According to the data of the National Film Fund Office, the national box office revenue of National Day movies this year was 1.567 billion yuan, which was 15.3% lower than the record of 1.85 billion yuan in 2015, showing the first negative growth in the box office of National Day movies in recent years. According to statistics, the total box office of this year’s summer file was 12.4 billion yuan, which was basically the same as that of the same period last year, but the total box office of domestic films was about 4.7 billion yuan, which was about 3.2 billion yuan lower than that of 7.9 billion yuan in the same period last year, down nearly 40%.
According to industry experts, the core reason for the box office "Waterloo" is the lack of "artisan spirit" in domestic films, and there is an extreme lack of well-made domestic "phenomenal" blockbusters this year. In recent years, the entry of a large number of hot money has also led to the impetuousness of the film market.
Funds have entered the film industry in a big way.
In 2014, Internet companies entered the film industry in a crazy and comprehensive way with the help of capital. From the previous small fights to the overall layout of the industrial chain, Internet companies rushed to enter the film industry.
According to the data of the Film Bureau of the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, 40% of the 29.6 billion box office in 2014 was contributed by the sales of Internet e-commerce platforms, which was 60% higher than that in 2013. Since then, the mode of internet and e-commerce network sales and online seat selection has begun to deeply affect the cinema business.
"The Internet economy enters the film industry, starting with sales. ‘ which started to rise in China in 2009; Group purchase ’ The website has become the first step into the film field. " Liu Jia, a film industry and market research expert and film publisher, told the Economic Information Daily reporter.
In 2014, the comedy "Heart Flower Road Release" was released and shown in the National Day file, and the ticketing cooperation between the film producer and the "Cat’s Eye" online sales platform became a landmark event for Internet companies to move from sales to distribution.
According to Wang Yibing, the producer of "Heart Flower Road Release", the cooperation between film and e-commerce is the exclusive pre-sale of movie tickets in "Cat’s Eye". The initial expectation is to sell 2 million tickets, with an income of about 670 million yuan. Finally, the pre-sale amount of 103 million yuan was actually completed.
Because "Cat’s Eye" pre-sold the film with a box office of 100 million yuan before the release of "Heart Flower Road", it made the film burst in the National Day file and finally earned 1.164 billion yuan at the box office, becoming the biggest winner of the National Day file. "The significance of this case lies in ‘ Cat’s eye ’ The pre-sale model has been verified by the actual market and achieved a successful Internet distribution model. " Wang Yibing said.
Cheng Yun, deputy editor of China Film Publishing House, analyzed the advantages of internet-based film distribution: the pre-sale box office model of online ticketing website can estimate the box office a priori; Can help the cinema to share the sales pressure, and even arrange all the tickets in the future; You can also get some subsidies and promotion resources from online ticketing websites.
"In addition, the ability of traditional film distribution companies to attract advertising sponsorship is limited, and the Internet can maximize the aggregation of resources. Therefore, ‘ Blockbuster+advertising brand sponsorship ’ The bundled marketing model has become the standard for Internet distribution. " Class into a cloud said.
The Internet has not only tried in the film distribution, but also broadened the channels for the film industry in terms of investment and financing. Shan Wanfeng, the training director of the film network, said that the film industry, as a creative industry, has fierce market competition and investment risks are difficult to control. In addition, it has no fixed assets that can be mortgaged, so financing is naturally relatively difficult. With the gradual deployment of BAT in the film industry, Internet capital has entered the film industry in a big way, and the combination of film crowdfunding and film and financial capital has gradually become the norm. More and more film companies choose to marry financial institutions to solve the capital problem in the production process.
In July 2016, Alibaba Pictures Group announced the establishment of a cultural industry fund with a target of 2 billion yuan, which became another landmark event of the Internet giant Nuggets film industry. In August this year, China films, Shanghai films and Happy Blue Ocean concentrated on the A-share market, which also reflected the enthusiasm of marriage between film industry and capital.
Capital "Kidnapping" Film Creation for Profit
After the entry of various capitals, the movie ticket market quickly copied the "burning money" model of market expansion such as taxis and takeaways. In the process of the Internet’s deep involvement in the film industry, its methods have gradually developed from low-price promotion to large-scale "ticket compensation".
Experts in the industry said that in the era of group buying, the low ticket price was still limited to lower than the non-member price of cinemas, but in the period of online seat selection, e-commerce giants with strong capital as the background fought a price war, and online ticket sales ranged from 9.9 yuan to 19.9 yuan to 6.8 yuan and 3.8 yuan. There has been an influential advertising slogan about selling movie tickets online: "There is no lowest movie ticket price, only lower".
First of all, the crowd attracted by the low fare of "ticket supplement" has not cultivated the habit of watching movies. Liu Jia said that attracting moviegoers with ultra-low fares is only a special means to seize market share in a short time. These people attracted by low fares are not real movie consumers. Once the fares return to normal, it is inevitable that they will leave. Cultivating more audiences is a comprehensive project, and ticket price is only one of them.
Secondly, the low ticket price without lower limit has impacted the cinema membership system. The design of each cinema membership system is based on the lowest ticket price of the issuing company, and online sales have a "ticket supplement". It is impossible for cinema members to buy tickets lower than that of 9.9 yuan on the Internet, so the carefully established membership system of the cinema will collapse. Not all cinema operators can feel the sense of crisis brought by e-commerce. Once the cinema relies on the e-commerce sales model, it not only loses the initiative of operation, but also the autonomy and characteristics of the cinema.
According to industry experts, the sale of ultra-low-priced tickets on the Internet can be very popular, which has a lot to do with the fact that China’s film industry is in its infancy. However, this kind of low-cost exchange of people to lock in the theater ostentation and extravagance has brought about a serious overlap and high homogeneity of the screening market in China. Due to the lack of development of film consumption for audiences over 35 years old, the mainstream audience tends to be younger, and the entry of the Internet intensifies the division between "hot and cold" schedules in the film market and the homogenization of cinema management.
Li Chun, an associate professor at the Film Institute of the Art Research Institute of China Communication University, said that the biggest drawback of the film market at present is "homogenization" — — Homogenization of products, distribution and projection.
Throughout this summer’s summer file, the film types are mostly limited to the content that domestic films are good at controlling: "light movies" with themes such as youth, campus and love, and the audience has been aesthetically tired. On the whole, this year’s summer movies failed to achieve the expected effect of activating summer movies, and the supply-side reform of China’s film industry has a long way to go.
Xiang Zhongping, a professor at Zhejiang Media College, said that in 2015, when the box office was at its peak, there were as many as 2,904 films submitted for record, more than 600 films were licensed and only 300 films were released. The large number of films, flat quality, weak appeal and communication competitiveness have become a major pain point for domestic films.
When the internet entered the film industry, it extended from testing the water to attacking the city and seizing land on a large scale, and the characteristics of crazy profit-seeking of capital became increasingly apparent. Many experts in the industry pointed out that the film market in China is extremely noisy today. It is an indisputable fact that the Internet, listed companies, private capital and other fields have flooded into the film market, and the capital is holding and kidnapping China films, and the films have become financial derivatives to a great extent.
Zhou Xing, a professor at Beijing Normal University, said that the result of many "hot money" entering the film market in recent years was to quickly ripen this market that was still in its infancy. The phenomenon of data fraud and buying box office occurs from time to time. There are fewer people talking about stories in the film and television industry, but there are more people talking about money and financing. Capital entering with the purpose of "making quick money" is likely to interfere with the production of film content, thus damaging the healthy development of the film industry.
In 2016, the release and screening of ip man 3 triggered a modest "earthquake" in the industry. Ip man 3, led by Kuailu Group, adopted the so-called "internet plus Finance+Movie" operation mode, which pushed the long-standing gray deviant behaviors such as "stealing the box office", "buying the box office", "ghost field" and "cashing in the capital market" to the extreme, and finally exposed bankruptcy.
According to the official notification of the Film Bureau of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, the film has a fake box office of 32 million, and the film has bought a box office of 56 million. The film bureau has given corresponding punishment to 20 cinemas and 73 cinemas under its control.
The famous director Xiaogang Feng said that a few years ago, a lot of "hot money" entered the film industry, and the development speed of domestic films was really very fast. This has brought new ideas to the film industry, but it has also brought many amateurs. Movies are not entirely business. If you read them completely according to business, you will read them askew.
"Content is king" is irreplaceable.
In 2015, China’s film industry has secured its position as the second largest film market in the world. However, due to the lack of supporting and exemplary benchmark works, the 2016 summer file failed to continue to write the summer box office miracles of phenomenal films such as monster hunt, Pancake Man and Return of the Great Sage in 2015.
According to statistics, in July this year, the total box office of cinemas nationwide was about 4.515 billion yuan, up 17% from the previous month and down 18.2% year-on-year, which was the first negative growth in the summer box office of movies in the past five years.
Recently, Alibaba Pictures issued a profit warning, and the net loss in the first half of this year exceeded 400 million yuan. Although it has been two years since its establishment, Alibaba Pictures has still not given a perfect answer in the field of film and television production. The large loss in performance led to the decline of Alibaba Pictures’s share price. As a representative of cross-border entry into the film industry, Alibaba Pictures relies on the big tree of the parent platform, but it has not been successful in content creation.
Industry experts pointed out that the direct reason for the year-on-year decline in box office this year is the "ebb tide" of ticket purchase subsidies. "Ticket supplement" is an important factor in the rapid growth of box office in recent years, and reached its peak in the summer of 2015. At the beginning of this year, the resource integration of major online ticketing platforms tends to be stable, the "ticket compensation" is reduced, the overall fare is rising, people’s consumption habit of relying on subsidies is broken, and new audience groups attracted by low fares are lost.
In January this year, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television specially convened a national film market management conference to carry out a 100-day special campaign to control the film market, focusing on solving the problems of inaccurate box office statistics, evasion and concealment, illegal recording and broadcasting of films, infringement of film copyright and poor screening quality in some cinemas. In the process of standardizing the market, the film "ticket compensation" is gradually reduced, squeezing out the bubble and making the market order more standardized.
In addition to the reasons for the decrease in "ticket compensation", experts pointed out that the core reason for the decline in box office is the lack of "artisan spirit" in domestic films, and there is also an extreme lack of well-made domestic "phenomenal" blockbusters this year.
From the word of mouth, more than 90 movies were released this summer, exceeding the total number of movies in the second quarter of last year, but the box office word of mouth has been weak. According to Aiman data, the average word-of-mouth score of new films released in the summer of 2016 is about 5 points. Among them, among 73 domestic films and co-productions, 42 are below 5 points, which means that the favorable rate of more than 57% domestic films is below the average.
Liu Jia said that despite the obvious advantages of the Internet platform, it still cannot change the law of the film industry — — Creativity and content are king, and it cannot change the core values of the film industry. What the audience experiences when they enter the cinema is a kind of cultural connotation, and the spiritual value and cultural value created by the film itself cannot be created by the Internet.
At the 19th Shanghai International Film Festival in June this year, internationally renowned director Ang Lee pointed out that China films should avoid two traps: grabbing money and following the trend. "It’s a good thing to stir up the movie, but we have to be aware of it. In the end, the audience looks at the quality that impresses them. The audience doesn’t watch MTV, he watches himself for two hours. Movies must have something to do with emotions, thoughts and feelings. It doesn’t matter whether the movie has technology to show off, as long as it talks about people’s hearts, it will get a response. "
