Translated from: http://ent.qq.com/zt2011/number/index.htm?pgv_ref=aio2012&ptlang=2052

(picture from online sources)

Today’s China is undergoing profound transformations and changes happen all the time in every aspect of the social life. We are living in a time when dramatic things happen everyday. It is overwhelming to look back on all the stories that have happened during the last 356 day, but fortunately we have numbers for us to refer to and reflect upon. Numbers can sometimes be confusing and deceiving, though. The number of Chinese film market of 2010 was the “10 billion”. For this year’s market, the number is all the way soaring. The expansion of cinemas and countless money-losing movies are twisting the landscape and it is not easy to get at the truth. To grasp the fundamental facts, one way is to make a comparison of these figures.

45%

It is the profit proportion required by the New Pictures for the box office revenue of The Flowers of War, Zhang Yimou’s epic blockbuster. It required that 0.45 yuan out of every 1 yuan revenue go to the company . The proportion is two percentage points higher than the previous 43%. It is a flexible number, though. When the box office reaches 500 million, the figure will go back to 41:59. Producers are satisfied with the change, considering it protecting the interests of filmmakers and a virtuous market behavior. While the cinemas, frustrated by the change, have to come up with new solutions to confront the increasingly rising prices. The SARFT later came to a final resolution. With a reference to the international standard, the proportion of first-round box office revenue cinemas receive should be no more than 50%. Although the figure can hardly be compared with the producers’ 90% in Hollywood, it takes its position on the producers’ side.

35

Premiered on this year’s super Bachelor’s day (2011-11-11), Love is Not Blind has received a box office which is 35 times more than the several millions it cost to make the film and the success of it has generated heated discussions in the industry. In Hollywood, The Blair Witch Project in 1999 and Paranormal Activity in 2009 are two 10,000 films that reached multibillion box offices. In China, such figures may seem too far away. Despite the large population, it still sounds fictional. Since the blockbuster Hero, domestic films have fallen into the pattern of high yields with high cost. Love is Not Blind is a turn as well as a blow to the market. Surviving among four multi-million Hollywood blockbusters has made it somewhat Luis Bunuel. It proved the feasibility of a certain alternative. The audience has become tired of movies with an all-star cast, and they are more willing to see something close to real life. It is not a certain genre like The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity, but something that can be related to the viewer’s own experience in life. It is possible that this gives a signal to TV producers.

10.26

On this day, the overall domestic box office revenue reached 10 billion, 66 days earlier than in last year. Experts even predicted that the final figure for 2011 would be 13 billion. However, it is hardly enough to make us exited. During the 299 days, domestic films hit the screen one after another but seldom lived up to the market expectation despite all the efforts devoted. If it was not for Jack Sparrow, the panda Po and Optimus Prime that accounted for 2 billion of the overall box office, it was hard to decide whether the date might have come later. The buzz of cinemas was not generated by domestic films. A large number of domestic films, among which there were ones of poor quality, might distract the moviegoers and made them give up on trying. This year’s 10 billion came late already.

1/4

During the summer, Rest on Your Shoulders—a film combined of reality and animation ended up a complete fiasco. The cost reached as high as 80 million counting the publicity (an enormous amount for an artistic movie). The final box office was less than 1/4 of the cost. The director Zhang Zhiliang (张之亮) fromHong Kong became the target of public attack. In fact, there were bad signs even before the movie hits the screen. Zhang Zhiliang refused to attend the press conference because the film was cut in length by producer without asking for the permission of the director. Nevertheless, according to media, the 90-minute-long movie could still get rid of another 30 minutes. While directors from Taiwan become popular in mainland China, Hong Kong directors’ commercial value is in doubt, considering several not so successful films. But the ultimate question is whether the director should be responsible for the box office.

1.1 yuan

The cheapest movie ticket ever bought through group purchase. The original price for a movie ticket at Shenyang Yongle Cinema was 85 yuan. And with the ticket came a 50% discount coupon and a 46-ounce bucket of popcorn. You could come at any time for any movie. There was a time when your friend from America told you that movie tickets were far cheaper there than in China. Even during the period of global economic recession, the price of movie tickets was still skyrocketing in China. Thanks to group purchase, the discount could be as high as 80%. Now the moviegoers benefit from the low price, then who is suffering? It is neither the group purchase websites to which the purchase turns into profits, nor the cinemas to which it is actually a quick way to be known. In the end, I guess it is the producers that suffer most, whose revenue always comes from the floor price.

1 accident

In the early evening hours on October 27, an accident occurred during filming of Second Unit Stunt Sequences of The Expendables 2 on Lake Ognyanovo, Bulgaria. This resulted in one fatality and one serious injury of stuntmen on the Second Unit set. The Chinese stuntman Liu Kun (刘坤) from Shanxi died at the age of 26. The accident happened due to an unexpected explosion when Liu Kun and the other stuntmen were on a nearby rubber boat. Liu’s family was grieved at the loss of the young man and Liu would have come home two weeks later. While Hollywood big stars may attract attention when they get involved in scandals or fights, the stuntmen are easier to be ignored by the public than the background crowd. In the early years when Kongfu films from Hong Kong were in a full swing, there was even a vicious habit of judging the film by how many stuntmen died during the shooting. Those days have gone way behind, but the status quo of these special actors is worse still. They usually have to take the fatal risks in their fleeting career. It becomes often that we see the line “Not a single horse has been hurt for the film”. Should we establish a special celebrity system to honor them?

4 Hollywood stars

In 2011, there were four Hollywood stars showing up in Chinese movies. They are Sam Neill in The Dragon Pearl, Hugh Jackman in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Guy Pearce in 33 Postcards, and Christian Bale in The Flowers of War. If we go back to the year 2001, it is easy to find that Chinese audience then was really not that that into Hollywood faces. However, in 2006 the show-up of Tom Cruise in Xitang attracted large scale of coverage and just by standing on the Great Wall Will Smith and his family generated a tsunami in China. Arguably the importance of Chinese market is increasingly growing. With lower cost, China has much more to be explored than America. And what is more, we will see Kevin Spacey, Keanu Reeves, Adrien Brody, and Tim Robbins etc. in next year’s Chinese movies.

9

Another 9 directors have made it into the Million Club in 2011. There are five less than last year and the power of the director is weakening. It is that marketing methods that have become the major drive of a movie. Some chose to go with the festive atmosphere of the Spring Festival and some chose to tap the opportunity of special holidays, such as Eternal Moment on Valentine’s Day and Love is Not Blind on the centurial Bachelor’s Day (2011/11/11). In this way, the power of director has been reduced to the second place.

41 days

The movie The Piano in a Factory has been shown in cinemas for only 41 days for the first round. Only several hundreds thousand viewers went to see it in cinema. The reason may be that the audience has become numb with various kinds of overseas award titles or that its being too artistic has driven the audience away. In the end, the theory of “gold will glitter after all” did not work here. In the criticism circle, however, critics all spoke highly of the movie and there was profound study on the artistic creation of the film, such as the cinematography and setting coordination, art and the background metaphor, the mood and spiritual belief etc. Even Cui Yongyuan (崔永元) praised it as a sincere film. However, its sincerity was received with indifference, corresponding to the current society. It is embarrassing that a good movie suffers from the box office failure. Some raised the questions that whether there should be a specific kind of cinema for artistic films and that how small-budget independent films find a place in the market. Should good movies be confined to the elite circle and stay away from cultural noise or let the audience have their own understanding? Like the status quo of the country, it moves on with conflicts.

200 million

It is the total amount of Warner Brothers’ investment for its annual blockbuster for 2012—1942. It has been a wish of director Feng Xiaogang (冯小刚) for 18 years—longer than Aftershock. The first reading of the script goes back to 1993 and in 2000 Feng Xiaogang received a budget of 30 million RMB from the producer (a huge amount of money back then). The shooting was disrupted three times during the years. Taking the inflation into consideration, the budget has been doubled three times during the years with later revision and the joining of two Academy winners from Hollywood. If we refer to the director’s previous Assembly and Aftershock, we will find they both had issues of overspending and delay. The 200 million might just be a starting price and it is a well-deserved budget for an oblivious national disaster. 1942 tells a story of 300 thousand people who died of starvation during the migration when a drought hit Henan in 1942. The word “remembering” was taken away from the original title “Remembering 1942”, possibly avoiding being too sentimental. It is hard to say whether audience will receive free tissues outside the cinema as a hint that the movie will be emotion stirring like they did for Aftershock. Undoubtedly, 1942 will be attracting most attention in next year’s cinemas.