Image source @ vision china
Wen | Eye Entertainment
Compared with the cinema Spring Festival file whose box office has exceeded 8 billion, what is the less noticeable online movie Spring Festival file?
In terms of works, it is booming.
Being regarded as the masterpiece of domestic martial arts movies in recent years, "Overlooking No One 2," the cinema turned to the net, and Douban scored 7.2, which directly caught up with a large number of popular movies in the cinema;
The action film Black and White Stealth, starring Andy On and Ceng Zhiwei, has won more than 10 million box office in four days, and its original old Hong Kong flavor has been evaluated by netizens as the spiritual sequel of Underworld and Infernal Affairs.
Produced by Zhang Yibai, "Coming is Coming" has a cast including Liao Fan, Tong Liya, Qiao Shan, Fan Wei, Du Jiang, Bao Beier, Daxun Wei and other stars, which is so luxurious that it doesn’t look like making a big movie.
During the Spring Festival, a total of 15 new films were released online, exceeding the number of cinemas in the same period. Since Iqiyi, Tencent Video and Youku jointly launched the first online movie Spring Festival in 2021, online movies have generally had the concept of schedule with cinemas.
2023 is a relatively special year.Online movies and cinema movies show opposite trends in development.For example, the offline cinema has picked up overall, and the box office has triumphed all the way; The development of online movies is not as good as before, and it is inferior to 2022 in many aspects.
On the other hand, in the Spring Festival file, four cinema films were withdrawn, and almost the whole box office of the Spring Festival file was rounded up by the remaining four films; On the other hand, various types of movies have emerged on the online movie side, and the overall quality is higher than that of the previous period, but it still got an opposite ending at the box office, namelyThe better the content, the worse the box office.
2023 Online Movie Spring Festival File
Before the official arrival of the Spring Festival in 2024, this year’s online movie Spring Festival file was expected by the industry, thinking that it could sweep away the overall decline of online movies in 2023.
On February 4 th, the solo "Black and White Stealth" was launched in Youku, and it won the top spot in the sub-account list on the first day of release. Since then,For four consecutive days, he won the champion of daily accounting, and on the fourth day, the box office exceeded 10 million.It is considered to be a hot performance in the market.
Like the cinema distribution, the heavyweight projects with more market competitiveness are concentrated in the outbreak of the Spring Festival file.
In 2024, the online movie Spring Festival file presented two characteristics. One is quality. Among the works launched in February, in addition to the above-mentioned "Overlooking No One 2" and "Coming", there are suspense comedies "Five Feet Detective" starring Pan Changjiang and Fan Shaohuang, action-packed films "Suit Mob" starring Chen Guokun and Miya, and "Running God of Wealth 5" and "Siping Police Affairs" of the IP "Running God of Wealth" series hatched by NetUniversity.
"Big Star" and "Old IP" have built the advantage selling point of this year’s online movie Spring Festival file, and the overall quality is higher than the previous two sessions.Some movies, such as Black and White Stealth and Impersonal 2, have completely broken away from the audience’s inherent cognition in many dimensions, such as art composition and script design, and are not inferior to cinema movies.
Another feature of online movies in this year’s Spring Festival is diversification. The diversity here has two meanings: on the one hand, compared with the monopoly of comedy in the Spring Festival this year, the Internet University is more inclusive of the theme type itself; On the other hand, in 2024.The video platform has also begun to learn the idea of "drama as a theater" and create different types of platform features in the field of Internet.
Among them, Youku aimed at the elements of Hong Kong films, with the first launch of Black and White Action as the core, and planned a one-stop broadcast of Hong Kong films in this year’s online Spring Festival file, covering dozens of new and old Hong Kong films in seven categories.
Iqiyi Sword refers to the field of martial arts and action, with Xie Miao, Wu Yue, Andy On and other Mesozoic action actors as the team, creating an "action master season". The first four action movies, Stop the Horse and Take the Sword, Defiant 2, Fight Evil and Stranger Knife, cover martial arts, modernity, crime, opera and other elements.
Objectively speaking, on the supply side, online movies are superior to the past in terms of the richness and quality of film types, but ultimately reflected in the market is not satisfactory.
Among them, the case of defiant 2 is more representative. Previously, the release of "Arrogant" in 2022 was a great success, and Douban scored 7.1, which earned a total of 29.76 million box office in iQiyi.
Therefore, during the release of its sequel "Arrogant 2", I once had the idea of going to the cinema. On January 13th, 2023, the official announced that "Overlooking No One 2" would be shown in cinemas, and the sequel would be developed from online movies to cinemas. But in the end, I decided to participate in the 2024 online movie Spring Festival file, which was broadcasted by iQiyi alone.
In publicity, including the help of iQiyi, this sequel has invested more publicity resources than the first one. But as a result, it was not until February 18th that the official Weibo announced that the box office had exceeded 10 million after it was released on the first day of New Year’s Day. At this time, the Spring Festival holiday was over, and it was an extravagant hope to surpass that year’s achievements.
The experience of "Arrogant 2" is only a microcosm of the overall situation of online movies in 2023.
Online movies, hanging in the air
In 2023, the online movie market did not pick up with the liberation of the epidemic, and there was even a big gap in box office performance compared with the previous two years. According to the statistics of Cat’s Eye Professional Edition,In 2023, only 29 online movies broke through 10 million, compared with 49 in 2022 and 50 in 2021.
This is mainly due to changes in the market environment. Since the promulgation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Film Industry Promotion Law in 2017, online movies have become the mainstream of market recognition, but it is undeniable that online movies and cinema movies have always occupied two markets separately.
Since the birth of online movies, its basic disk has always been a "differentiated content" market that overflowed at the cinema. For example, Jianghu films or horror films with different themes, comedies or cool films with more direct feelings.
butThe rise of miniseries in 2023 directly extended their hands to the basic disk of Netbig, and they were similar in entertainment functionality, which led to a large number of users flowing to the miniseries market.
This makes the Internet University fall into an embarrassing situation. Compared with cinema films, it is not as excellent as cinema films, and its distribution channels are limited to several platforms, and its influence is far less than that of national cinemas. In contrast, it is not as direct as miniseries, and it has a greater cost advantage and can put more resources into the publicity side.
Online movies, hanging in the air.
The collapse of the Spring Festival in 2023 is a concentrated expression of the embarrassing situation of online movies.
The action movie "Blind War" created by the production team Yun Shuifang was broadcasted alone on the iQiyi platform in 2022, and reached the top of the annual box office champion with a cumulative box office of 33.02 million in that year. In this year’s Spring Festival file, the action movie "Evil" also launched by the team currently has only 7.793 million at the box office of iQiyi, with an account of 4.91 million. According to the official disclosure of the film, the entire film production investment is 15 million yuan.
What should I do with online movies? At present, it seems that only self-help is available.
First of all, it is certain that online movies can’t go back to their old ways and attract audiences with exotic themes.
On the one hand, according to the data in 2023, it seems that internet users have become desensitized to the themes of thriller, disaster, monster and grave robbery. Previously, the first works of the IP series of "Snake" and "Xing ‘anling Hunter" had achieved admirable results in the online market, but their more well-made sequels "Snake 4" and "Xing ‘anling Hunter 2" were all smashed in 2023.
On the other hand,The platform changed its previous support attitude, forcing Netbig to embark on the road of sophisticated innovation and use content to feed back platform traffic.
On December 18th, last year, iQiyi announced that since January 1st, 2024, the online movie billing mode will implement new cooperation rules, and the revenue of all members who have exclusive cooperation in premiering movies and the revenue of premiere movies of Cloud Cinema during the membership billing period (SVOD) will be adjusted from "long billing on time" to "long billing on time". After adjustment, the online movies exclusively launched on the iQiyi platform, during the billing period, members watched for more than 10 million hours, more than 6 million hours and less than 6 million hours, and the corresponding 10,000-hour ladder billing prices were 3 yuan, 2 yuan and 1 yuan, respectively, and the final total box office was the sum of the income of each ladder.
Divide the accounts in a long ladder on time, which means that how much the film will benefit will be completely decided by the audience, and the platform will not bear any risks.
This is not good news for many online film teams that have just made some achievements in the exploration period. Their previous relationship with the platform will be completely invalid. Not only will their works not be supported by the high-scoring bill price given by the platform, but each work will have to start from scratch, and they must also bear the risk that "long-step accounting on time" may lead to greater losses.
To make matters worse,After the platform withdraws its support for online movies, it will invest in other film and television fields, especially the emerging micro-short drama track.In a sense, they are supporting their opponents.
For online movies, the box office results of the Spring Festival in 2023 undoubtedly released a bad message, and the industry must find a competitive point between cinema movies and miniseries as soon as possible to make efforts and seek a breakthrough.
In 2021, more than 40 new online movies were released, more than 20 were released in 2022, and only 15 were left in 2021. If the situation continues to deteriorate, the online movie Spring Festival in 2023 will not only be the best quality, the lowest box office, but also the last one.