Three people talk about New Year's Eve: Why domestic films are so popular and popular

The collective efforts of domestic films during the Lunar New Year make people full of expectations for the future of domestic films. This is a microcosm of the transformation and upgrading of China's film industry and the transformation of China from a major film country to a powerful film country.

Lead: For a long time, we used to regret that China films "hate iron but fail to make steel"-some films suck, but they can get high box office; some films carry a lot of "ideas", but people can't understand them; some films are oriented correctly, but no one watches them at all. In the game between box office and word of mouth, business and art, the audience launched an endless war of words, and the creators were once confused.

However, the performance of China films on this year's New Year's Eve has subverted people's traditional perceptions. As of now, the box office of the three domestic films "Lao Pao 'er","Detective Chinatown" and "Seeking the Dragon" has exceeded 800 million yuan, 600 million yuan and 1.6 billion yuan respectively. More importantly, these high-box-office domestic films are also widely praised in terms of reputation. "Lao Pao 'er" demonstrates humanistic feelings in the new generation of China films."Detective Chinatown" vigorously integrates suspense plots and comedy, opening up a new genre for domestic films."Xunlong Secret" broadens the industrialization path of China films. Films with different themes, different types, and different styles have all achieved great improvement in quality, and they have all found their own world in the market.

The new year has just begun, and it may not be possible to "talk about a bumper year in the fragrance of rice", but it is vaguely visible that "the tide is flat and the two sides are wide, and the wind is blowing." The collective efforts of domestic films during the Lunar New Year make people full of expectations for the future of domestic films. This is a microcosm of the transformation and upgrading of China's film industry and the transformation of China from a major film country to a powerful film country. Today, we specially invited young director Chen Sicheng, film and television critic Shi Hang, and Ye Ning, vice president of Wanda Cultural Industry Group, to discuss this year's New Year's Eve and related works from their respective perspectives.

Innovation and change have become the creative consciousness of filmmakers| When Chen Sicheng

was studying in Hollywood last year, I discovered that this leader in the global film industry has been shrouded in the confusion of "not knowing where the road is" in recent years. In movie theaters in the United States, the market favorites with box office hits are often series films, but the real genre films are getting narrower and narrower, with little innovation. Later, I learned that this was not only a problem that troubled Americans, but also a worldwide problem.

Throughout the montage history of world movies, from the beginning with hundreds of shots per film, to the current commercial blockbusters with too few 3,000 shots, the pace can be said to be getting faster and faster. This is the result of industrial standards and audience tastes going hand in hand, and it also means that today's creators are facing greater pressure. To borrow the famous saying of "A Tale of Two Cities", this is the best era and this is the worst era-opportunities and challenges are actually equally huge, and the key depends on whether we can control this trend.

In my opinion, the current domestic film market is actually full of "blue seas", full of opportunities and surprises. There are still many neglected corners of the rapidly expanding "cake" that have not been touched upon, which constitutes a rich spot in the commercial genre field. For example, what genre is unprecedented and what films are popular with audiences. These questions test the acumen of a practitioner, and also guide me to seek a "virgin land" to break through.

Take "Detective Chinatown", which I recently directed, as an example. I define it as a new genre that combines suspense reasoning and comedy. The creative process does not even have a template to refer to, and it subverts many established paths. As you can imagine, this will be a brand new movie-watching experience for the audience, but at the same time it is not self-explanatory, but can resonate with the frequency of most viewers. This is the commercial way of genre films.

However, there is an argument in the industry at present that "business" and "art" are opposed, and that "popular" and "applauded" cannot be both. I think this is inevitably biased. As works of art and industrial products, films first have dual attributes-namely artistic and commercial. The so-called commercial nature is nothing more than that more people choose your products. It can even be said that the goal of any artist in his life is to "appreciate both elegance and vulgarity", or to use current popular words, it is to "be down-to-earth".

There is no denying that it is very difficult to achieve success in both aspects. This is also why many people prefer to be paranoid, either pursuing commercial nature and neglecting artistic value, or overemphasizing personal interests and running counter to the public. As everyone knows, blindly catering to the market may not necessarily win the market, and extremely narcissistic art deviates from the purpose of art. I think that the real way to create is to take self-expression as the core, add elements that the public likes and likes to see, and achieve both "body and application" and clearly define "Tao and technique". Creators must focus on "Tao" and grasp the core emotions and value demands. In terms of presentation, it should be more easy-to-understand and simple. This is naturally not as simple as imagined, and it is also the goal I have been pursuing.

Looking at today's domestic film market, we can see that heroes are rising together, mountains are lined up, and competition is unprecedentedly fierce. Regardless of whether the film itself is good or bad, the fascination of marketing is enough to confuse the audience with the suspicion of "chaos and fascination." I don't like the kind of tricks that use gimmicks to drive box office. For example,"Detective Chinatown" was not very successful in marketing and struggled to grow almost through its later reputation. In addition, the competition in film scheduling is also quite fierce. Our films only occupied a four-day gap when they entered the Lunar New Year slot. In the first place, there were the "bombing" of "Old Pao" and "The Quest for the Dragon", and in the second place, there was the attack of "Detective Sherlock" and "Star Wars: The Force Awakens". In such a market, it is almost impossible without excellent film quality.

Of course, judging from the overall quality of this year's New Year's Eve, domestic films have improved significantly compared with previous years. After all, culture is always another manifestation of comprehensive national strength. As China's comprehensive national strength increases, the cultural industry is also desperately catching up. This is due to the times and the mission that our generation of creators should shoulder. (Interviewed and compiled by Lu Bolin)

The era when word of mouth influences the market has arrived| During Shi Hang

's New Year's Eve this year, different types of domestic films such as "Lao Pao 'er," Detective Chinatown "and" The Quest for the Dragon "have made great breakthroughs in both box office and word of mouth, which shows that domestic films are moving towards maturity. Judging from the development history of the world film industry, only when genre films continue to enrich and mature can they win the recognition of the audience and then win the box office. For a long time in the past, the typology of domestic films has not developed enough. An important reason is that China filmmakers have sealed themselves up and failed to let go of their imagination. Now the huge demand in the market has opened up the imagination of creators and allowed them to dare to gallop freely on the battlefield of film art. In the end, when they filmed it "happily", the audience naturally watched it "happily".

In the past, the fermentation and transmission of word of mouth in movies was relatively slow. Some "bad films" take advantage of the time lag in word-of-mouth transmission and use publicity and hype to lure some audiences into theaters, thus obtaining high box office. In this way, it will squeeze the market space for many good films. Now, with the advancement of communication methods, audiences have been able to grasp the word-of-mouth and evaluation of different films in real time, so good films have been able to rapidly expand the market through word-of-mouth communication. "Lao Pao 'er" did not achieve a single-day box office surpass other similar films until the fourth day after its release. On the ninth day of release, it reached its peak single-day box office with a score of 85 million yuan. Word of mouth can influence the box office of movies. On the one hand, it shows the improvement of the audience's aesthetic level, and on the other hand, it can force filmmakers to spend more time on improving the quality of movies.

For a long time, in the China film industry, there seemed to be an insurmountable gap between literature and art and business, between emotion and box office, and even mutually exclusive. This deliberate division once resulted in various strange situations in which either the bottom line of art was infinitely lowered for the box office, or people talked to themselves in pursuit of artistry. I disagree with separating the artistic and commercial aspects of films and treating them differently. As long as any artistic film sells one ticket, it has commercial attributes; similarly, any commercial film, as long as it is created, must contain artistic elements. Several domestic films in this year's New Year's Eve season have better combined artistic and commercial aspects, which is why they have won both high box office and good reputation. As a commercial genre film,"Lao Pao 'er" has feelings and hearts;"Detective Chinatown" combines different elements such as comedy, thriller and reasoning to solve cases, with commercial pursuits and self-persistence;"The Quest for the Dragon" uses Hollywood techniques to tell the story of China. All these excellent films let people see the organic unity of business and art, box office and word of mouth rather than a high degree of opposition. This may be the most important experience that other domestic films need to learn from in the future.

The movie topics triggered by this Lunar New Year festival go far beyond that. While "Lao Pao 'er" has achieved a win-win situation at the box office and reputation, the issue of swearing frequently appearing in the lines has also caused considerable controversy. Some people think that too much swearing in film works is very undesirable and is not conducive to the improvement of culture. However, from an artistic perspective, the swearing in "Lao Pao 'er" all serve the characters' personalities and specific situations. It is an indispensable element for this film to shape characters and demonstrate human nature. Of course, as Feng Xiaogang admitted, too much swearing in movies may have a negative impact on minors, but we can fully learn from mature experience from foreign countries and classify and screen relevant films. Otherwise, if you simply ask the film to make artistic compromises, you will be giving up the food because of choking. (Compiled by interview with Han Yeting)

China-style commercial blockbusters are maturing day by day| As

of now, Ye Ning's national box office of "The Quest for the Dragon" has exceeded 1.6 billion yuan. Not only is he famous in the box office rankings, but he is also not inferior in reputation-he has won 7.9 and 7.6 respectively on two professional film review websites, Douban. com and Shiguang.

The significance of "The Quest for Dragon" is not only that it creates a new way to create domestic adventure genre films, but also that it makes a successful exploration on the development path of China's film industrialization. "The Quest for Dragon" was invested by Wanda and jointly produced by Huayi and Guangguang. All three companies have strong financial strength and industry influence. It is not a problem for each company to independently support the project. However, in the end, they chose to cooperate because China's film industry needs to join forces to create a more standardized and standardized industrial system.

As the controlling investor, Wanda is the copyright owner of the original novel and has the most powerful theater system in the Chinese-speaking region. Huayi has rich experience in film production, star resources, etc. In the early stage of project preparation, it organized a creative "dream team" including Chen Guofu, Wu Ershan, Chen Kun, Huang Bo, Shu Qi, and Yang Ying. Light has a mature distribution network and rich experience in Internet marketing. It should be said that since the inception of the project,"Dragon Xunji" has made sufficient preparations in all upstream, middle and downstream links of the film industry chain in accordance with the principle of industrial division of labor and cooperation.

The production cost of "Dragon Seeking Secret" is as high as 250 million yuan, the production team is as large as 2000 people, and the production cycle is as long as 4 years. From the moment the film started shooting, it was scheduled for this year's New Year's Eve. The filming and production progress of the film is reversed according to the release time, and these are the reflection of the standard process of industrial film production. Among the investment of 250 million yuan, the crew of "Seeking the Dragon" spent more than 100 million yuan to turn 1530 of the more than 1800 shots in the entire film into special effects pictures, accounting for 85% of the total shots in the film. This is the first time in the history of the development of domestic films that so many special effects shots need to be produced in one film. This cannot be accomplished without the support of film industry technology and talents. In short, the production process of "Seeking the Dragon" is an important test of the technology and personnel capabilities of China's film industry. What is gratifying is that the excellent film quality has proved that China's film industry is indeed making progress.

At present, the biggest challenge for China films still comes from the other side of the ocean. Although there are a large number of good comedies and youth films in China films, if you want to compete head-on with Hollywood, you must have a batch of high-quality domestic commercial blockbusters. In a sense, only by making domestic commercial blockbusters bigger and stronger can we form the backbone of China's film industry and go abroad to form international communication in the future. The wild imagination of Hollywood films is supported by the strong film industry system of the United States, and many creative China commercial films ultimately failed to weak industrial links. Therefore, we need to explore the industrialization path of China films from various aspects such as models, processes, technologies, and talents. Of course, exploring the industrialization path of China films does not mean completely copying Hollywood. Still take "The Quest for the Dragon" as an example. Although the film draws on Hollywood in its production techniques, it tells the story of China. Perhaps it is the combination of China elements and modern film technology that has produced such a strong topic effect, making the film more interesting and chewy.

The needs of the audience are diverse. While doing a good job in creating small and medium-cost films, we must catch up with the creation and production of commercial blockbusters as soon as possible. Otherwise, it will mean ceding the market for commercial blockbusters to Hollywood, which is obviously not conducive to the improvement of China's film industry system. At present, China's film industry has developed to a new stage, and its capital, technology, and talent reserves are gradually improving. We are fully capable of learning from Hollywood's experience and using industrial methods to tell the story of China well. "The Dragon Quest" has created a successful path for the industrialization of China films. I believe that more films like "The Dragon Quest" will appear in the future. (Compiled by interviews with Han Yeting)

Editor: vian