The hero is back, with what?
- By Luo Laiming
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E-mail CRI, August 7, 2015
In July 2015, Chinese animation film "Monkey King: Hero is Back" became the best-selling animation film in the Chinese market, beating the decade-old record set by Dreamworks Animation's 2011 comedy-drama "Kung Fu Panda 2."
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Poster of the animation film "Monkey King: Hero is Back" [File photo] |
Behind the box office triumph is the support of countless moviegoers, some of whom went to the cinema to watch the film for the second or third time. Their enthusiasm also spread like wildfire among their peers and on social media, causing an explosion in attendance rates in the week after the film's debut. At the height of their excitement, some zealous fans spoke of the renaissance of Chinese animation films.
That is quite an optimistic statement. In fact, the success of "Monkey King: Hero is Back" is an isolated case, where the filmmakers play a small part, and the shifting landscape of China's movie industry a much larger one.
Whatever small part the filmmakers played was crucial. Director Tian Xiaopeng and his crew insisted on creating original, top-notch pictures, many finished scenes were scrapped and redone over and over again, some staff members who could not handle the stress quit the team. The issue of funding was also a part of their daily struggles. As a result, the whole project spanned a lengthy eight years.
Other filmmakers could have completed quite a few animation projects in the same interval, but none could have impressed the audience with such a fantastic visual extravaganza.
But a good spectacle alone is not enough to guarantee box office success. Taylor Swift couldn't have risen from obscurity if she only sang in the shower in her rented house in the suburban town of Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. For her to reach super-stardom, she needed bigger stages and a lot of help. Likewise, recent developments in the Chinese film industry are expanding the stage for Chinese movies and lighting up their financial prospects.
Continuous infrastructure building across the country laid the groundwork. In 2014 alone, the number of cinemas in China increased by 1015, and the total number of cinema screens has now reached 236,000. Although attendance rates in movie theatres are generally low, the surplus capacity makes room for occasional outbursts in the number of visitors.
In fact, with adequate infrastructure in place, people both inside and outside the movie industry are now trying to make these box office miracles happen more often. Filmmakers are relying on information technology to increase their odds of success. Advertising on social media is cliched, the new buzz word is big data. With latest data processing technology, filmmakers can gauge the popularity of their subjects by monitoring user response and interactions on social media, and then drafting or adapting their strategies accordingly to lure in more cinema-goers. One example is writer and businessman Guo Jingming's notorious "Tiny Times" franchise, which turned a total of 1.5 billion yuan because they precisely appealed to teenage girls.
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