Wen | Zero One
With the announcement of China Ping-Pong Jedi Counter-Strike on New Year’s Day and the announcement of King of the Sky on May 1st in 2023, the lineup of this year’s Spring Festival file has been basically determined as the following seven films: Wandering Earth 2, Unknown, Manjianghong, Deep Sea, Exchange of Life, China Ping-Pong Jedi Counter-Strike, Bears Come and Stay with Me, Bear Heart.
The number of seven blockbusters is basically the standard for the Spring Festival in recent years. In 2021, the seven Spring Festival movies were Detective Chinatown 3, Hi, Mom, A Writer’s Odyssey, The Order to Serve the Gods, Crowd Surging, New Gods: Nezha Reborn and Boonie Bears:The Wild Life; There are 8 movies for the Spring Festival in 2022: Watergate Bridge of Changjin Lake, This Killer is Not Too Cold, Miracle Stupid Child, Bears Coming Back to Earth, Four Seas, Sniper, Pleasant Goat and Big Big Big Big Wolf Out of the Future, Little Tiger Pier Hero, but Little Tiger Pier Hero only won 10 million box office.
Before the official arrival of the Spring Festival file, what content features can be seen in the film lineup of the Spring Festival file in 2023? Who is the main force that people expect, and who has the possibility of becoming a dark horse?
Judging from the box office expectation, all previous Spring Festival files can basically be divided into two types of "players":
One is the type with higher box office lower limit. Movies with high popularity in the early stage or clear selling points are mainly composed of "seed players" in the schedule or the dominant themes of Spring Festival files such as comedy and youth animation, and the pre-sale situation is good. The former is Detective Chinatown 3’s Watergate Bridge of Changjin Lake, while the latter is represented by the series This Killer is Not Too Cold and Quiet and Bears Appear.
The second is the type with high uncertainty. "Dark horse or accompanying running" is possible. Before the official release, it is difficult for both the audience and the market to predict its final box office trend. Even if there are stars or IP guarantees, it is difficult to be a guarantee in the ever-changing Spring Festival market. Winners are like The Wandering Earth in those days, and losers in the market are like "Order to Serve the Gods" and "Four Seas".
Among the seven films scheduled for 2023, the main "stability factors" in the market are Wandering Earth 2, Exchange of Life, Bears Come and Go with Me and Bear Heart.
Judging from the popularity before the screening, there are many industry forecasts that have already booked the champion of the Spring Festival for Wandering Earth 2. Compared with the first film, Wandering Earth 2 obviously has more abundant funds and more appealing IP. In addition to Jason Wu’s continued return, Andy Lau, Li Xuejian, Ning Li and other powerful factions joined in the cast; Judging from the trailer, the plot of the second part will have hardcore sci-fi thoughts, human nature speculation and special effects scenes at the same time. It is worth looking forward to how director Frant Gwo and producer Liu Cixin will continue to explore the depth and Chinese expression of sci-fi stories.
When it was released in The Wandering Earth in 2019, the audience and the market didn’t have high expectations for domestic sci-fi, with only 11.4% of its first-day screening, ranking fourth at the box office in a single day, and only after the first wave of word-of-mouth was released did it become the biggest dark horse of the year. Just when the audience thought that The Wandering Earth would be the clarion call for the rise of domestic sci-fi blockbusters, the same year’s Shanghai Fortress directly buried domestic sci-fi. In 2022, the sci-fi theme "Tomorrow’s Battle" and "Mozart in Outer Space" performed in general, while the selling point elements of Moon Man with higher box office focused on Shen Teng and comedy types.
It is precisely because the development of domestic hard science fiction genre is basically at a standstill in the next few years in The Wandering Earth, so the market expectation of Wandering Earth 2, which was the first to announce the Spring Festival in 2023, has been further raised. On Cat’s Eye and Taobao Film, Wandering Earth 2 ranks first in the Spring Festival.
Exchange of Life is the only film featuring comedy in this Spring Festival. The comedy genre has always been the "just need" of the Spring Festival file, and it is also the easiest field to "be small and broad". I don’t need to go into details about Hi, Mom’s historical dark horse counterattack. The killer is not too cold and quiet, but it steadily won 2.5 billion+box office with a general cast and a low reputation. In fact, it highlights the audience’s hard-core demand for comedy. As long as it can make people laugh, comedy has great potential in the Spring Festival market.
Judging from the trailer of "Exchange of Life", it is basically a comedy effect with fantasy elements guiding the wrong position, which is actually a major stream of comedy type creation in recent years. The female director Su Lun’s last film "Living Together in Time and Space" won about 900 million yuan at the box office at a small and medium cost. As long as the plot of "Exchange of Life" is above the passing line, I believe this film will achieve good box office results in the Spring Festival of 2023 as a "comedy".
There is no need to analyze the stability elements of "Bears Come with Me". In recent years, the series "Bears haunt" has never missed the Spring Festival stalls, and has steadily taken away more than 500 million box office every year. In 2022, "Bears haunt and return to the earth" is close to 1 billion. This series has succeeded in the continuous creation of IP, and from the perspective of Bears Coming Back to Earth, its production level is becoming more and more refined with the improvement of investment level, which is likely to broaden the audience from the children’s market.
On the other side of the stability of the market, naturally, there are those movies that are more likely to have "upper and lower limits" at the box office. At present, Man Jiang Hong, Unknown, China Ping-Pong’s Jedi Strike Back and Deep Sea can all be classified into this part. The popularity before screening is high and low, and each has its own unique market selling point. However, none of them has the stable "market main force" expectations like this year’s Wandering Earth 2, last year’s Watergate Bridge and Detective Chinatown 3 the year before last.
Directed by Cheng Er and starring Tony Leung Chiu Wai and YiBo, The Unknown should be the movie with the highest box office uncertainty in this year’s Spring Festival. As the main theme film produced by Bona Film, the theme of Shanghai spy war and Tony Leung Chiu Wai attracted a group of audiences, and as the first new film produced by director Cheng Er after "The Romance of Death" in 2016, it attracted another group of audiences. The fan effect brought by starring YiBo constituted a new basic disc-in short, it seems that there are different opinions, but the specific communication effect is still unknown.
Director Cheng Er’s last commercial film "The Romance of Death" failed to reach the expected box office. Thanks to a group of movie stars such as Ge You, Zhang Ziyi and Tadanobu Asano, it only earned 122 million box office, which made Huayi Brothers suffer a major defeat that year. The Douban score of Romantic Death is still 7.7. It is a film that is highly praised by fans, but it is obviously dragged down by the impression of "art film" in its dissemination, which has affected the box office performance. Therefore, in the trailer of "Nobody", the film side directly typed the Chinese characters of "super commercial film", which is a bit of a trick, and may also include the idea of reversing public expectations.
But in the end, what kind of Cheng Er’s works will the audience see, whether it will be closer to the market public or personalized artistic expression, and it is difficult to draw effective conclusions only from the current material information.
The box office expectation of "Man Jiang Hong" is also quite different in the market. On the one hand, the main creative lineup assembled by this film is one of the best in this Spring Festival file: director Zhang Yimou has returned to the theme of historical costume, starring Shen Teng, Jackson Yee, Zhang Yi and Lei Jiayin, almost all of whom have made outstanding box office achievements in the past, and Shen Teng, Zhang Yi and Jackson Yee are among the top ten cumulative box office of Chinese actors. At present, the number of people who want to see this film ranks second in Cat’s Eye and third in Taobao Film, and the popularity before screening is still relatively high.
But on the other hand, everything is full of variables about whether this suspense story about Yue Fei’s costume, which tells four years after his death, fits with the Spring Festival file, how high the public’s acceptance is, what role Jackson Yee, who is murderous, and Shen Teng, who has his own comedy atmosphere, plays.
After Shadow in 2018, director Zhang Yimou’s film style has gradually changed from paying attention to the heavy expression of visual color and sense of ceremony in the past to being plain. One Second’s Above the Cliff and Sniper are all slowly telling stories instead of grabbing people with "scenes", but what new exploration China will make in film art in Manjianghong is worthy of the attention of fans.
At present, Deng Chao and Yu Baimei’s "China Ping-Pong Fight Back" has the lowest popularity before screening in the Spring Festival of 2023, while Cat’s Eye and Taobao Film are at the bottom. Previously, the narrative of domestic sports themes represented by Leap was lacking, and almost all of them were modeled narrative and characterization, so it was difficult to gain obvious advantages in the cinema market, especially in the highly competitive Spring Festival file; But on the other hand, telling the reversal story of table tennis in China in the 1990s, The Jedi Strike Back of China Table Tennis actually has a certain "popularization" function. Many ordinary audiences think that China table tennis has always been ahead of the world in cognition, and this film may be able to do propaganda articles in this respect.
The animated film Deep Sea was very popular in the previous summer file, and this kind of all-age animation type may also be more suitable for the summer file. As a work that Tian Xiaopeng, the director of The Return of the Great Sage, will shoot all his life, Deep Sea has declared its "visual wonders" highly shocking since the release of the first trailer, with its unique picture style of ink particles and magnificent and colorful fantasy marine world texture. The animation’s outstanding performance in the visual mountain can already be guaranteed, but how it performs as an original script can only be verified after it is officially released.
However, in terms of market share, in the past few years, from the Spring Festival to the summer in Legend of Deification, the box office of Rebirth of Nezha, a light-chasing animation, was tepid, and only the box office of Bears has been rising every year. No full-age animation has achieved more than 1 billion box office results in the Spring Festival. "Deep Sea" will stand out from the box office in the Spring Festival, and I’m afraid it needs to reach the level of surprise like that in The Wandering Earth.
Conclusion:
In 2022, the operating rate of cinemas once fell to the bottom, and returned to the peak of 90%+ in the New Year’s Day schedule with the change of epidemic policy, and the movie-watching traffic recovered obviously in the past month. The Hollywood blockbuster Avatar 2 played a preheating role in this "recovery period".
In this year, the cinemas that Emperor UA couldn’t hold back have been eliminated, and the surviving cinemas certainly hope that the next Spring Festival file will be as hot as possible. Therefore, on the road to the recovery of the cinema film market, the Spring Festival file in 2023 is the first "hard battle".
The menu is ready. Will you pay for the China film this Spring Festival?
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