Under such pressure, as of today, the Great Protector has been released for three days and recorded 20 million. The comparison between box office and word of mouth is really embarrassing, and online discussion is limited. Regarding the content of "The Great Protector", this paper will not expand, but only from the perspective of its announcement, what routines are there in animated films and whether these routines can work now.
After the success of Great Sage's return, the light seems to have determined the same set of animation film announcement mode: national roadshow+word-of-mouth marketing+crowdfunding derivatives+three-dimensional star participation, and later "Big Fish Begonia" and "Your Name". The recent "Great Protector" has a similar publicity model. If "Feelings" was worth 950 million box office two years ago, it seems that it is not so easy for the audience to pay the bill just by leading the creative team to tell stories on a national road show.
Relying on the director's previous works and crowdfunding to attract core fans.
The director of The Great Protector didn't think about anything. Since the flash era, he has impressed the core animation fans with his strong personal artistic style and has a group of fans of original directors. From Blackbird, Millet Forest to Teacher Miao, the series of works have gained a good reputation, and the score on Douban is much higher than that of most domestic animations.
20 15, bu began to prepare for the "great protector". In June of the same year, 5438+0 launched the official Weibo @ Movie Protector, and launched project crowdfunding on Kickstarter, an American crowdfunding website led by Haochuan Animation, which won the support of 20,000 US dollars.
Crowdfunding page of "The Great Protector" on Kickstarter
Like The Return of the Great Sage and The Big Fish Begonia, the crowdfunding of The Great Protector is an important way of publicity, and posters, character settings and some scene pictures have been released on the international stage. Producer Haig mentioned that the first fans of the Great Protector began to pay attention to this work from crowdfunding at that time. At the same time, relying on Kickstarter's mature promotion channels, Dharma dharma masters the market feedback of the works in the early stage and flexibly adjusts the subsequent creation through crowdfunding response.
At this stage, Dafa attracts core fans. In 20 16, Dafa also held several small roadshows, all aimed at professionals in the animation industry. Until April this year, the film began to face the public and entered an intensive publicity period.
National roadshow, focusing on young college students
Since April, the Great Protector has published posters, PV and other materials, and invited Dai Quan, Charlie, Cai Qin and Guan Xiaotong to sing live.
By June, the "Great Protector" had started a nationwide roadshow. The first roadshow passed through universities in Shenyang, Chengdu, Yunnan, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Wuhan, Xi and Jinan, and then premiered in Hangzhou and Beijing, with nearly 10,000 spectators. This is related to the return of the Great Sage, the big fish Haitang and your name. The national roadshow is similar, and the director and creative team communicate with the audience at the event site.
At the event site, Dafa will release some new publicity materials every time, such as releasing a new theme song, releasing a new publicity PV and releasing a new poster. In addition to the main creation, the event will also invite well-known local animators to participate in publicity.
After the event, the official of Dafa will make a long collection of photos of the live event and the audience's comments, hoping to form a word-of-mouth effect and spread it spontaneously among the audience.
However, judging from the results, it may be that roadshows are immune to the routine of creating word of mouth, or the publicity audience of roadshows is limited. In a word, it is far less than the hot event in Weibo when The Return of the Great Sage was released, and it is not as good as the heated discussion after the release of The Big Fish Begonia. The Great Protector has not spread to a wider audience except for a few people who participated in the exchanges between audiences.
Crowdfunding for film derivatives is linked to works such as The Return of the Great Sage.
Before the film was released, Dafa started the crowdfunding pre-sale of derivatives, which is the same as that of the big fish begonia, but the categories of derivatives of Dafa are less than 10, mainly including plush toys and hand-made derivatives, with limited partners, while the derivatives of the big fish begonia have more than 20 categories, including all kinds of hand-made, umbrella and hand-made.
From the sales situation, among the Taobao flagship stores of light e-commerce, the best-selling "Dafa" piggy bank and plush toys have a monthly sales volume of about 600 pieces, and other mobile phone cases, door curtains and notebooks. I only have dozens of copies. Compared with Big Fish Begonia, which has been released for one year, its monthly sales of mobile phone cases can still reach 300.
Some insiders believe that this is because Dafa has not done enough in derivatives, especially mobile phone cases, door curtains and other daily necessities. The appearance is not bright enough, and the color matching and pattern design are not considered, which has a great impact on sales.
In the same period, another distinctive propaganda strategy of Great Protector was to launch posters in cooperation with Return of the Great Sage, Big Fish Begonia and Yesterday's Blue Sky, which was also supported by popular domestic animations such as Star Trek, Quebap and Tea No.2 Middle School.
This series of publicity can be regarded as the climax of the publication of "The Great Protector", which evokes many animation lovers' memories of domestic excellent animation, and even sells their feelings to the extreme under the signboard of "continuing large-scale domestic animated films".
Publicity has never broken through secondary users.
The biggest problem with the publication of The Great Guardian is that it has never broken through the scope of secondary users. Of course, this is also related to the theme content. The Return of the Great Sage is an all-age family animation, the big fish Haitang and your name. The Love Story of Youth is a popular love story among young women, which is suitable for wide spread.
However, judging from the published strategy and actual effect, The Great Protector really lacks a three-dimensional audience, and the number of people who want to see it on the ticketing platform is also very unsatisfactory, which is very different from other topic films.
For example, from the invited singer lineup, The Return of the Great Sage invited Wang Feng and Chen Jieyi, and Haitang invited Eason Chan, Lala Hsu and Charlie. Except Charlie, a singer who is mainly aimed at secondary users, other singers are well-known pop stars in the tertiary audience, and they are highly recognized. Dai Quan, Cai Qin and Guan Xiaotong, who sang for The Great Protector, are all three-dimensional stars, but their appeal among young people is still limited. The collocation with animated films really makes fans feel a little disobedient.
So is the roadshow. Although they are all aimed at colleges and universities all over the country, on the one hand, the students of Zhongchuan and Qingbei Second Yuan Movie Group who participated in the roadshow are all anime lovers. Although it has laid the foundation for word-of-mouth movies, its publicity scope and word-of-mouth influence are very limited. On the other hand, although the Great Protector is animated, its core is still very profound, and it is rated PG- 13. Some viewers think that PG- 18 should be mentioned. "The Great Protector" copied the experience of animated films before Guang, and made a lot of publicity among young students, which may not be completely matched with the works.
Online publicity, whether linked to the poster promotion of the Great Sage's Return and the Big Fish Begonia, or linked to the official domestic animation blogs such as Cha No.2 Middle School and Kuiba, and the support of senior practitioners such as Lu and others, including the apostles in Weibo, inhuman writers and ghosts, seems to cheer each other up in the circle.
Take the Beijing premiere of the Great Protector attended by Sanwen Entertainment as an example. Even though Zhang Jiajia, the author of Passing Through Your World, Yang Lu, the director of Embroidered Spring Knife, and Yu Baimei, the director and screenwriter of The Great Guardian were invited to the scene, they failed to make effective use of these resources and hardly saw their personal accounts promoting the film on social platforms.
Of course, it should be emphasized that the failure of the box office of "The Great Protector" is not only due to insufficient publicity, but also to major defects in quality, mainly because the theme is too small to set off a craze among the public. It is neither a family movie of Xian Yi and Xian Yi, nor a love theme favored by young audiences, but an obscure political fable, which undoubtedly greatly raises the threshold for viewing.
In addition, there are other reasons. For example, although there are tickets on the cat's eye platform, there is no cooperation in the cinema, and the number of films arranged is very limited; At the same time, the content is not commercial enough, and the artistry is not well conveyed in propaganda.
After the box office failure two days before the release, from yesterday to today, there have been Sir movies, visual records, independent fish movies and other self-media voices, whether it is tap water or part of the announcement of "Great Protection", at least it has played a certain role.
The Great Protector truly represents the new possibilities of China's animation-new visual style, new theme and new core. Box office is just one of the manifestations of the commercial value of a movie. The entertainment circle expects that there will be more China animations that dare to try in the future, not all popcorn movies.