The tenth part of the "Fast and Furious" series was released today, even in recent years it has become more and more dependent on the IP effect, and the sequel development is commonplace in Hollywood, and there are really only a handful of IPs that can be filmed until the tenth part, but "Fast and Furious" has done it. Some time ago, Vin Diesel revealed at the press conference that "Fast and Furious 10" and "Fast and Furious 11", which were originally set for the upper and lower parts, may now become a trilogy, that is, this series may have to be filmed until the twelfth.
It has been twenty-two years since the first "Fast and Furious" came out in 2001. In the space of twenty-two years, "Fast and Furious" has produced ten films and one spin-off, and its update frequency is so intensive that it is comparable to the "New Year Movie" model of many animated theatrical versions to some extent.
But this is just the surface, in fact, the development of this IP is not at all as stable as the theatrical version of the movie, nor is it like Marvel has a front-end "cosmic" strategic concept, but a gradual continuation of Hollywood's classic "trilogy" thinking. It may be terminated in many stages, but in the end, it can be continued because of its long-lasting gold-absorbing power.
For the Chinese market, the "Fast and Furious" series is also an important player in the rapid expansion of the film market in the last decade. Until now, four of the top 20 films introduced in the domestic market are from the IP of "Fast and Furious", which is the best. However, in the past, it could be used as a trend culture vane for young domestic audiences, and time has passed, even if it has maintained a high-density update, it is difficult to resist the tide receding.
For a new generation of young Chinese film audiences, if traditional scenes like "car colliding" are no longer eye-catching, what will they be obsessed with? Whether it is an imported film or a domestic film, it is necessary to think about this topic.
What kind of movie series can make the tenth film?
In Hollywood, where the film industry is relatively mature, the development of series has always been a very important commercial option. However, most of the films that can be developed into a series of movies and achieve great success are mostly adaptations of existing IPs, rather than original scripts. According to statistics from The Numbers, from 1995 to 2014, of the 12,545 movies released in Hollywood, 5,703 were adapted from IP, accounting for 45.5%, but occupying 52.94% of the market.
"Fast and Furious", which can shoot the tenth film, is an exception, it is not based on any IP, and it is just a low-cost B-grade film at first.
The director of the first film, Rob Cohen, and producer Neil Cohen H. Moretz and starring Vin Diesel's original intention was to make a secret service film full of extreme sports elements, including various elements such as speeding cars, surfing, and skydiving. But Universal rejected the proposal, reducing it to just drag racing, and investing just $38 million — even though Vin Diesel and Paul Walker weren't stars at the time, the budget was stretched thin even for special effects and action scenes.
But it is such a crude low-cost original film that sold for $140 million in North America, and the sales of subsequent DVDs and other products are even more popular. This also made Universal Pictures realize the potential of this IP.
It's just that the good times did not last long, and the first three films developed with the thinking of the classic Hollywood "trilogy" came to the first node to be ended after the third "Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift" encountered box office Waterloo. Justin Lin, the Chinese director who took over this series for the first time, took the racing elements to the extreme, introducing many shots of professional racing drivers drifting, but the market did not pay for it.
The rebound came from Vin Diesel, who had left the "Fast and Furious" series at that time, and his star path in Hollywood was not smooth, and he always had a mediocre response after taking on many blockbusters in a row. It wasn't until he returned to the "Fast and Furious" series as a producer that the IP was finally reactivated. This film, which was Chinese translated as "Racing Storm" at the time, has begun to take the "Fast and Furious" series to go farther and farther away from racing.
Fast and Furious 4
Market feedback proves that the path that "Fast and Furious" should take is not a sports film that races between cars, but an action film that shuttles through various dangers through the carrier of the car - the success of the fourth part has brought follow-up concoction, star lineup, investment budget has been repeatedly increased, so that sports cars can continue to play new tricks, fighting different battlefields on land, sea and air, and the box office has also risen.
The same pattern has been repeated, and it is only a matter of time before the audience's fatigue point arrives, but the sudden death of core star Paul Walker breaks the normal life cycle of this IP.
From the perspective of the script, the withdrawal of the core protagonist from the story is bound to bring great harm to the core setting of the entire story. But from the market level, the outside world's recollection of Paul Walker objectively helped "Fast and Furious 7" to the peak of the entire series, which is a trend that is difficult for other sequel movies to replicate. In the end, "Fast and Furious 7" swept the global box office with a total of more than 1.5 billion US dollars, and still ranks eleventh at the global film history.
"Fast and Furious 7"
Although the follow-up "Fast and Furious 8" has become tired, the box office in North America fell by more than 33% compared with the previous game, but it still gained $1.238 billion in the global market with strong inertia. But inertia cannot last forever, and after being forcibly renewed by "Fast and Furious 7", the IP will inevitably go downhill, and you need to make other plans.
Just when the "Avengers" series is sweeping the world at this time, the new idea of "cosmos" has completely broken the thinking inertia of Hollywood's "trilogy", and suddenly a number of Hollywood IPs have begun to test the water "cosmosity", naturally including "Fast and Furious". So before "Fast and Furious 9", Universal first opened the idea of spin-off movies. In addition to Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham's "Fast and Furious: Special Ops", Netflix also launched a sub-animated series "Fast and Furious: Agent Speeder" to try to find a new direction before the IP declined.
But the result is still unsatisfactory, and the box office of the spin-off movie is not even as good as "Fast and Furious 6". Therefore, Universal had to return to the main line and try to replace the "old wine" with a "new bottle". But after the first eight films where imagination has constantly broken through boundaries, "Fast and Furious 9" can only be "derailed" if it is added. The plot of "equipping a sports car with a rocket launcher and flying into space" caused ridicule from the audience, and word of mouth fell to the bottom of the series.
Looking back at the development history of the series, it is not difficult to see that "Fast and Furious" is a combination of multiple stages, and after the downward trend of each stage appears, there are always new opportunities to drive IP restarts. But in addition to the accidental factor, there is also an inevitable part of this IP to be evergreen - to make the type element to the extreme.
"Speeding car scene" is an almost necessary heavy scene in Hollywood action blockbusters, and it has been tried and tested for decades, but it has been "purified" to the maximum extent in "Fast and Furious". For genre films, genre is a tool to help audiences screen films that meet their tastes, and the ultimate presentation of genre elements in the "Fast and Furious" series allows audiences who enter the theater with such viewing expectations to always obtain maximum satisfaction, and it is naturally not difficult to understand the reason for its evergreen box office.
In addition, the stable and high-frequency update frequency in the past 22 years has also maintained a very high fan stickiness. Since the fourth installment in 2009, it has maintained a frequency of updates every two years, even in the face of the epidemic. Compared with other evergreen IPs such as "007", "Mission Impossible", "Transformers", etc., "Fast and Furious" is undoubtedly the least alienated from the audience in these years. And if you choose to finally launch a sequel like "Avatar" after eleven years, there will be a large gap in the core audience, which will eventually make the box office less than expected.
Therefore, although "Fast and Furious" is difficult to return to the peak at the box office and word of mouth no matter how it is filmed later, as a rare evergreen IP, the methodology shown in its development process is still worth learning.
What wonders do the new generation of young people love to see?
"Compared with Hollywood superstars, teenagers still prefer to watch two cars collide, and the superstar's salary is as high as $20 million." In the book "The Inside Story of the Hollywood Film Economy", a Sony Pictures marketing executive said,
The formation of this conclusion came from the 2003 confrontation between "Hollywood Major Crime Unit" starring Hollywood superstar Harrison Ford and the then unknown "Fast and Furious 2". The former features Hollywood superstars in a 30-second TV commercial, while "Fast and Furious 2" only features a car burning and colliding. In the audience survey before the release, the audience was far more familiar with "Hollywood Major Crime Unit", but at the time of the national premiere, "Fast and Furious 2" grossed $50 million, while "Hollywood Crime Unit" only 11.1 million.
"Hollywood Major Crime Unit" "Fast and Furious 2"
This was not only applicable to American teenagers, but also to the psychology of Chinese young people at that time.
Although street racing is actually just a youth subculture that emerged in the United States during the millennium, there are almost no racing movies familiar to domestic audiences except for a comic book "Head Text D". But ever since the Fast and Furious series moved from racing to speeding action blockbusters, the spectacle has become a cross-cultural, world-sharing entertainment option.
Private cars began to be popularized in China around 2002, and for young people at that time, the affection for cars and the significance of the trend symbols given to them began to spread. It was in this context that "Fast and Furious" was introduced domestically. In 2009, "Fast and Furious 4" was introduced, which meant that the first three racing-themed "Fast and Furious" were completely skipped, and the fifth part coincided with the best work in the series, giving the first impression of the Chinese audience.
At the same time, the same "Transformers" with cars as the main visual element was also popular, and the first film in 2007 won 281 million at the domestic box office, and since then it has alternately set a box office record in the domestic film market with "Fast and Furious".
If overseas audiences pay for "Fast and Furious 7" based on Paul Walker's emotional bonus, then this is difficult to explain on domestic audiences. The fifth and sixth films only achieved 251 million and 413 million box office in the mainland, but by the seventh part, they suddenly jumped to 2.423 billion, becoming the first film in Chinese film history to break 2 billion at the box office. This shows that there are a large number of incremental viewers who are not fans of the series, who only stepped into theaters at this stage, and they did not have an emotional basis for Paul Walker.
The real reason is that "Fast and Furious" at that time, like Hollywood blockbusters such as "Transformers" and "Avatar", represented a trend belonging to young people. If someone doesn't go into the cinema to watch such a movie, it almost means that he has been abandoned by the trend.
And most Hollywood movies today have obviously lost the ability to equate with trends, gradually limiting themselves to the point of relying on fan feelings to pay. The Easter eggs about past films that appear repeatedly in "Fast and Furious 10" are a symptom of this path dependence. Poison Eye counted the change in the proportion of users under the age of 30 in the "Fast and Furious" series since the popularity of Internet ticket purchase, and there has been a decline of 8%-12% on both platforms. Considering the objective decline in the box office volume of these films, it can be seen that the number of young audiences has lost seriously.
The nearly 4 films of "Fast and Furious" want to see the age change of users
Taking the well-known theatrical version of the movie "Detective Conan" series as a synchronous comparison, 2018's "Executor Zero" accounted for 79.3% of users under the age of 30 who wanted to watch Maoyan, while "Halloween Bride" released at the end of last year still maintained 73.5%, a very limited decrease. Moreover, its proportion of users under the age of 20 can reach 27.7%, which is far from the 10.5% of "Fast and Furious 10", and it is almost impossible for this age group to be the earliest "sentimental" audience of these IPs, so the difference in data also clearly highlights the qualitative gap between the two in terms of attraction to new young audiences.
Not to mention "Journey to the Bell Buds", released this year, it can almost be said that it is the only remaining "young audience harvester" in the current film market. Among the users who want to see Maoyan, the proportion of users under the age of 30 has reached 79%, and the proportion of users under the age of 20 can even reach 35.5%. In addition, similar to "Fast and Furious", the proportion of users who want to see them are all men is more prominent.
Age distribution of users of "Lingya Journey" Source: Maoyan Professional Edition
But whether it is Makoto Shinkai's series or "Detective Conan", they are actually providing wonders, and both have a trend of paying more and more attention to spectacles.
Providing spectacle is originally one of the core functions of the movie. When the Lumière brothers screened "The Train Comes In" in 1895, simply recording a clip of the train entering the platform could make the audience escape the theater. Today, too, there is no bigger reason to drive audiences to theaters rather than online, than the spectacle that cinema audiovisual equipment can provide.
"Train Comes In"
It's not that young people don't love spectacle anymore, but what type of spectacle they need and how they present it has quietly changed in the minds of a new generation of audiences. Ten years ago, it would have been hard to imagine that young people would abandon "car collisions" and become more interested in "vermicomes that cause earthquakes." Perhaps, similar to the luxury car, a material symbol of rapid popularization in the era of economic take-off, for this generation of young people with gradually rich material conditions, but with higher spiritual needs, it seems that it is not as important as the truly fantastic and magnificent spiritual imagination.
Although the changes mentioned are all imported films, the enlightenment obtained also applies to domestic films. The objective gap between the domestic film industry in technology and overseas has become smaller and smaller, but how many of the domestic films that are willing to provide wonders are really interesting to young people and have the ability to equate with the "trend" in the eyes of young people? If the film continues to lose the ability to lead the trend, then the further growth of the film market in the future will naturally be impossible.