The total box office of the 2024 National Day file (October 1-October 7) is finally fixed at 2.1 billion yuan, which is basically in line with the industry's previous expectations for the box office of 2 billion yuan.
According to the "2024 National Day Film Market Insight Report" (hereinafter referred to as the "Report") released by the Lighthouse Research Institute, the box office on the first day of the National Day file was 490 million yuan, reaching the highest single-day box office of the National Day file in the past three years, but the box office trend failed to continue in the following days, with an average of 1.19 views per capita during the period, and ninety percent of the audience only watched one film during the period. Compared with previous years, the box office of this year's National Day stalls is not outstanding.
Is the performance of the National Day file a prominent signal of changes in the current film market?
A movie poster displayed in the lobby of the Capital Cinema in Beijing on October 4. Photo by Xinhuanet Yan Yuxin
1 Who walks into the cinema?
"The proportion of 35+ viewers in the Chinese film market has risen for many years, and this year it has risen to nearly one-third." Zhang Jin, a data analyst at Lighthouse Professional Edition, said that in recent years, the demand for family movies has increased significantly, and films with educational significance, such as "Volunteers: The Battle of Survival" with the theme of patriotic education, and "Thirty Thousand Miles of Chang'an" with the theme of cultural education have achieved outstanding box office results.
Among them, the box office of "Volunteers: Survival War" exceeded 800 million yuan during the period, ranking first in the National Day file, and the report shows that 21.9% of the audience is three or more people watching the movie together, and many parents take their children into the cinema to learn about this history.
In addition, the proportion of female ticket purchases for the National Day stalls is nearly 60%, an increase compared with 2023. Among the 10 films released, the user portraits of "Road to Fire", "749 Bureau", "Only This Green", "Big Head Son and Little Head Dad 6: Mini Adventure" and "Pipiru and Luxisi's 309 Dark Room" are all female.
2 Weakened head effect
The reporter noticed that compared with the first "Volunteers: The Battle for Survival", "The Road to Fire" and "749 Bureau", which ranked second and third in the National Day file, received 358 million yuan and 356 million yuan at the box office respectively, which was broken compared with the same period in previous years. Compared with the top films of this year's Spring Festival file "Hot and Hot" and "Flying Life 2", as well as last year's "All or Nothing", "Disappearing Her", "Fengshen Part 1" and other box office of two or three billion yuan, the head effect is also weak.
Xiao Nan, deputy general manager of Zhejiang Times Cinema, believes that the phenomenon of film schedules in 2024 is more prominent. 10 films will be released on this National Day, the genre is relatively scattered, small films are piled up, stock films are piled up, and although the number of films is large, the driving effect is not strong. "At this stage of the development of the film industry, there are abundant entertainment methods competing with us for consumers' time," Xiao Nan said.
Some industry insiders believe that the quality of some of the top films in the National Day file is not as good as expected is the key factor: "Only high-scoring word-of-mouth films can trigger the long-tail effect, prompting the cinema film tube to do long-term screenings." Xiao Nan believes that in any case, the quality of the film has always been the driving force for the continuous stability of the box office.
3 Segment to find new space
Looking back at this year's film market, comedy plots and crime themes still have a wide audience. The box office of "Hot and Hot" in the Spring Festival file is nearly 3.5 billion yuan, which is the first in the annual list, and in the first half of the year, "Removing the Three Evils in the Week", "The Siege of the Kowloon Walled City", and "Catching the Doll" and "Silent Killing" in the summer file have achieved good box office results.
Zhang Jin analyzed that word-of-mouth masterpieces with realistic themes are still box office potential stocks, "I look forward to more realistic themes that come from society, are close to real life, and have emotional resonance." ”
The market segment shows a new space for development, and people are more interested in watching movies with "different themes" and "different ways of expression".
For example, "Only This Green" is a unique existence of this year's National Day file, the movie adapts the dance drama to the rhythm and style of the big screen, with zero dialogue throughout the presentation and visual effects with oriental charm, bringing the audience a Chinese aesthetic experience. According to the report, the film has the first comprehensive reputation in the same schedule, and the audience has a strong willingness to watch it twice.
Mr. Zhu, who watched the movie with his children, told reporters that "Only This Green" shows the whole process of "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains", one of China's top ten famous paintings, from conception to birth. "Every frame is very shocking, and it also allows children to feel the charm of traditional culture."
The animated film "White Snake: Floating Life" has also attracted a large number of Chinese comic lovers, and since its release on August 10 this year, the box office of the entire summer has accumulated nearly 400 million yuan, breaking the cumulative box office record of Chinese film history Qixi cartoons.
"At several roadshows, I have seen that some of the audience are very familiar with each other and feel that they should have been here many times," the film's director Li Jiakai mentioned, "Some viewers will also come to us to discuss the details and plot of the work, and this interaction has given the main creative team a huge momentum to move forward, and I cherish this feeling very much." ”
Unexpectedly, documentary films also killed a "dark horse". "The Sinking of the Lisbon Pill" went from the audience's ignorance and ignorance at the beginning of its release to the follow-up continuous hot searches and box office counterattacks, with more than 40,000 people scoring a high score of 9.3 on Douban.
"There is a lot of stamina," said Ms. Zhao, who watched the movie, "It is an 'exception' in the fast-paced life, and we will always need such a sentimental recorder." The film broke the cumulative box office record of domestic documentaries in the past five years, and as of October 9, the box office has reached 41 million yuan.
Poster of the movie "The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru".
Some film practitioners said that people's emotional value and aesthetic value are more diversified now. "It's getting harder and harder to make phenomenal films that the whole people pay for. There is no movie that the whole people can watch, so it is necessary to subdivide the crowd and movie-watching, and find growth points in the diversified movie-watching demand. ”
Si Ruo, a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at Tsinghua University and director of the Film and Television Communication Research Center at Tsinghua University, reminded that films targeting vertical and segmented markets must control their budgets. "The audience size is focused, and the layout needs to be made after a good estimate, and the risk of market segmentation is not low."
4 Why does the audience pay?
Ms. You, who used to frequented the cinema, recently felt a little "not worth it". "Now it's not like I'm going to the cinema for an actor or a director, I'm going to wait for an objective and real movie-watching experience." She said, "After all, I don't want to 'run out of people and money', so I bought a ticket and wasted two hours in vain." ”
Indeed, people's movie-watching consumption habits are changing, and more and more people need to "let the bullets fly for a while".
The lighthouse survey also shows that the film's real word-of-mouth, light-heartedness, and topic resonance are becoming more and more important for movie-watching decisions, while "poor word-of-mouth" is the primary factor hindering movie-watching, followed by "cliché content" and "unattractive story".
Si Ruo observed that in terms of the movie-watching trend in the past one or two years, the development of attributes of cinema films in addition to the movie itself is very important, such as social attributes, parent-child attributes, topic attributes, etc. "Some films that are closely related to social hotspots and have interactivity are loved by young people, but the attraction of some superficial film stunts and heavy industrial effects has weakened."
Taking this year's summer hit movie "Catching Dolls" as an example, the movie is about the family disputes between two generations around the "no hard work" and "all for your good" education, and it takes the route of comedy and comedy. According to the data of Lighthouse Professional Edition, the box office of the film exceeded 1.5 billion yuan in less than 6 days, and finally won the summer champion with a score of 3.25 billion.
On October 7, citizens collected tickets at a cinema in Jiaxing City, Zhejiang Province, to prepare to watch the movie. Xinhua News Agency (photo by Jin Peng)
However, high topics do not always become box office elixirs, and social hotspots sometimes accurately step on the "thunder point". This year, some films that are close to the plight of reality originally wanted to attract moviegoers through hot topics, but judging from the final data, they did not work, and netizen evaluations were also polarized.
Xiao Nan believes that as a theater company, in order to attract more young people to enter the cinema, it is also necessary to iterate the viewing experience from the technical side. It is mainly reflected in the improvement of naked-eye 3D, high frame rate, and immersive sound effects, so that the audience has a stronger sense of substitution and a more unforgettable visual experience for the movie content.
Movie derivative consumption, animation millet (millet, the homonym of the English "Goods", that is, comics, animation, games, idols, special effects and other copyright works derived peripheral products) and other movie derivative consumption are loved by young customers, and also let theaters see the possibility of more revenue in addition to box office revenue.
Xiao Nan said that peripheral goods and themed restaurants will also become an important source of income for the film industry, which will prompt film producers and distributors to pay more attention to the building of film brands and the development of derivative products, so as to achieve the diversified development of the film industry.
Rao Shuguang, president of the China Film Critics Society, said that the current Chinese film market is undergoing unprecedented and irreversible structural changes. "The market is changing, the audience is changing, and filmmakers must adapt to changes and open up new space in order to find new impetus for the development of films."
Xinhuanet (Main writers: Wan Fang, Yan Yuxin, Zhao Yujiao)