Sad people!
How can the movie market get better?
◎Secretary of the round head
darkest hour at the box office
On March 24 this year, the total box office in mainland China fell below 10 million yuan, which was the lowest single-day box office in the mainland in ten years.
Until the Qingming Festival a few days ago, the situation still did not improve much, and even the two films "Moonfall" and "The New Batman", which had high hopes in the industry, failed to save the scene.
"There are no movies in theaters, and there are movies that no one sees" has become a fact to some extent.
In the past three years, the global film industry has faced a huge crisis, and the upstream, middle and downstream links of the film industry have been greatly affected, and the epidemic factor is of course the first to bear the brunt.
In China, theaters in closed-off areas cannot operate and theaters in other areas have low attendance rates. It has become the new normal. Theaters struggling to survive often choose to raise ticket prices in specific schedules to "recover blood", but this practice of exhausting water and fishing has led to audiences watching movies. A further reduction in demand triggers a vicious circle.
Although the relevant departments have also introduced a series of measures to stabilize ticket prices, as the end of the entire industry, theaters are the first to face an existential crisis, and it is helpless to raise ticket prices.
At present, cinemas across the country are no longer able to survive by selling movie tickets and snacks.
As a result, many cinemas have begun to curate their own projects or cooperate with other curatorial institutions to increase audience stickiness and cope with the lack of cinema films.
For example, the French film exhibition to be held at the Broadway Film Center, the Italian film exhibition with the theme of art museums held by CGV Studios, etc. These exhibitions are undoubtedly beneficial to the audience in first-tier cities, but in terms of scale, they can only be regarded as self-help measures. , For the entire cinema system, it is nothing short of a drop in the bucket.
Get together with the issuance risk of the big period
Due to the poor market environment and box office performance, films in the midstream have entered a long-term wait-and-see state, resulting in a backlog of many films and a sharp decrease in the number of cinema films.
Many films choose to gather large schedules in order to obtain the box office bonus brought by the cluster effect, but such choices often further increase the risk of distribution:
On the one hand, there may be deviations in the selection of schedules. For example, Han Han's new film and "The Four Seas", which talks about urban and rural issues, appeared in the Spring Festival file, which made many audiences call "too frustrated". Although the quality of the film may not be too bad, but It is far from the audience's attributes and expectations for the Spring Festival "family fun", which has caused a huge impact on word of mouth and box office.
In the whole Spring Festival stalls, there is hardly a live-action movie that can be "happy" with the family. For most audiences who want to have a good time in the theater, it is undoubtedly a mental burden, and it will also have an impact on the overall box office.
On the other hand, getting together in a certain schedule is very likely to face uncertainties brought about by the epidemic, which will lead to delays in the release, resulting in a further backlog of films to the next schedule. An embarrassing situation where time runs out.
In fact, since 2022, 8 domestic films have been withdrawn from mainland theaters, including "Hidden in the Dust", which was shortlisted for the main competition unit of this year's Berlin Film Festival.
We have also seen a large number of videos in the 2022 Spring Festival video clips that skip the May 1st file, the summer vacation file, and the National Day file and directly set the 2023 Spring Festival file. This is undoubtedly a kind of unusual but in line with market rules. The phenomenon.
These phenomena show us a certain psychological expectation of the film industry, not to mention whether the film industry can survive the dry state for a whole year, the complete fading of the audience's viewing habits, and a new round of retaliatory price hikes by theaters. Inevitably.
Investment is tightening
"Bad films" take advantage
After the theater chain and distribution are facing huge challenges, film production as an upstream industry will inevitably be implicated, film investment is increasingly tightened, and blockbuster films have shown a shortage from the source.
In the past year, only the main theme movies can really get sufficient funds, which has also led to the concentration of domestic movie capital and themes, and the supply is relatively single.
Due to more cautious investment, there are fewer and fewer popcorn "blockbusters" in theaters, and comedy films are ridiculously rare: As of April, the only real comedy film in theaters this year is "This Killer Is Not Calm", although The quality is worrying, but it has harvested more than 2.6 billion box office, which shows the high entertainment demand of the audience.
In this case, there are also some "bad films" customized by schedules to take advantage of the situation. During Valentine's Day, the film party will definitely enter the theater and release the "inventory" that cannot be taken out, including the Douban score that hit a record high. With an ultra-low score of 2.8, a large number of viewers bluntly said that they even felt a strong sense of being defrauded after watching it.
This kind of film has caused the audience's enthusiasm for watching movies to fade again quickly, and the theater has to become a "catcher" again.
There is also a factor that cannot be ignored, that is, cinema movies often lack real observation of reality (although it may be a realistic theme), and they often avoid talking about "problems", and instead are complacent under a certain way of life.
The life of Bourgeois described in some films is tantamount to a castle in the air for the vast majority of cinema audiences, and it cannot reach more audiences in terms of content, so it cannot form a larger-scale word of mouth and box office.
Cinema movies have become a "light luxury" option
From the audience's point of view, the reasons for their reluctance to enter the theater are also obvious: on the one hand, the so-called "experience" brought by the theater has not changed much in the past few years (it has even declined due to lack of maintenance), and the industry lacks the ability to upgrade. Capital and motivation; on the other hand, the audience's wallet is getting tighter, and ticket prices are actually increasing.
Under such a "scissors difference", cinema movies have become a "light luxury" option among many entertainment possibilities to some extent.
From a global perspective, the gradual disappearance of this necessity is not unique to China: with the boom of streaming media, online variety shows and drama series have begun to erode the cinema market, and both capital and talent are flowing to the market. The media is getting closer, and this year's Oscar-best film "The Listening Girl" was bought by Apple TV+ and distributed globally through its online platform is a good example.
The Marvel series, which is the "golden sign" of the North American theater chain, has also begun to turn to series in recent years. From last year's "WandaVision" to this year's "Moon Knight", we have been able to feel it very clearly Marvel's creative center began to shift toward streaming.
This is not only a response to the long-term closure policy of theaters under the epidemic, but also a response to the audience's latest media habits.
Under such circumstances, the reduction in audience demand for theaters is irreversible.
In fact, for today's audiences, the catch-all slogan "content is king" has become very outdated, and the so-called "good content" defined in the traditional sense is no longer enough to bring audiences back to the theater - in "everyone" Today, “content” occupies the user’s time overwhelmingly. The Internet, streaming media, and even short videos are attractive enough, even more complete and abundant. In the past, it took a movie and two hours to obtain it. Now you only need to watch a short video or read an article on an official account, and these media spread even wider and faster, and the public discussions that can be triggered are also greater and greater.
really tell the public,
can truly belong to the public
In the face of such new challenges, the film did not lose the necessity of its existence, but it lost a lot of ground.
The industrial upgrade is imminent. This kind of upgrade should not only stop at the level of hardware iteration, but more importantly, it is the idea of regeneration: what exactly does a cinema movie bring to the audience?
What is it that the small screen and streaming can't replace?
This is the problem facing literature after the rise of cinema more than a hundred years ago, and the problem facing cinema after the advent of television decades ago.
Now, the development of the medium once again requires the film industry to return to the indestructible nature of film and cinema.
Among them, the audiovisual experience is one of the most important aspects.
Interestingly, corresponding to the depression of cinemas and the collapse of cinema films, it has always been the popularity of major domestic film festivals. Whether it is a world-class new film or a classic old film, the situation of hard to get a ticket has never changed.
This means that the quality of the film itself remains the most important factor for the audience.
Although cinema films place more emphasis on commodity attributes, finding a cultural and spiritual connection is crucial for audiences in any era, which not only requires the production capacity and screening level of the film, but also the creators. There are higher requirements, the era of blindly stacking special effects has ended both subjectively and objectively, and "Assassination of the Novelist" should be a swan song.
In this regard, the best domestic films are actually cartoons.
How to give audiences a cinema-level experience, Chinese animation creators have made great efforts. For example, "The Lion Boy" was released in theaters at the end of last year. Whether it is extremely fine design, smooth storytelling, or a certain depth All the screenwriters show the extremely high industrial level of domestic animation.
If there are plenty of these, it should only be a matter of time before the movie gets back to the starting line.
In addition, if streaming media brings a private or private experience, empathy on the screen that can be obtained without watching it with others, then the most important thing in theaters is synchronicity and non-private attributes.
Only works that truly speak to the masses, belong to the masses, and inspire discussion can bring films and theaters back to life.