Original title: New Year’s Eve box office 554 million yuan, recovered but not recovered (quote)
What conditions are needed for the film market to recover? (theme)
Yangcheng Evening News reporter Li Li
According to data from Maoyan Professional Edition, the total box office for the three days of New Year’s Eve in 2023 is 554 million yuan. Although the market is still far from reaching the level of “full blood resurrection”, it has recorded a significant recovery compared to December 2022.
Over the past three years, the recurrence of the epidemic has become the main reason affecting the film market. However, as the epidemic prevention and control has entered a new stage, the most difficult period has passed, and China’s film market is gradually recovering. But in order to fully reach the level of “full-blooded resurrection”, it still requires the persistence and joint efforts of audiences, creators and theater directors.
The $100 billion movie in cinema history was born
In the last New Year’s file, “Avatar: The Way of Water” (also known as “Avatar 2”) became the box office champion of the program, with a three-day box office of 280 million yuan, accounting for more than 50% of the box office. As Cameron’s latest visual effects blockbuster, which was highly anticipated, “Avatar 2” had a box office of more than 100 million yuan in the first two days of its release, and its daily box office dropped once to more than 20 million yuan. Affected by this, the film’s expected box office was also “discounted by half” from the original of more than 2 billion yuan. However, since the first day of the New Year file on December 31 last year, the daily box office of “Avatar 2” has once again exceeded 100 million yuan.
The recovery of cinemas is synchronized with the recovery of consumption in all sectors of society. Take for example the average attendance of the sample of the program “Avatar 2”. On New Year’s Day, the average attendance per game exceeded 20. For a long time before, the number of spectators per game did not exceed 10.
As audiences of ‘Yangkang’ returned to the theater one after another, ‘Avatar 2’ started a box office counterattack half a month after its release. After the end of the New Year file, “Avatar 2” surpassed 1 billion yuan at the box office, officially becoming the 100th film in Chinese film history to surpass 1 billion yuan at the box office. It is worth mentioning that the first “Avatar” released in 2010 was the first film in the history of Chinese cinema to break 1 billion at the box office. After 12 years, Cameron has completed a complete reincarnation in the Chinese film market.
Domestic films claimed over 80% of the box office last year
According to data from the National Film Administration, the total box office of films nationwide in 2022 will be 30.067 billion yuan, and the number of admissions in urban cinemas will be 712 million throughout the year. According to data from the Guangdong Provincial Film Bureau, Guangdong will produce a box office of 3.79 billion yuan in 2022, continuing to lead the country.
Compared with 2020 and 2021, the film market in 2022 is particularly bumpy, and repeated epidemics have become an important reason hindering the accelerated operation of the industry. Popular programs such as May 1, Summer and National Day have failed to give full play to their due benefits.
Despite this, there are still many major films, especially domestic ones, that will gain both word of mouth and box office in 2022. Among them, the new themed blockbuster “Shuimen Bridge of Changjin Lake”, “Miracle Stupid Kid”, “Sniper”, “The Way Back Thousand Miles” and “Ordinary Heroes”, and the realistic works “Life Events” and “Mom! “, “The Grassland at the End of the Sea”, as well as the science fiction film “Lonely Walking on the Moon”, “Tomorrow’s War”, the comedy “This Killer Is Not So Calm”, the action film “Detective War”, the cartoon “Bear Infested Return to Earth” “New God List: Yang Jian” and so on, has satisfied the different needs of the public.
The annual income of the major studios is less than 5 million yuan
In 2021, the total number of screens in the mainland cinema market will exceed 80,000, ranking first in the world. However, in terms of growth rate, compared to the annual increase of 1,000 screens before the epidemic, it has slowed significantly. Since 2020, relief and support policies for theaters have subsequently been introduced throughout the country, but the life context of many theaters is still difficult.
According to data from Maoyan Professional Edition, there has been a shortage of cinemas with an annual box office of more than 30 million yuan since 2020. The major cinemas that contributed to the annual box office increased from the range of 10 million to 20 million yuan to the range of 1 million to 5 million yuan. Especially in 2022, cinemas with an annual box office of between 1 million and 5 million yuan will contribute half of the annual box office of the film market.
Even if the total box office of Chinese films will exceed 30 billion yuan in 2022, this figure is still far from the annual box office output of the mainland film market of 60 billion yuan three years ago. Due to the decline in both the overall production value and the average lead per game, and the increase in operating costs over the past three years due to the epidemic, studios and theaters have unanimously adopted a price hike strategy tickets for popular programming. Starting with the New Year’s Eve file in 2022, the minimum clearance price of some domestic films in non-special theaters has been raised from 35 yuan to 40 yuan, and the prices of popular films have also increased to a certain extent. For example, the price of some domestic screenings of “Avatar 2” has even exceeded 300 yuan. But the ticket price is ultimately the result of the play between the theater and the audience, because the first box office of “Avatar 2” did not seem to be as popular as expected, and now the national average ticket price has dropped to 43 yuan.
The new film lacks the cultivation of unfavorable viewing habits
The difficulties in downstream are obvious to all, but the dire manufacturing situation in upstream over the past three years is not so easy to see. As of August 2022, the number of feature film submissions decreased by 30% compared to the same period of 2019-2021, totaling only 80% of the total number of domestic films in the past three years compared to 2017-2019.
The “cutting” of new films will have a significant and ongoing impact on the market. In appearance, the box office revenue of movie theaters has declined, but the industry’s deeper logic is that this will be extremely detrimental to the cultivation of the audience’s viewing habits. “Avatar 2” did not achieve the expected success effect, or it was one of the consequences. In the past, it was difficult for this visual effects blockbuster not to cause a movie-watching frenzy, but now even if the impact of the the epidemic is gradually dissipating, the so-called “visual retaliation” phenomenon has not appeared in cinemas around the world. This worries some people in the industry: In the past three years, has the public gotten used to not watching movies?
The performances of the top three films on New Year’s Eve this year are not much different: with the exception of “Avatar 2”, the second and third place are “Want to See You” and “Desperate Husband”. The love film “Want to See You” is the film version of the 2019 hit drama of the same name. The IP effect attracted many viewers, but the story let them down. On Douban, the drama version “Want to See You” scored 9.2 points, but the film version did not. Only 6.5 points. The comedy “The Desperate Husband”, which brought together Chang Yuan, Wei Xiang and others, scored only 6.1 points on Douban and was rated as “the last bad movie to watch in 2022” by some viewers.
The long-term benefits can only be achieved by making efforts on the production side
According to Maoyan’s data, the percentage of moviegoers who watch a film only once will rise to 60% in 2022 and the number of movies watched per capita will fall below 2. Under such circumstances, both cinemas and audiences are focusing on blockbuster movies: only the top of the industry can attract incremental users. But in the long run, the number and frequency of high-quality film releases are the ultimate driving force for increasing the number and frequency of film viewing per capita.
The good news is that during the three years of the epidemic, the process of sinking the domestic film market is still advancing steadily, and the proportion of admissions in the third and fourth tier cities increased from 43% in 2019 to 49% in 2022 , which continues to be an important factor for the film market, will lead to an increase in the number of people. Watching movies in theaters with social attributes is still one of the important choices for people’s cultural consumption and entertainment methods. As epidemic prevention and control enters a new stage, movies can still shine with vigorous vitality .
From the point of view of production, the prosperity of various types of domestic films such as “Operation Red Sea”, “The Wandering Earth” and “Nezha: The Devil Boy Comes into the World” has broken through the limits of subject matter and industrial development of Chinese films. Nowadays, public praise for big-budget domestic films has gradually surpassed that of Hollywood blockbusters. In particular, the popularity of the new mainstream blockbusters combined with the family and village feeling has gradually formed a new national trend sought after by young people, which also indicates the creative direction for the future recovery of the film market.
At this year’s Spring Festival, 5 blockbuster films were officially established, including the sci-fi sequel “The Wandering Earth 2”, the period film “Manjianghong”, the suspense film “Unknown” and two cartoons animated “Bear Infested: Be with me “Bear Core”” “deep sea”. Famous IP, famous director and famous actors, China’s film market ushered in a long-lost “hit party”. The industry is optimistic that China’s film market will usher in yet another upswing as the Spring Festival film kicks off the first upswing of the annual schedule.
