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Not enough cakes

Text｜"Chinese Entrepreneurs" reporter Tao Tao

Editor: Mina

Source of header image｜Visual China

Following the hits of "Gone Girl" and "All or Nothing" last year, it is still TikTok that ignited the summer market this summer.

After a month and a half of silence, the movie "Catching Dolls" finally made its first appearance in the summer movie season. According to the data from Lighthouse Professional Edition, as of 9 a.m. on July 21, less than a week after the official release of "Catching Dolls", the box office had reached 1.365 billion yuan; Lighthouse AI predicts that the final box office of the film will reach 3.6 billion yuan.

In line with the box office boom, the popularity of "Catching Dolls" on Douyin is also in line with the box office boom. As of 9:00 a.m. on July 21, the #电影抓娃娃# topic on Douyin had been played 4.54 billion times, ranking first on the cinema hot list. Other hot search topics related to "Catching Dolls" on Douyin include #沈腾马丽又合合# and #被沈腾马丽新电影抓娃娃硬控笑点#.

Another film, "The Silent Killer," which ranks second in the summer box office forecast and second in popularity on Douyin, also has content that is suitable for short, flat and fast dissemination: five minutes of conflict and ten minutes of counterattack, and it attracts attention with its fast pace from the beginning.

Ever since the re-creation video of "Ex-Files 3" went viral on Douyin in 2017, Douyin has gradually become a major promotional platform for theatrical films.

"When Weibo dominated the promotion of cinema films, Weibo accounted for about 30% to 40% of the promotional expenses. In the 'TikTok era', this figure soared to 60% to 70%, and as high as 80%."Su Beiqi, founder of Shuoguo Lianlian, a film and television publicity and distribution company, revealed this to China Entrepreneur.

This has also attracted more audiences from the lower-tier markets to go to the cinema because of short videos. According to the data from Lighthouse Professional Edition,From 2017 to 2024, the proportion of audiences from third-tier and fourth-tier cities increased from 16.4% and 16.1% in 2017 to 19.5% and 22.9% this year respectively.

The distribution of national movie box office cities from 2014 to 2024. Source: Lighthouse Professional Edition

However, the success of TikTok-driven movies has also restructured the production methods of cinema movies. Most film and television companies have already intervened in the creative end of the film marketing, creating more trigger points suitable for publicity from the script level.

Some cinema movies are becoming more and more like extended short plays. For example, among this year's summer movies, "The Silence" is full of spectacular scenes such as school bullying, burying people in flower gardens, and hitting people with hammers. Last year's summer movie "Gone Girl" set up suspense points from multiple movies, which was called "stitched monster" by some viewers.

However, some of the original missed gems in the theaters have been seen by more people because of the spontaneous spread of Douyin. From 2022 to 2024, movies such as "Hidden in the Dust", "The First Part of the Gods", and "Stop and Go" set off several waves of topics on Douyin and achieved box office counterattacks.

Compared to TikTok "squeezing out movie box office" or "pushing up movie box office",Tik Tok is more like an amplifier, exacerbating the Matthew effect on the box office of all movies.

this meansCinema films do not necessarily need to rely on "short dramas" to promote their creations."On the marketing side, the team should fully integrate the characteristics of the film and analyze the potential audience groups, formulate the most suitable promotion and marketing strategy for the film within the limited promotion and marketing budget, and carry out precise marketing," said Ding Lei, media manager of the film marketing company.

Of course, with the internal circulation of Douyin marketing, it has become increasingly difficult for theater movies to break through on Douyin.“When all teams choose to bet on this position, there is no longer an absolute winner.”Su Beiqi analyzed that if one only does Tik Tok now without considering the type of video and one's own approach, one will inevitably fail.

Therefore, for today's theater movies, if they want to make a breakthrough in marketing, in addition to precise delivery on Douyin, they also need to find a new path.

The number of “passerby” movies in theaters has increased

Last summer, short video marketing demonstrated its strong strength.

The main creators of "The First Part of the Gods", "In the Octagon" and "Hot" collaborated with top Douyin influencers, and cooperated with @疯狂小杨哥, @刘畊宏, @东方甄選, @樊登, and @老虞闲话 to launch more than 15 live broadcast promotional activities, with a total of more than 150 million viewers.

After the release date of "All or Nothing", a movie related to the northern Myanmar scam, was scheduled, the film was not very popular until the short video of the "Scam Group Morning Meeting" was released, which instantly ignited the desire to watch the film. The number of people who wanted to watch the film on Tao Piaopiao soared by 523% month-on-month in a single day.

Coincidentally, this summer, the movie "Catching Dolls" was also closely related to the leveraging of Douyin materials.

"Catching Dolls" tells the story of Ma Chenggang and Chunlan, a wealthy couple, who raise their son Ma Jiye in poverty and pretend to be poor in order to train a successor and temper his will. The film is produced by Happy Twist, starring Shen Teng and Ma Li.

The film's narrative is intertwined between real wealth and fake poverty, and there are endless jokes. Most of these most classic "baggage" can be found in Douyin videos: when Boss Jia visited the Ma family, as soon as he sat down at the door, the stool immediately fell apart, and the next second, Chunlan gave Boss Jia a cigar; before Ma Chenggang went out, he would pretend to sit on a donkey cart with heavy objects on his back and leave, and when his son was out of sight, he would immediately change to a luxury car to travel...

As early as 19 days before the release, the official Douyin of "Catching Dolls" released the first material video. In the following 20 days, the official Douyin released 75 videos. On July 17, the second day of the release of "Catching Dolls", the three videos pinned on the official Douyin of the movie had received more than 2.5 million likes.

Source: Screenshot from the official Douyin of the movie "Catching Dolls"

Below these materials, the audience's "tap water" recommendations included "good-looking, Chinese people don't cheat Chinese people", "conscientious recommendation", "more than 96% of the laughter points throughout the film", etc. Among the users who responded, many mentioned that they "plan to watch it".

The spread of TikTok has brought more audiences from lower-tier markets to cinema movies.

"When short video platforms represented by Douyin become the focus of film promotion and marketing, promotion and marketing companies will formulate promotion and marketing strategies based on the user preferences of short video platforms, and prepare corresponding materials and plan activities. These contents tailored for audiences in the sinking market will directly affect their movie-watching decisions." Speaking of the increase in the proportion of movie-watching in third- and fourth-tier cities, Ding Lei told "China Entrepreneur".

Douyin has added "passerby screenings" for theater movies, allowing potential audiences who originally had no habit of watching movies offline to go to the theater.

"2023 Summer Movie Data Insights" shows that the 2023 summer box office increased by 162% year-on-year, and the Douyin movie topic playback volume increased by 163% year-on-year; the main topic playback volume of the four films "All or Nothing", "Fengshen I", "Octagon Cage" and "Gone Girl" exceeded 10 billion, and these four films took the top four box office spots in last year's summer season.

According to the "2023 Summer Movie Data Insight Report" jointly released by Douyin and Maoyan Research Institute,During the 2023 summer season, new users who had never purchased tickets on the Maoyan platform accounted for as much as 17.9%.

This is the new potential that the "Tik Tok Marketing Era" has brought to the cinema film market.

Cinema movies are becoming short dramas

Tik Tok marketing is also a double-edged sword.

Precisely because the degree of integration between Douyin promotion and theater movies is increasing, the downstream promotion and distribution of theater movies are occupying greater creative voice.

In the past five years, marketing involvement in film creation has almost become a standard feature of cinema films. Yu Dong, founder of Bona Film Group, said in an exclusive interview with China Entrepreneur in July that Bona Film Group's marketing team currently intervenes in the creation of films at the script stage.

In other words, the marketing team will prepare the plot and twists in advance during the script creation process. The classic structure of the original cinema film has been deconstructed to a certain extent in the productized film.

When introducing the micro-short drama as an entertainment form, many short drama screenwriters have said that the core difference between short dramas and theatrical movies lies in the different rhythms of text narratives. "The former must have a gag at the end of each episode because it triggers the pay point, while the latter mainly has a beginning, development, climax, and ending."

Nowadays, many cinema movies are also moving towards "short-drama" narratives, and TikTok marketing breaks down movies into countless "hooks", creating a short-drama-style viewing experience and attracting audiences to the theaters.

These scenes also became a marketing tool for the film on Douyin. Among the six videos of "Silent Killing" that received more than 1 million likes on Douyin, four of them were bullying clips of the heroine being glued to the wall. This objectively contributed to the nearly 1 billion yuan box office of "Silent Killing".

But at the same time, this also deviates from the core purpose of the film to spread resistance against school bullying.

One netizen commented on last year's film "Gone Girl": "The marketing is greater than the content itself, or it may be that the expectations are too high due to the marketing. I was not surprised after watching it, it was just average."

Compared with the previous era of graphic marketing, when movies were driven by KOL copywriting, in the era of original and secondary short video creation, the KOL effect has weakened and movie dissemination has become more decentralized; short video content itself has become a greater driving force for audience consumption, and theater movies are likely to involuntarily lean towards the preferences of short video users, encouraging short video users to re-create movies.

Therefore, compared with 2019,In the cinema market from 2020 to 2024, the dispersion between word-of-mouth and box office will become greater, and the correlation with the popularity of Douyin will increase.

For example, last year's "All or Nothing" and "Gone Girl" were called "TikTok movies" by industry insiders due to their massive marketing. The Douban scores of the two were 6.9 and 6.2 respectively, and both earned more than 3 billion yuan in box office, ranking third and fourth in the annual box office list. The four movies ranked 5th to 8th in the box office had Douban reputations of 7.8, 7.6, 8.3, and 7.1 respectively, with the box office and reputation being inverted.

In 2019, the top four movies in the annual box office list all had Douban ratings of more than 7 points. Among them, the top three movies in the box office had Douban ratings of 8.4 (Nezha: The Devil Child Comes into the World), 8.3 (The Wandering Earth), and 8.5 (Avengers 4), and their reputations also ranked in the top three.

As TikTok videos have a great influence on audiences’ choices, movies with emotional twists and turns have become more and more popular at the box office. “This has also caused cinemas to schedule more films in favor of these movies,” Su Beiqi analyzed.

In contrast, art films, documentaries and cartoons with insufficient publicity and promotion budgets find it more difficult to gain a foothold than before.

Finding a new breakthrough

However, short video marketing can sometimes also create a gap in the screening schedule for low-cost, high-reputation movies.

In 2022, after the movie "Hidden in the Dust" was released in theaters, the box office rose from 10 million yuan to 100 million yuan through word-of-mouth fermentation of short videos. The movie promotion entered Dong Yuhui's live broadcast room of Oriental Selection, and the topic #Hidden in the Dust has a large backing# was played 1.13 billion times on Douyin, creating a rare achievement for a niche film.

"Tik Tok has brought more possibilities for the full fermentation of word-of-mouth. As audiences obtain movie information and word-of-mouth in faster and more diverse ways, good movies may also have a longer screening life cycle after word-of-mouth ferments," Ding Lei analyzed.

This means that the marketing team of theatrical films does not necessarily need to be deeply involved from the creative end, and can also try their best to explore the highlights of the film after it is completed.

The involvement of marketing teams in films at an earlier stage of production does not necessarily mean low quality.When hot memes are fully integrated into the plot, and suspense and reversal serve the content, the film will naturally be classified as an excellent commercial film rather than a typical "TikTok film."

For example, in the movie "Catching Dolls", Ma Chenggang and his wife are dressed in jewels and precious stones outside, but pretend to be poor in front of their son. The funny story is wrapped in a tragic core - the manipulative education method of East Asian parents for their children destroys the children's nature and triggers reflection on the education method. At present, the Douban score of the film is 7.4 points, which is a win-win case for theater movies and Douyin.

Of course, in the current era of fierce short video marketing, compared with 5 to 10 years ago, the factors that affect the box office are more diverse, the direction of public opinion is more difficult to judge, and the box office trend is more difficult to predict. The difficulty for the marketing team to stand out has also increased dramatically. "Sometimes the Douyin data is very good, but the pre-sale of movie tickets is very poor, because short videos have revealed too much film baggage, which has weakened the curiosity about the film. This shows that not all types of movies will generate box office revenue through Douyin marketing." Su Beiqi analyzed.

Therefore, different types of films such as comedy, suspense, and literature,At different stages of publicity and promotion, it is necessary to release the content of the materials at the right time and get rid of the burden step by step.

In the summer of 2023, the short video "She Vanished" became popular on Douyin, and the box office increased from tens of millions of yuan on the first day to over 100 million yuan a day later, all because the spoilers of "real and fake Li Muzi" were not leaked too early.

Source: Visual China

In addition, in Su Beiqi's opinion, the traffic pool of Douyin is so big. When all movie marketers come to grab a piece of Douyin's cake, in the long run, not every movie that uses Douyin will be a winner.

"Nowadays, for a movie with a marketing cost of 20 million yuan, publicity and distribution each account for about half of the cost (publicity is mainly online marketing, and distribution is mainly offline and roadshow expenses). Douyin accounts for about 60% to 70% of the 10 million yuan, which is a high proportion of the budget." Su Beiqi introduced. Not all types of movies will win if they do large-scale Douyin marketing, which forces theater movies to develop newer and more effective marketing models in the future.

Five years ago, it was called the "first year of Douyin marketing" by people in the film and television industry, which led to the gradual shift of online promotion of theater movies from Weibo to Douyin. Today, movies can also seek more diverse public opinion fields besides Douyin.

Ding Lei is a pseudonym in this article.