The box office of detective films in China generally falls below 300 million yuan."The Sacrifice of Suspect X" may set off a detective craze

Statistics show that it is rare for domestic "detective" films to box office exceeding 300 million yuan in recent years. Therefore, in addition to its own box office results, whether it can pierce the box office ceiling of this theme and whether it can continue to expand territory for genre films have also become topics worthy of attention.

Original title: Can "The Sacrifice of Suspect X" break the "300 Million Curse"?

After the Spring Festival, domestic films, which have been suppressed by imported films, finally ushered in a suspense and reasoning domestic film that has been highly anticipated by the market. Directed by Youpeng Su and adapted based on the classic works of Keigo Higashino, the film "The Sacrifice of Suspect X" starring Wang Kai, Zhang Luyi and Lin Xinru will be released on March 31.

This film with many high-box office potential will soon be tested by the market. However, statistics show that it is rare for domestic "detective" films to box office exceeding 300 million yuan in recent years. Therefore, in addition to its own box office results, whether it can pierce the box office ceiling of this theme and whether it can continue to expand territory for genre films have also become topics worthy of attention.

The box office of 300 million yuan is a "hurdle"

from sales. The domestic version of "The Sacrifice of Suspect X" has considerable market competitiveness, and the leading stars Wang Kai and Zhang Luyi already have certain box office appeal. Although director Youpeng Su's first work "Left Ear" was poorly reviewed, it still achieved 485 million yuan at the box office. However, for this movie at present, the first thing to do is break through the ceiling of the "detective theme" itself.

Statistics on the market performance of "detective themed" films in recent years show that there are only three films that have exceeded 300 million yuan: "Detective Chinatown","Di Renjie's God's Dragon King", and "The Burning Sun". Relatively speaking,"Detective Chinatown", which won 824 million yuan, relies more on the elements of "Wang Baoqiang + comedy", while the selling points of "Di Renjie: The God of the Dragon King", which won 601 million yuan, mainly include "Zhao Youting + costume action". Therefore,"The Burning Sun", which relies purely on "detective" elements, seems to better represent the market performance of this theme, with a box office of 305 million yuan.

Except for these three high-box office movies, most detective films have box office receipts of less than 300 million yuan. Moreover, it is not difficult to find that the box office of this theme is more directly linked to reviews. At present, most movies with box office exceeding 100 million yuan have Douban scores above 6 points, with the exception of "The Unparalleled Detective"(Douban 4.6, box office 284 million yuan) starring the article and "Shocking Sky"(Douban 3.9, box office 114 million yuan) starring Nicholas Tse and Liu Qingyun. The box office of the remaining detective films with less than 6 points remained at the tens of millions of yuan.

To sum up, the audience of this genre of movies has been relatively fixed and harsh. Therefore, if "The Sacrifice of Suspect X" wants to exceed the 300 million ceiling, it must ensure that the story is above the passing line.

China's "detective films" are narrow.

Strictly speaking,"detective" films are not a movie genre, and are generally labeled as "crime","suspense" and other genres. The reason why detective films have been relatively dull in the domestic market is mainly because the market atmosphere of detective films in my country has not been cultivated. Compared with comedy films that often start at the box office of 1 billion yuan, detective films have always been relatively narrow. Of course, the problem is not just in the film market.

When it comes to detective films, the two major factions of Europe, America and Japan are the most outstanding. Among them, Japan, for example, is quite mature in the development of detective film and television works. For example, in 2008, the Japanese version of "The Sacrifice of Suspect X" has exceeded 1.8 billion yen (approximately 111 million yuan) in 10 days after its release. Last year's hit Japanese film "Showa 64" was divided into two parts, and the total box office exceeded 3.5 billion yen (about 216 million yuan).

Some filmmakers pointed out that domestic detective literature is currently not developed enough and there are few well-known works, so it is difficult to say that there is a local cultural atmosphere, let alone have detective characters such as "Holmes" and "Poirot" from Europe and the United States. At present, in the domestic IP development of movies with detective themes, except for very few characters such as "Di Renjie", it is difficult for original themes to be favored by the market. Some potential originals were basically destroyed in the second part. For example, after the detective movie "The Secret Room of Secrets" starring Youpeng Su attracted a lot of praise from the audience at the time, the quality of the second "The Secret Room of Secrets of Secrets" directly collapsed, resulting in the end of the series.

Therefore, in the face of the high risks and difficulty of original domestic detective themes, there has also been a wave of adaptation of foreign detective "IP" since the beginning of this year. However, whether localization can truly be seamlessly integrated remains to be tested by the market.

There is no "detective" profession in China.

Of course, the reason why there have been few successful creators and characters with detective themes in China in recent years is also related to the fact that the "detective" profession is not legal in China itself.

It is understood that at present, for the profession of detectives, China law does not recognize the evidence provided by private detectives or organizations, and is not afraid of effectiveness in court. This fundamentally denies the value of detectives. In countries such as the United States and Japan, the law recognizes evidence provided by private detectives. Even the United States allows private detectives to freely intervene in criminal cases without the consent of prosecutors or police agencies.

This restriction has also caused a lot of trouble for domestic creators. Therefore, at present, the protagonists of most domestic detective films have police status, similar to Tong Tao, the prosecutor in "National Witness", and Liu Yunfei, the otaku mystery novelist in the "Secret Room" series, are not full-time detectives. Among them, the one closest to a full-time detective should be the role of Gui Xiang in "Otaku Detective Gui Xiang". However, the film's theme is deviated and the plot is various flaws, which has greatly damaged the attention. For example, a full-time detective like Tang Ren in "Detective Chinatown", his office location can only be moved to Thailand.

The protagonist of "The Sacrifice of Suspect X"(the Chinese version was changed to Tang Chuan) is actually a university professor, not a detective in the strict sense. Therefore, it seems that it will take some time for real detectives to emerge in China films.

The Chinese market needs more genres based on various elements. At present, the market is not confident in detective films. For example, last year, the film "Portrait of Nineteen-Year-Old in Summer", which was originally planned to be released during the summer season and was adapted from the well-known Japanese author Shoji Shimada, was directly re-released due to lack of confidence in competition with films in the same period, and has not met with the audience to this day.

However, detective films have become one of the important genres. Yang Shupeng, director of "Juvenile", once pointed out that crime genre films can deeply touch the hearts and humanity of real life. When the audience sees the darkness and cruelty of contemporary people in the heart of crime genre films, the film brings more thinking than many martial arts films. It is deeper and more literary in its story.

In recent years, some genre films have also achieved some good results, such as the thriller "Jingcheng 81", the war film "Wolf Warrior", and last year's "Operation Mekong". Therefore, at present, domestic crime-themed films are more about "fighting courage" rather than "fighting wisdom".

In recent years, the domestic film market has fallen into a rapid decline in both box office and reviews due to the successive release of domestic blockbusters with the themes of "visual effects and magic action". Letting more genre markets mature as soon as possible and achieving due box office results may also be the right direction for the future development of the domestic film landscape.

I hope that starting with "The Sacrifice of Suspect X" and "The Kidnapper" directed by Xu Jinglei, which was released on the same day, there will be a lot of "detective movie craze" this year.

Editor: Nancy