After the brief "carnival" of the National Day, the mainland film market ushered in a state of silence for nearly one and a half months. Hollywood blockbusters with high hopes were withdrawn in turn, and domestic high-quality new films were scarce, making November, which has always been unpopular, even more sad. This state was not partially alleviated until the release of "Eliminating Violence" last Friday. The film was written and directed by Ho Leung Lau, a Hong Kong director, and invited two powerful actors, Daniel Wu and Wang Qianyuan, to sit in the town, and continued the well-known setting of "duel between two heroes" in Hong Kong films. Although the word-of-mouth performance of "Eliminate Violence" was poor, it still earned nearly 200 million box office in the first weekend, which was related to the distribution strategy selected by the actors in the early stage.
Under the setting of "Double Heroes",
What are the highlights and shortcomings of "Eliminating Violence"
Since November, due to the serious shortage of new films, the film market has been in a downturn for several weeks. At the worst, the daily box office once fell to 20 million. Compared with the same period in previous years, the box office revenue in November this year was the highest in the past seven years. On the one hand, the release of many new Hollywood films lags behind, and on the other hand, strong domestic films are scarce, which jointly caused the cold and cheerless situation of the film market in November.
It was not until the release of "Eliminating Violence" last Friday that the downturn in the film market was partially alleviated. In the early publicity, the film featured Daniel Wu+Wang Qianyuan. Although they cooperated for the first time, their chemical reactions were also expected by the outside world because they had played the roles of positive figures and villains for many times before. In the eyes of many viewers, the biggest attraction of "Eliminating Violence" was the duel between Wang Qianyuan and Daniel Wu.
In "Eliminating Violence", Daniel Wu plays a gangster, and once again assumes the villain role after "New never to lose", while Wang Qianyuan, who once played the villain image in films such as "Save Mr. Wu" and "Break the Bureau", takes a positive role as a criminal police in this film. Perhaps because he is familiar with the excitement of the audience, or perhaps because of his many years of experience in the Hong Kong film industry, Ho Leung Lau, the director of this film, deliberately turned "Eliminating Violence" into a "double hero" play in the early stage of his creation. In the film, he designed many gun battles and fighting scenes for the two of them, and the climax scene of "Bathroom Hand-to-Hand Fighting" is the best in the film, abandoning the "fake style" of the same type of films in the past and fighting from boxing to meat.
In recent years, Hong Kong-made films, including "Cold War" and "Warriors", have always continued the classic setting of "Double Heroes" and gained good market response. In "Eliminating Violence", Daniel Wu and Wang Qianyuan have also subverted their previous images to a certain extent, especially for Daniel Wu, who once again plays the role of a gangster. In the film, he appeared with a long head of mullet, and when he appeared, he was full of pique, and his gas field was fully open, which corresponded with Wang Qianyuan’s ferocity and courage, further strengthening the tension between them. With his previous creative experience in the field of police and bandits films, director Ho Leung Lau also devoted many hearty scheduling scenes in the first half of the film, such as "Fighting Banks" and "Confrontation between Police and Bandits".
However, in addition to the "two heroes" setting and scene scheduling, there are also some problems in the drama. For example, the film relies too much on action scenes and weakens the confrontation between the two people. Most of the time, the purpose of "communication" between two characters in different time and space is achieved through editing. Although the large-scale gun battle drama enhances the sensory experience, it also makes the story adapted from real events lose its documentary and unconvincing.
In addition, limited by the length of the film, although there are many hearty fighting scenes in "Eliminating Violence", in less than 90 minutes, the protagonist has been pushed away by the plot. As a director, Ho Leung Lau neglected to pave the way in emotion and details, which led to some plot logic that could not stand scrutiny. For example, many questions such as how the criminal police quickly knew that the gang committed the crime was the Eagle Gang and how the Eagle Gang handled the huge amount of money robbed were lacking. While immersed in the excellent acting and beautiful body of the leading actor, the plot paving and connection became the soft underbelly of "Eliminate Violence", which further led to the film’s average word-of-mouth performance after its release. On Douban, "Eliminate Violence" only scored 6.5 points.
Sink the market, announce the help,
"Eliminating Violence" uses high-profile films to make up for the disadvantage of word of mouth.
Although the word-of-mouth after the release was not satisfactory, judging from the announcement before the release of "Eliminate Violence", the excellent performance of the film at the box office on the first weekend can still be traced.
Content quality is often the key factor to determine the box office trend of a film, but how to maximize the commercial value of the film depends largely on the distribution and marketing methods of the film in the face of insufficient content or word-of-mouth failure. For "Eliminating Violence", the biggest selling point of the film undoubtedly comes from two powerful actors, Daniel Wu and Wang Qianyuan. For this reason, after the film entered the official announcement stage, "Eliminating Violence" released a number of two-person production specials and tidbits, and created hot topics in Weibo and Tik Tok, continuously increasing the volume of the film’s topics.
According to the Cat’s Eye Professional Edition, since November 20th, "Eliminating Violence" has been ranked first in the broadcast of materials (trailers, MVs, tidbits, etc.) for several consecutive days. On the Weibo, topics such as # Daniel Wu’s acting skills # and # Daniel Wu’s fighting bath towel don’t drop # occupy the forefront of the hot search list; On the Tik Tok, the topic of # Movie Eliminating Violence has accumulated more than 700 million times, which is more popular than the films released in The Sacrifice and One Second in the same period. Making full use of social networks to achieve the effect of topic communication is the first homework done in the early stage of the release of "Eliminating Violence", and it has gained a good response.
In addition, a week before the official release of the film, "Anti-Violence" also opened a large-scale screening in several cities. It is worth mentioning that, unlike previous films of the same type, the first round of screening of "Anti-Violence" covered a number of second-and third-tier cities, and all of them were concentrated in the northern region. In the past, the market performance of films such as Anti-drug 2 and Apostle 2 proved that the audiences of such Hong Kong-made films were mostly concentrated in the south, especially in Cantonese. The radical approach of "Anti-violence" can be said to be to find the possibility for the film to further break the circle on the premise of maintaining the basic disk.
Facts have proved that this point-and-shoot strategy selected by "Eliminate Violence" has also achieved miraculous results. According to the professional version of Cat’s Eye, in the first weekend, "Eliminate Violence" continuously gained more than 41% of the proportion of films, and the proportion of golden fields and attendance rate were also far higher than those of the films of the same period. Compared with other films of the same type, the box office revenue of "Eliminate Violence" in the second and third lines has also been significantly improved. It is precisely because of the good foundation laid by the previous screening that "Eliminate Violence" took the advantage of arranging films in advance before the word-of-mouth collapse, and finally the film won more than 200 million box office revenue in the first weekend of release.
Type film IP+ strength actor,
Hong Kong films become a good medicine to save the market.
All along, Hong Kong films are potential stocks in all periods. In 2018, the National Day film "Warriors" won more than 1.27 billion box office and became the biggest winner in the same period. "Anti-drug 2" released in the summer of 2019 has accumulated 1.31 billion box office, ranking among the top ten in the annual domestic box office list. Facts have proved that Hong Kong-made genre films usually have great appeal to the audience, and with the help of powerful actors’ wonderful interpretations, they can often achieve box office success.
Take "Anti-drug 2" released last year as an example. The film inherited the IP of "Anti-drug 2" released in 2013, which once revived the Hong Kong-made crime genre film, taking advantage of anti-drug elements to shoot brotherhood and a sense of rivers and lakes, and harvested 240 million box office in the cold season of November of that year; Since then, this IP has made a comeback, and Qiu Litao, the director of Hong Kong genre film geek, was invited to direct the film. Louis Koo, who just won the Academy Award the year before, continued to return to play the leading role and compete with Andy Lau, another actor. The "Double Heroes" duel between two established Hong Kong stars also became the biggest attraction of the film.
In addition to the attraction brought by the IP blessing of Hong Kong films and the confrontation between powerful actors, the reason why Anti-Drug 2 can attract the audience into the cinema lies in its excellent action scenes. Director Qiu Litao put the gun battles and car chases that were common in the past in different backgrounds for interpretation. In previous Hong Kong crime films, car chasing scenes were mostly staged on open roads, but in the climax scene at the end of Anti-Drug 2, the protagonists Yu Shuntian and Di Zang staged a thrilling car chasing scene in a closed subway station, and two cars shuttled through the crowded subway station, bringing amazing visual effects.
In the long-term studio practice, Hong Kong directors have accumulated a set of effective genre film techniques. Thanks to the excellent scene scheduling of director Qiu Litao, the tense action scenes of the film and the chemical reaction among the actors, Anti-Drug 2 has continued the success of its previous film, successfully captured more than 600 million box office in less than a week, and finally gained more than 1.31 billion box office revenue, making it one of the most outstanding Hong Kong-made films in recent years.
Conclusion
Despite the poor word-of-mouth response, with the pre-occupied film arrangement advantage, the box office performance of "Eliminating Violence" still made many people shine, and also made the market have more expectations for the subsequent Hong Kong-made films. Next, the audience will also see Shock Wave 2’s "money empire: The Battle of the Peak" and other Hong Kong films appear, expecting that there will be explosive films with both box office and word-of-mouth in these films.
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