projects require a larger venue, more actors to be mobilized, and more complex camera positions. The cost goes all the way up, and the number is naturally relatively small.
Fighting to see blood, directly catering to human animality, is a cheap violent film, so it was once rampant. "Rocky" made five in a row; "The Ultimate Fighter" was also four in one shot, until the audience's feelings were exhausted.
"The Heart of a Champion", directed by Liu Zhengli and starring Yang Kun, is also a fighting movie. Compared to "Breaking Bad Munich", "The Heart of a Champion" is a completely fictional story. Because it lacks the seriousness of real events, it is more challenging for editors to set the story outline.
But the story is quite old-fashioned: in the boxing ring, the protagonist Tan Kai accidentally killed his brother for many years, and under the pressure of psychology, he chose to retire and leave. Years later, by chance, he learned that his brother's heart had been transplanted into the body of the girl Lichuan, and in order to raise money for Lichuan's treatment, he once again picked up the boxing sleeve and walked to the boxing ring.
The protagonist Tan Kai's personality, much like Kang Tae-seok in the 2005 Korean movie "Crying Fist", is about the counterattack journey of the low-level small people - the uncle of the mid-life crisis, who urgently needs a bonus to solve the dilemma of life.
"Crying Fist" is a "two-male mode", but there can only be one champion. So the screenwriter asked for a coincidence, deliberately not to explain the whereabouts of the money, but also to leave a little good thought for the audience.
Crying Fist is just one example. Dismantling many fighting movies ("Rocky", "Invincible", "Million Dollar Baby", etc.), it is not difficult to find that their routines are highly consistent: the protagonist breaks through many dangers and obstacles, passes five levels and slashes six generals, and finally wins the crown. The champion usually has a prize money, which is not a small amount, so the problems in the protagonist's life are also solved.
The real world we face is highly complex, and whether a person succeeds or not is affected by the interaction of many factors. Most fight movies, on the other hand, have a not-so-good tendency: simplifying and linearizing everything, as if as long as they are not afraid of suffering or death, they can get good results after a few months of assault training. The spirit is commendable, but it does not correspond to the actual situation.
Perhaps the director took this into account as well. In order to avoid the vulgarity, in the second half, "The Heart of the Champion" did not take the usual path, but imitated the Hong Kong films "Ah Hu" and "Ah Lang's Story", and wrote the protagonist to death. The girl who suffered from heart disease also had to die. The whole movie became a complete tragedy.
Screenshot of stills from "A Tiger"
Either live or die. This is the suspense of fighting, but it also creates a natural separation from real life. Cheng Yong in "I Am Not a Medicine God" does not sell generic drugs, but can also open a textile factory; even if he is imprisoned, there is a day to be released. After all, life is not a casino, as long as people live, there is always a way out. And distorting the essence of life for the sake of the story is precisely the taboo of the screenwriter.
Not only "The Champion's Heart", most fighting movies, can't escape this trap.
3
In addition to the above problems, no matter what type of sports movie, there is a fatal wound: the audience is small.
First of all, the majority of the moviegoers are men, which makes a gender split. Secondly, the audience of each sports category is fixed. If it weren't for a whim, a basketball fan wouldn't have been able to watch a football movie exclusively.
In recent years, the basic plate of sports enthusiasts has been shrinking. In the June 2017 issue of the U.S. Sports Business Journal, the median age of cable tv viewers in 25 sports was surveyed. The results show that as of 2016, only 5 of the 25 projects had an average age of audiences under 45 years old, while 16 projects were over 50 years old.
Among them, the median age of professional wrestling audiences reached 54 years; UFC and boxing reached 49 years old. What should have been a movement for young people has become the preserve of the elderly.
The reasons for this situation are complex and difficult to explain. But the shrinkage of the sports audience is directly reflected in the box office of the movie. When Rocky premiered in 1976, it grossed $117 million. It was also the heyday of boxing, with Ali, Fraser and Foreman on stage one after another. By 1990, the sport of fighting began to shift from pure boxing to mixed martial arts, and Rocky 5 was only $40 million at the box office. Considering inflation, the decline is not disastrous.
In addition to fighting, the highest-grossing sports film in the United States is 2009's "Blind Spot", which focuses on the rugby genre and grosses $300 million worldwide, of which North America contributes five-sixths. This number may represent the ceiling that traditional sports movies can reach.
Compared with Europe and the United States, where commercial sports are developed, China's related industries mostly pursue a national system and lack a popular base. Emulating the sports movie, it is more of a taste of Dong Shi Gong. Because of the lack of influential formal commercial events, "The Champion's Heart" had to arrange the story underground. For the audience, the strangeness is even heavier.
Even big productions can't avoid this embarrassment. "Guild Wars" and "Breaking the Wind" have Lin Chaoxian, Peng Yuyan, a class of famous directors and cass blessings, and the box office performance is only mediocre, not more than 150 million.
With "Wrestle It! The fire of "Daddy" has become a big year for domestic sports themes in 2017, and related films have appeared in groups, but few have succeeded. The total box office of "Who is the Ball King" produced by CCTV was 990,000, and "I Am Marbury" was 8.89 million. And the main basketball and Olympic themes of "Undefeated Ambition" and "Eighty Thousand Miles", the box office is only 13,000 and 23,000 respectively, I am afraid that even the crew's box lunch money can not be recovered.
The only domestic success story is "Shy Iron Fist". But its essence is a comedy with fighting elements, the audience walks into the cinema, the psychological expectations come from happy twists, and there is not much to do with sports.
Beyond borders, WrestleMania! "Daddy" is a rare sports film that can jump out of the genre in recent years, and it uses the topic of wrestling to conduct a comprehensive discussion of Indian politics, culture and even feminism, and has won nearly 1.3 billion yuan at the box office in Chinese mainland, and its global performance is only a few million dollars lower than "Blind Spot". It can be said that the emergence of this film has successfully widened the boundaries of sports films.
Times are changing, and the formula for the play of "passing the barrier" in the past is no longer valid. For sports films, widening the boundaries and using the shell of sports to talk about other social issues is the only way out. But this is bound to put forward higher requirements for the knowledge and understanding of directors and screenwriters.