For the first time in four years, the box office of the Spring Festival file ＂Low-key Rich Man＂ and ＂Bear Haunted＂ declined instead of rising.
Author | Wei Xiaolin
alreadySome people began to regard the annual Spring Festival file "Bears Come and Go" as a measure:
"If the box office of a movie with a higher cost is lower than that of Bears, it can be said that it is a rush." This sentence is slightly ridiculous, but in the fierce competition of "no one dares to go to the Spring Festival file", the seemingly inconspicuous animated family movie "Bears Come and Go" is often the most stable player at the box office and word of mouth.
The same is true of "Bears: Wild Continent", which was delayed by the epidemic for one year. Although only 5.7% of the films were released on the first day, and it was also tightly packed by heavy productions such as Tang Tan 3, Hi, Mom A Writer’s Odyssey and Nezha Rebirth, in the end, Bears: Wild Continent still managed to survive with the fourth place in the box office during the Spring Festival, and became a low-key "invisible rich man" among many films.
As of February 21st, the seventh film "Wild Continent" in the series "Bears Appear" has exceeded 450 million at the box office, and the cumulative box office of this series of animation has also exceeded 3 billion, which has become a stable IP with a high lower limit among domestic family animation films, and has been praised by many film critics as "the power of one bear" and "the wall of masterpieces".
However, according to the forecast of the ticketing platform, as of February 20th, the estimated box office of Wild Continent was only 538 million, which not only failed to reach the box office height of 720 million in Primitive Times, but also failed to surpass the achievement of 610 million in Metamorphosis the year before. For the series "Bears Come and Go", this is the first time that the box office has fallen instead of rising after it entered the Spring Festival file.
In addition, in the case that the total number of animated films is limited, "Bears Come and Go" is also no longer the monopoly and infinite scenery in previous years. Compared with the previous "Bears Come and Go" which made constant efforts to increase the number of films in the late Spring Festival, this year’s "Wild Continent" will also face the dilemma of competing with "Nezha Rebirth" for the number of films, which also affected the box office of the works to some extent.
Can it be said that the "bear infestation", the "first IP of the country", will also usher in the "seven-year itch"?
From young age to family fun
Bear infested road to industrialization
While domestic filmmakers are still worried about how to industrialize movies, "the bear-infested universe next door has been built for a generation."
In the past eight years, "Bears Come and Go" has released seven animated films at the rate of one per year in the most competitive Spring Festival file.
In the animation film market with many variables, the stable output of one film a year is not common, which poses a great challenge to the animation industry.
And what is the core of animation industry? Liu Wei, the producer of The Return of the Great Sage, once suggested that the core of animation film industrialization should be people. On the one hand, this requires animated film directors to have a certain understanding and recognition of the industrialization process; On the other hand, the creation of talents has a cycle and needs to be tempered in the project, which requires both producers and directors to have enough tolerance for the younger generation.
By observing the credits at the end of the film, we can find that, in addition to director Ding Liang, who can’t be shaken by thunder, every big film "Bears Come and Go" is matched with another young director, which not only ensures that the creation is independent of individuals, but also cultivates new directors and speeds up the creation efficiency.
(Ding Liang, the father of "Bears")
At the same time, at the beginning of the project, Huaqiang Fante generally mobilized the team to come up with dozens of ideas, selected three or four best ideas from them, expanded them into a rich and complete story, and then started the subsequent creation.
"The whole content of Bear Haunted is the crystallization of teamwork, which makes the style of Bear Haunted not limited to individuals, but has the temperament of a team series." Producer Shang Linlin once said in an interview. Generally speaking, the production cycle of a bear haunt is about one and a half years, so as to ensure that a work is released every winter vacation/Spring Festival.
Efficient production does not sacrifice the picture quality. Take Wild Continent as an example. In the film setting, human beings can transform into 387 kinds of animals by genetic bracelets. Among them, Logger Vick alone can transform into six kinds of animals, which not only requires him to bind six sets of motion systems separately when making, but also poses greater challenges to details such as hair. It is said that a single animal has more than tens of millions of hairs at most.
In addition, in order to present the best opening scenery effect, the production team also used hundreds of millions of special effects particles in the opening paragraph, and the autumn red maple was beautiful.
("Bears: Wild Continent" animation opening)
Such fine production can not be separated from the development of computer technology of the team of Bears. Some media have made statistics. In traditional animated TV production, one person can do 6 to 8 seconds a day at most, while in three-dimensional technology, each person can do 16 to 18 seconds a day through module classification and data storage.
However, the industrialization process and increasingly sophisticated technology can’t hide the fact that the audience thinks that the early script of Bears is "immature". The accusation of "being young and young" in "Bears" has been widely discussed on the Internet and reached its peak in the "children’s animation contempt chain" in 2017. This view holds that parents with different income and education levels will "screen" different enlightenment animations for their children: children who watch Pleasant Goat and Bears are naturally different from those who grew up watching Disney and Piggy Page.
This proves once again that although the core audience of family animation is children, it is often parents who make audits and checks.
Being accused of being young and falling in reputation, "Bears Come and Go" is not an isolated case. In fact, even the theatrical version of Doraemon, which has a history of nearly 40 years, has faced the low reputation dilemma of being young, boring and naive.
In 2015, Doraemon: Heroes of the Universe in Nobita, with a plot of "Full Son", fell into a quagmire of word of mouth and became one of Doraemon with the lowest score in recent years. After learning from a painful experience, Doraemon released Daxiong’s Antarctic Ice Cold Adventure in 2017. With the mythical elements of Cthulhu and the narrative trick about time travel, it was not only affirmed by celebrities such as Joseph Kirschvink, Ichiro Kokuro and Okada Toshio, the founders of Snowball Earth theory, but also made hot searches on Twitter, becoming the most topical animated film in Japan that year.
As a children’s cartoon, the main audience of Doraemon has always been children. However, there are also many bridges in the works that can resonate with adults, which is also the enduring charm of the series in the past 50 years. In August 2018, the main creative interview of Doraemon proposed that "it should be a film that pays more attention to adult audiences than before". Subsequently, the release of three theatrical editions, Nobita’s Moon Adventure, Nobita and Treasure Island and Nobita’s New Dinosaur, revived this old IP and made it more popular.
This is also the path chosen by Bears. Based on a number of interviews with the main creators of Bear Haunted, starting from the fourth Bear Haunted in 2017, the main creative team began to consciously add "adult" plots to the works.
Taking Wild Continent as an example, one method adopted by the main creator is to add stalks that need certain social experience to understand. For example, Cheng Xuyuan, who is still working overtime with his computer in an amusement park, openly rents out scalpers of transformers. For children, it doesn’t hurt to understand, but for adults, they can smile after understanding.
(Cheng Xuyuan in the movie)
Secondly, in the plot, Wild Continent not only created an amazing animal world, but also was the first film in the series involving science fiction and artificial intelligence. For children, animation can satisfy children’s abundant imagination and lead them to become omnipotent animals; For adults, there are hidden worries behind the thriving prosperity of science and technology. How can people keep the simplest happiness in the face of artificial intelligence and excess happiness? This is undoubtedly a topic that adult audiences can better understand and care about.
Take Primitive Times, which is the highest box office in this series at present, as an example. Director Ding Liang once said that the creativity of the film comes from A Brief History of Mankind by Israeli writer yuval harari. In this animated comedy, children can not only enjoy vivid action jokes, but also learn about the historical origin of human civilization, especially human culture and entertainment with their parents.
The deeper approach is to impress children and parents at the same time with family elements such as father and daughter, mother and child. In Wild Continent, the story of the scientist’s father Lotte and his sick daughter made many viewers shed tears for this fathers and daughters. In the previous interview with producer Shang Linlin, she mentioned that "Bears Come and Go" is gradually increasing such emotional scenes every year, which resonates with adult audiences.
According to a set of data provided by Huaqiang Fante, the proportion of young viewers watching the film "Bears" is increasing year by year, and has already exceeded the 20% mark.
"When other countries are busy with the rise, the series" Bears Come and Go "has quietly made the domestic family fun animation to the extreme." A netizen commented on Douban.
Behind the box office inflection point: is the bear infested IP also aesthetically tired?
A proposition that all longevity IPS can’t escape: You have grown six, how can you grow the next one?
Since 2014, Bears have released seven films. However, this year may be the first year that the box office of Bears Appears has declined since it entered the Spring Festival. According to cat’s eye data, as of February 20, the estimated box office of Wild Continent was only 538 million, which was not only inferior to 720 million last year, but also failed to exceed 610 million the year before.
Judging from the film arrangement rate of the three bears, the film arrangement rate of Wild Continent in 2021 was only 7.8% at the peak, and it gradually declined and remained at around 6.5% after three days of release. Compared with the film arrangement rate of 9% and 10% in 2019 and 2018, such a film arrangement rate is hardly satisfactory.
Generally speaking, the volume of animated films in the Spring Festival file is certain. If the average number of people in the film is high, there is also the possibility of box office counterattack. Judging from the attendance rate, Wild Continent’s attendance rate is basically the same as that of Primitive Times, and it is almost the same as that of Metamorphosis, except that the attendance on the opening day is slightly lower than that of the previous film, and its performance is relatively stable.
For the series "Bears Come and Go", the number of films is reduced and the expected box office is reduced. What may be the problem?
First of all, this may be related to the generally high ticket prices for the Spring Festival this year.
According to the daily economic report, the average fare for the Spring Festival this year is 36.5~50.2 yuan, and the average fare on the first day of the New Year is 49.2 yuan, which is 8.8% higher than the 45.2 yuan in the same period of the Spring Festival in 2019.
The ticket price of "Bears Come and Go" is rising. According to the data of Cat’s Eye Professional Edition, the average ticket price of Metamorphosis was 36.8 yuan in 2018, 40.9 yuan in Primitive Times in 2019 and 45.9 yuan in Wild Continent in 2021.
The sudden increase in ticket prices may not only discourage the audience who originally planned to watch 2-3 movies, but it is not surprising for parents who often take 2-3 children to watch movies together. Although some cinemas may open parent-child fields with relatively low ticket prices, the ticket price for watching Bears is still higher than in previous years, and it is not surprising to give up watching movies when they have other entertainment alternatives.
At the same time, compared with 18 years and 19 years in the field of animated films, "Bears Come and Go" met a strong competitor who is also an animated film this year-Nezha Rebirth, which pursues light animation. Created by the original crew of White Snake Origin, this film tells the story of Cyberpunk-style Nezha’s rebirth, with excellent visual effects. At present, Douban scores 7.2, ranking second in the reputation of Spring Festival films. In contrast, the Douban score of Bears is only 6.6. For some viewers who only plan to watch an animated film during the Spring Festival, it is also reasonable to choose Rebirth of Nezha with a better reputation and give up Bears.
Judging from the arrangement of the two films, although the arrangement of Bear Haunted was always higher than that of Nezha Rebirth, with the fermentation of the latter’s word of mouth, the arrangement of Nezha Rebirth by the cinema gradually rose, and Nezha pursued after Xiong Da Xiong Er. During the Spring Festival, the number of times the cinema arranges for animated films is generally limited, and the appearance of "Nezha" actually squeezes the scheduling rate of "Bears Come and Go" to some extent. In the past few years’ Spring Festival files, The Bear Haunted has monopolized about 10% of the films, but this year’s first day of Spring Festival files, The Bear Haunted+Nezha only got 10.8% of the films.
At present, it is very unlikely that Wild Continent will boost the box office by word-of-mouth fermentation in the later period.
Some film critics have pointed out that although it is normal that the proportion of the three protagonists in each film "Bears Come and Go" is different, in this work, the proportion of the three leading characters Xiong Da, Xiong Er and Logger Vick is seriously unbalanced, and the important character Xiong Da "disappeared" for a long time except at the beginning, and reappeared at the end.
In addition, the over-emphasis on the theme of "affection" makes the development of the series "Bears Appear" somewhat "self-repeating", such as Metamorphosis in 2018 and Wild Continent this year, which are all about the affection between father and son.
From this point of view, under the pattern of this year’s Spring Festival, which is full of experts and "one super and many strong", it is unlikely that "Bears haunt" will achieve a counterattack by word of mouth. However, from another perspective, from 2014 to now, Bear Haunted has been rooted in the Lunar New Year file and the Spring Festival file for many years. From the IP point of view, it has completed the schedule and audience cultivation, and has become one of the "traditional Chinese New Year projects" of domestic family animation films. For many parents, it has become a deep-rooted movie-watching habit to take their children to watch Bears in the New Year.
For the team of Bears, a small box office failure in 2021 may be an excellent opportunity to adjust creative ideas and adapt to the ever-changing market.
Logger Vick fell down many times, but when he got up, he always said, "I’m going to chase my dream!" " The same is true for the IP of Bears.
References:
1. Digital Entertainment DreamWorks, "Bear Distortion Meter" 560 million broke the domestic young animation record, and family fun will be redefined? | Interview with Guang Huaqiang
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/LBSPAbrvo0S1Usr-orqNpA
2, three entertainment, "China animation film industrialization, what is the core? 》
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/6e4eLu0FoPF7DXgOxB4H4Q
3. Zhihu, what do you think of the statement that "Doraemon animation is getting younger now"? Cristaldo’s answer
https://www.zhihu.com/question/380382819/answer/1313692020
4. Animation Economics. How did Bears Come and Go become the most profitable animation in China?
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/1HsoUxEJJcv5oJZJdK4T4A
5, BFA moves, who knows bears better than him? | Special topic
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