Special feature of 1905 film network In the first week of its release, the movie "The Man Caught by Light" did not exceed 60 million at the box office.
In the case of the first day of filming accounting for 28.6%, it was still upstaged by Sky Fire and Sheep Without A Shepherd. The single-day box office on December 15th was even surpassed by Frozen, which was released for three weeks, and Game of the Brave 2, which was released for 10 days.
On the fourth day of the release, the single-day box office had no momentum, and the number of films dropped lower and lower, which had dropped to 16.8% on the 17th. The industry’s latest box office forecast for this film is only 84.534 million.
Starring Bo Huang, Wang Luodan, Tan Zhuo, Ke Bai, Huang Lu and others, it is also the first work of Huang Bo’s new director support plan. It has been highly anticipated since it was set up. Even because of its high-concept overhead setting of soft science fiction, many people compare it with The Island directed by Bo Huang. Even if it doesn’t reach 1 billion box office, it should get a relatively good result. Obviously, today’s results do not meet the expectations of the public in the early stage.
Perhaps the greater the expectation, the greater the disappointment. The Douban score of "The Man Taken Away by Light" dropped from 7.8 points to 7.1 points, and the score of the ticketing platform was not satisfactory, so it was difficult to drive the follow-up box office.
Coincidentally, a similar situation occurred in the movie The Whistleblower, which was released last week. Compared with Xue Xiaolu’s previous films, the film has the same lineup and is also a transnational theme. However, compared with the 520 million and 780 million achievements of the first two "Seattle", this one obviously failed to meet everyone’s expectations.After 11 days of release, the box office totaled 48.55 million, and it is expected to stop before 50 million.
According to the marketing data, as of December 15th, Whistleblower has released 41 video materials, which have been played for 3.25 million times. A total of 26 video materials were released in "The Man Caught by Light", which was played 5.931 million times. In addition, the creators of the two films also actively participated in roadshows, which won enough exposure for the films.
Why do these two commercial films, which have such a luxurious lineup and top publicity, collectively fall short of expectations?
Is there a threshold for watching movies?
On the eve of the release, when the directors of the two films were interviewed, they seemed to have expected the market reaction today.
Xue Xiaolu once said,"The audience will look not to understand? I am also quite embarrassed, but in fact this type of movie is really not the first one. "Run Nian Dong told us directly,"I don’t really expect much from the market. I hope the audience can go to the cinema to see this movie, but" The Man Caught by Light "is not a movie to please the audience."
It can be seen from the words of the two directors that these two films have certain thresholds for the audience.
After The Whistleblower was released, many people were curious about its title. What exactly is a "whistleblower"? Tan Fei, a film critic, spoke on Weibo. "The English of Whistleblower is estimated to be known by many people in the English context, but it is almost a completely unfamiliar vocabulary in the Chinese context. It is too difficult for the audience to understand it at a glance."
"Whistleblower" refers to the disclosure system of insiders, and a person has to fight against a huge organization alone. In September this year, the State Council first proposed to establish a "whistle blower" system in China.
Faced with such a brand-new concept, the film failed to make the audience understand from the initial publicity, and the synopsis of the follow-up film was also unclear, which eventually led to the audience never finding a position for the film.
In fact, in recent years, there have been many similar incidents in China. Ordinary people reported their voices through real names or through the Internet, which finally led to some investigations. From this perspective, The Whistleblower should be a film with realistic theme. If it is put in the present, it can completely benchmark Dying to Survive and other films, and it has the opportunity to make the audience empathize.
However, in her creation, director Xue Xiaolu seems not only to tell a simple story, but to fulfill her own ambition as much as possible."The Whistleblower is a crime suspense movie with a classic Hollywood narrative in the 1990 s, and now even Hollywood doesn’t make such a movie."
In the end, the two leading actors, as "whistleblowers", have many flaws in their settings. In order to help them "wash the white", the plot is constantly reversed for the sake of reversal. The whole film is like a ball of wool, which is getting more and more chaotic, making it difficult to find a clue. More importantly, the film also integrates many types of elements such as crime, suspense, action and love.
Obviously, this book will not be a relaxing and entertaining cool film.
The same is true of the movie "The Man Caught by Light". The story tells "After a white light, all the people who have love are taken away. What should those who stay do?" From the story level, there are not many problems. Many viewers said after the screening that "the story is good" and "the concept is good".
How should this film be defined from the genre level? Science fiction is inappropriate, and love seems to be insufficient. It is more like a type mentioned by Chen Kexin — — A "relationship film" is a film about the relationship between people. Run Nian Dong also indicated in the interview that,"In addition to love, a large part of the film wants to discuss the relationship between people and between people and society. I feel that the emotions before people are not so simple, and they are largely influenced by family and social concepts. "
Obviously, this is a work that I hope can arouse the audience’s post-reflection thinking. "I actually don’t know if this kind of thinking will make the young audience uncomfortable or stimulate them." Run Nian Dong tried to put his sincerity into the film. "The film is 130 minutes long, and I began to worry a little, but considering that all the emotions inside it need to have such a length to digest."
What the director was worried about happened after all. The emotional content that the film hoped to convey did not introduce extensive thinking. On the contrary, many people thought that the whole was just "concept first", which led to the continuous decline of the film rating.
Audience-centered system?
We are used to talking about the director’s authorship, and even the creators flaunt themselves from time to time with Hou Xiaoxian’s idea that "the creation should be back to the audience". However, the bottom line of Hou Dao’s statement is that he is confident to recover the cost of the film through other channels, which makes him care about the box office income to some extent.
Are most directors ok now? Maybe you need to draw a question mark.
In the interview, we found that most directors would say, "First of all, make sure investors don’t lose money." Then, for any film operating under the business model, its basic attribute is commodity, box office is the most direct way to express its value, and the audience is the economic person who produces the box office. The so-called grounding gas when creating, "ground gas" refers to the preference of the public.
"Whistleblower" or "The Man Caught by the Light" are all good projects in terms of conception, and several leading actors have also contributed very brilliant acting skills, which are not inferior to the films of the same period.
These films are all under the banner of realism, but in the end, they didn’t make the audience empathize like Dying to Survive and Better Days, largely because they deviated from the audience from the director’s personal expression in creation.
On the other hand, Sheep Without A Shepherd, a film of the same period as The Man Caught by the Light, understood the audience’s watching rhythm, and grasped the audience’s emotions through the parents’ feelings for their children in the film, thus achieving a box office counterattack and becoming the first dark horse in this year’s Lunar New Year file.
Of course, we don’t blindly hope that the creators will pursue the audience-centered system in the future, but hope that they can be closer to the market, think more from the audience’s point of view and avoid self-satisfaction.
Shell Financial News (Reporter Bai Haotian) On September 26, Avita’s medium-sized SUV Avita 07 was officially listed, launching two models of pure electric and extended range. The price of the pure electric version is 229,900 – 289,900 yuan; the price of the extended range version is 219,900 – 279,900 yuan.
