The public may have perceived that this year’s Spring Festival stalls are longer than in previous years.
Compared with the end of the Spring Festival in previous years, the film market will be taken over by imported blockbusters around the Lantern Festival. This year’s Lantern Festival and even the beginning of March, the box office market is still dominated by Hi, Mom (hereinafter referred to as "Li Huanying") and Detective Chinatown 3 (hereinafter referred to as "Tang Tan 3").
Chinese box office data show that on the Lantern Festival in 2021, the box office market reached 262 million, up 43% from the previous month, and the performance increased by about 20% compared with the Lantern Festival in 2019. However, the market still maintains the pattern of Spring Festival stalls. Li Huanying contributed 44.6% of the box office by itself, followed by Tang Tan 3, but the box office accounted for only 16.52%.
It is worth noting that five movies were released on the Lantern Festival, but only one movie with a large volume, Warner Bros. classic animation IP "Cat and Mouse" movie. The film won 28.86 million box office on the day of its release, and was quickly overtaken by the old Spring Festival film Crowd.
As of the time of writing (around 19: 00 on February 27th), the proportion of film arrangement is about 10%, which is far from Li Huanying, Tang Tan 3 and other old films in terms of box office volume and film arrangement space.
Obviously, judging from the volume of films released at the Lantern Festival this year, the film market does not attach importance to this festival. The fifteenth day of the first month, as the end of the Spring Festival, is hidden in the long tail heat of the Spring Festival file.For a long time, the box office market has been very vague about the concept of "Yuan Xiao dang". When the movie market is busy, it can barely be regarded as a schedule, and when the market is cold, it is an ordinary working day/weekend.
This year’s Lantern Festival is an ordinary Saturday. It should be noted that this disappearing Yuan Xiao file in 2021 is not only the indifference of a small festival, but also seems to indicate the loss of the entire imported film market.
The coldest Lantern Festival in history?What we should really worry about is the cold period after the Spring Festival.
The film market after the Spring Festival stalls has experienced a long cold period, but this year’s cold period of the Spring Festival stalls is even more withered than in previous years.
According to the data of Cat’s Eye Professional Edition, after 7 movies were released during the Spring Festival, 9 other movies were welcomed in the movie market in February, but most of them were domestic films for one-day trips. Among the five films released in the Lantern Festival, except for the imported cartoon Tom and Jerry, which caused a splash in the market because of IP awareness, no one cares about other films such as Suburban Birds’s "Agent Mommy". In the two days after the Lantern Festival, no new films were released in the market, and a batch of old films continued to harvest the market during the Spring Festival.
This situation is somewhat miserable.Throughout the Lantern Festival in the past five years (2015 -2019), although there is almost no schedule effect on this festival, it has never been taken seriously by the box office market. However, the Lantern Festival occasionally coincides with the weekend or is close to the Valentine’s Day file, which is often the end of the "monopoly" of Spring Festival movies and the beginning of new films entering the movie market.
In fact, the Lantern Festival is not a regular schedule, and a fixed wave of new films has not yet formed in the market. For example, the Lantern Festival in 2016 falls on Monday, which is a normal working day, and there is no public holiday. There are no new films released this year, even before and after the Lantern Festival.But when the festival is in the right time, it will have a small-scale scheduling effect.
For example, the Lantern Festival in 2018 falls on a Friday, and eight new films are released on the day of the festival. Among them, imported films such as Peter Rabbit and Uncle Monkey of Little Loli in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri are released, officially announcing that the import market has begun to exert its strength. Since then, the Oscar season and popular IP blockbusters in the imported market will enter the market one after another.
The Lantern Festival in 2019 is also a working day, but the Hollywood blockbuster Alita: Fighting Angel was released this weekend, which set off the first wave of imported movies in China.
It can be vaguely felt that although the Lantern Festival has a very weak sense of existence in the box office market, it seems to have a subtle node significance for the imported film market.It has virtually become a signal to remind the market that the domestic blockbusters in the Spring Festival stalls are ebbing, the cold season is coming, and imported films are coming into the market.
This year’s Lantern Festival should have the same effect, but under the influence of the epidemic black swan, the overseas film market has not recovered, and the imported film market has withered unprecedentedly. Only one imported IP film was released in Tom and Jerry during the Lantern Festival. As a big animated film of MGM’s classic comedy, the film broke away from the original 2D animation and was completely produced by CG technology combined with real-life interpretation.
For the domestic audience, Tom and Jerry has a strong childhood color. Tom, the stupid cat who can never catch the mouse, and Jerry, the clever and lovely mouse, are one of the most vivid and interesting memories of childhood. In overseas markets, this animated short film has reached hundreds of episodes, won seven Oscar animated short film awards, and is popular all over the world. It is one of the cutest and humorous symbols in the global pop culture market from 1940s to 1970s. From MGM to Warner Bros., "Cat and Mouse" is also one of the most classic animation images in animation history.
However, the situation of the big movie Cat and Mouse is not optimistic.Cat and Mouse was originally planned to be shown in cinemas. However, under the influence of the epidemic, the release date of the film was revised several times in overseas markets, and finally it landed on HBO MAX, a streaming media of Warner Bros., in the Lantern Festival, while the cinema was released simultaneously in the domestic market.
As far as the domestic box office market is concerned, the release performance of Cat and Mouse is not as good as expected. From childhood feelings to big movies, movies have not played the ideal effect of heat fermentation and box office conversion.
This is a market reason.In the cold period after the Spring Festival, the market is still dominated by domestic films in the Spring Festival, and it is difficult for imported films to break through. However, the animated films like Tom and Jerry, although blessed by IP, are limited by the theme, and the box office space is more limited.
On the other hand, it is the quality of the film itself.Tom and jerry Douban scored 5.7, and the animation fans were not satisfied with the big movie, "Tom and Jerry content was 20%" and "giggle without thinking, and then the real protagonist was not Tom and Jerry’s movie".
There is no blockbuster in March, how long can the temperature of the Spring Festival stall last?
February is drawing to a close, and what really worries people is the movie market in March.
After imported films began to make up for the cold period of the Spring Festival in 2018, the film market from 2018 to March 2019 either gave way to Hollywood IP blockbusters, or mainly imported films, supplemented by small and medium-cost domestic films.
Take 2019 as an example. In March this year, 39 films were released, including 14 imported films. At the beginning of the import market, there are the animated IP movie Master Dragon Trainer 3 of Universal Pictures, Captain Surprise of Marvel Comics’s super English movie, the theatrical version of Natsume Friends’ Account, the Japanese IP animation My Hero Academy in the middle of the month, and The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part of Bohemian Rhapsody in the second half of the year. On the domestic market, it is the topic movie "The Sad Story" and the literary word-of-mouth movie "Over the Spring".
In March 2019, the monthly box office reached 4.16 billion, and imported films were the main force in the box office market.
On the other hand, this year, only 20 films have been announced in the film market, of which only one Disney animated film "The Legend of Searching for Dragons" is a relatively large imported film. On the domestic market, there are small-budget movies such as Legal Companion and Love Picture Book in Beijing, as well as comedy movies such as Days Never Fall Hotel that have been postponed several times before.
The shortage has been visible to the naked eye, which makes the box office prospect in March unpredictable.In the previous two years, the task of the box office market in March did not accidentally fall on imported films, but the era of domestic box office supported by imported films has passed. In March 2018, except for the last Ready Player One, other imported films did not perform as expected. In 2019, "Alita: Fighting Angel" started the "box office defense war" after the Spring Festival in advance, but the market still showed a downward trend. The impact of the epidemic in 2020 has made the box office weight of domestic films rise rapidly.
At present, the box office market is still in the afterglow of the Spring Festival, and the cumulative box office of Li Huanying has exceeded 4.7 billion yuan, and the cumulative box office of Tang Tan 3 has exceeded 4.2 billion yuan. The box office market also accommodates two explosive movies exceeding 4 billion yuan, and the biggest heat in the Spring Festival market has been released. And "Crowd" A Writer’s Odyssey and other mid-waist movies have more room to play the long tail effect because there are no new films in the market, but it is unlikely that the movies can release the second wave of dividends.
The film market in 2021 is still special, and now we need to think about the problem. When the residual temperature of the Spring Festival stalls dissipates and the import market is missing, how can the film market tap a new box office market under this new situation?
