First of all, we should mention that the mainstream consumer group of the current movie industry is the young people, mainly the post-90s, who as the main force of movie-going have boosted the "bull market" of China's movie industry. At the same time, their consumption tendency is also subject to a lot of criticism, mainly in two points: first, the excessive preference for comedy movies. Take a look at the box office list of the mainland movie market, excluding the imported Hollywood blockbusters, five of the six movies that exceeded 1 billion dollars were comedies. Two years ago, "Lost in Thailand" topped the domestic box office with 1.267 billion yuan, and this year's "To Catch a Demon" topped the mainland box office with 2.438 billion yuan, which is really eye-opening. It's not uncommon for comedy movies to be measured in billions of dollars, and it's not uncommon for them to break the five-year mark or exceed the ten-year mark. This has given many people the impression that today's young people are too fond of heartless laughter. The feeling of watching movies on site is also the same, young people's laughing point is generally very low, a little bit of laughter plot can make her (him) laugh out loud. Second, the lack of rationality in movie consumption. Nowadays, young people are attracted to some movies under the guise of a movie, but in fact, with handsome, famous, broad to engage in marketing things, to some purely for the purpose of enrichment to play the movie players splash money. I once asked a post-90s, "Small Times" and "He Yisheng xiaojiao" such a good movie, the answer is to look pretty bad, but never absent. This kind of irrational and capricious consumption behavior is especially criticized and labeled as "brainless". These two consumer preferences of young people, to the film market has created a drought and flood situation, the good to earn a lot of money, some high-quality movies but few people ask for, part of the heart of the movie people can not even recover the cost of the young people's viewing preferences are therefore widely criticized. In fact, it is more important to try to understand the reasons behind such consumer behavior among young people.
Why are comedies so popular
We're living in a time when we're tired of worrying, and since we've known it, we've been tired of worrying. The young people who go to school for the academic tired for the examination upset, the young people who go to work for the work tired for the life upset, rich don't know what to do, no money hate can't do anything, the pressure is everywhere. There are a lot of young people to listen to Guo Degang's comedy to sleep, is to be relaxed to relieve the pressure of the heart. Into the cinema to figure a relaxed relaxation, happy to laugh and ease the pressure of the heart, is a very natural thing, there is less mood to taste the content of the bitter. Not only young people, all age levels want to laugh at the same strong demand, so the quality of the comedy film will be widely sought after, box office is not surprising.
Why shitty things are so popular
Today's young people have no resistance to things packaged with good looks, fame, and grandeur, and show extraordinary loyalty, which is not very acceptable indeed. But this has a lot to do with the social environment, in this crazy pursuit of fame and fortune in society, what other valuable things can be trusted, in the letter without credibility of the situation, the young people of looks, fame, material preferences become the most instinctive and most direct choice. Except for children who are still young, which of us at any age is not swayed by profit and fame. When young people need to anesthetize themselves with these, the good wealth collectors will provide "anesthetics", and it's hard to get a bad return.
Why high-quality film suffered a cold reception
Part of the high-quality film suffered a cold reception is indeed chilling, but if you use the culture, taste, level of what condescendingly say the young people, is a thing of quite a loaded thing. 70 after like Qiong Yao, 80 after like Han Han, after like Guo Jingming is a normal thing, no one higher than anyone else to where. The reason why young people are not interested in good movies, in addition to the two factors mentioned above, there is another important reason is that young people do not yet have the necessary life experience. Take "The Piano of Steel" and "The Intruder" as a movie, you need to have a certain life experience to watch it before you can touch your heart, and the older ones will feel a long aftertaste if they have a deep experience of the situation. Young people do not have this experience, so it is difficult to realize the deep meaning. When I was in my twenties, I would have found it boring to watch such a movie. In recent years, some romantic movies, especially school youth movies, have become popular because they are the experiences that young people are experiencing or have just gone through. The fact that good movies don't do well at the box office has little to do with young people and everything to do with the fact that the movie-going public is not diverse enough.
So it's understandable that young people have such movie-going behavior, and we shouldn't put society's problems on young people's heads, and we should see the profound changes that young people have brought to China's movie industry. One of the most prominent and direct changes is that young people's consumption has strongly boosted the development of the film industry and attracted a large inflow of resources. In just two years, how many predators and how much capital have entered the film industry. Compared with the previous years, the movie industry's resource allocation and industry status have changed dramatically, and young people are undoubtedly the main promoter of the movie industry's prosperous development.
Another profound change is that when young people unabashedly shell out their pockets and walk into theaters, they are also changing our traditional consumer behavior and consumption habits. I used to recommend good movies to people in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and the response was a look of disdain and disbelief, why spend money to go to the cinema to see it, from the Internet to see and save money and trouble. When young people are more and more like to spend money into the theater to enjoy the immersive audio-visual experience, but also in the change of the kind of deep-rooted habit of eating a free lunch of fast-food consumer behavior. Whether it is intentional or unintentional, their behavior is illustrating a truth that many people have overlooked: you spend money on consumption in order to support the people who serve you, in order to allow you to enjoy better service. So when the young people fill up the seats in the movie hall, we should show our gratitude to these young people, whose small step is a big step for China's movie industry.
Let's pack in a few more words about audiences of other age levels, starting from the youngest to the oldest. Let's start with children and teenagers. As a delightful new force, children's movie-going consumption is clearly characterized: First, they don't care much about spending money, and it's a pain in the neck for parents to pay for their kids' tickets to the movies. Secondly, most of the bundled consumption, children can lead their parents into the theater together, regardless of whether the parents would like to see, but also promote the "popcorn economy". Thirdly, they have developed the habit of going to the movies since they were young, and when they grow up, they will also take going to the movies as one of their major hobbies in life. These children's power is how big, look at this year's unprecedented degree of fire in the summer file will know, more than 12 billion box office, the children have more than half of the credit. As the kids get older, the movie market will have an even rosier future.
Then again, young people, the 60-80s should be the most barren area of film consumption, either daily mundane tasks, or accustomed to online scanning film, more than ten years or even decades have not been in the theater in the minority. There are a lot of reasons why movie-going enthusiasm is low, so I won't go into them here.
Finally, I'd like to focus on the elderly, whose potential for moviegoing and consumption is actually far greater than we thought. From personal experience, we are seeing more and more older people in theaters, and male and female audiences behave differently. The number of male audience is relatively small, and when we meet them at the box office or in the theater, we can sense that they are a bit unnatural. I also share this feeling. Since I am no longer young, I always feel a bit embarrassed to face the young staff and audience at the box office, ticket gate and in the movie theater when I watch some romantic movies, and I try to leave the theater as early as possible at the end of the movie.
Compared to the male audience, the female elderly audience is not at all pretentious in this regard, and they behave calmly in the theater. Once in the theater, I came across two old ladies of about 70 years old, one of them talked with the young people next to her before the screening, saying that she had watched all the recently released movies from "Black Cat Sheriff" to "Get Out of Here, Tumor Monster"; there was also an old lady carrying a big bag of things, standing in front of the movie lineup column after the movie finished and examining it for a long time, and it so happened that there was a father of a child with her next to her, and the three people of different ages were standing side by side in the theater. Three people of different ages and levels stood there side by side watching the movie previews, which felt very meaningful. The movie I saw with the two old men was The Magnificent Working Class. During the Mid-Autumn Festival, I came across a number of elderly female moviegoers, either in groups or accompanied by their children, and it was obvious that they were highly interested in watching the movie. If these are still isolated cases, the elderly people we met during the screening of "Intruder" are even more telling. Although the theater was not that big at that time, more than half of the seats were occupied by elderly people. The key lies not in the number, but in the fact that they came to see the movie unanimously, indicating that they were actively acquiring information about the movie, and that the enthusiasm behind the moviegoing was very high. With a box office of nearly 900 million dollars, the consumption of the elderly should not be in the minority. Elderly people have income, life experience, and more importantly, have free time, not yet the habit of online scanning film, and health care, tourism, square dancing hobbies, compared to the spiritual enjoyment of watching movies has a unique charm, the elderly watching movies "gray hair economy" is still very promising.
The above mentioned three age levels of the audience, there is a correlation effect. Young and middle-aged people have old and young, children have children like to watch, the elderly have the elderly willing to watch, as long as the children and the elderly article to do enough, will not worry about the young and middle-aged people to bring into the theater. This shows that, in addition to young people, other age levels of moviegoing consumption also has a relatively large guide, pull, the development of space.
Additionally, there are more female than male moviegoers in theaters for both the young and the old, and even for young couples, it's the females who are the ones who spend the most on movies. That's why I put "she" in front and "he" in parentheses when I use the third person. No matter what the market or consumption, women are always the main characters.
The domestic movie market is at its best ever, and the audience is the movie industry's "bread and butter". However, in other industries, the consumer as the guiding principle, the marketing to the extreme, with "big data" to grasp and meet consumer demand, the movie audience does not seem to be due attention. Let's talk about personal experience. As an avid moviegoer, I have never received a single message from a theater, not even a text message. What about buying something on Taobao once and getting some greetings from time to time. It feels like the movie industry is still a bit dependent on the sky and waiting for the rice to fall out of the pot, and lacks an active and in-depth understanding of our audience. For movie practitioners, only from the heart to love the audience, the audience will love the movie more.