Huayu: Starting with Marketing Bad Movies

After the opening ceremony, Xu Feng treated the entire crew to dinner, and also invited Mr. Wang from Enlight Media, as well as Han Sanping.

Actually, the real purpose was to treat these two people to dinner; the crew members were just incidental.

Both of them are big names in the industry, especially Han Sanping.

Xu Feng asked Liu Yifei if she wanted to participate, but she declined. In the end, only the assistant director attended.

"Director Xu, are you interested in making blockbuster films?"

Before the restaurant's dishes were even served, Han Sanping spoke up.

Like Wang Changtian, he also came for Xu Feng.

"Unexpectedly" is a small production with a budget of ten million, and an investment of only one million is not worth Han Sanping's attention at all. His purpose in coming here today is actually to say this.

Xu Feng suddenly realized.

He understood why Han Sanping had come to the opening ceremony.

This has to do with the situation facing the domestic film industry.

In Xu Feng's view, the domestic film industry is thriving, like the rising sun, with a bright future.

Because he knows that in the future, domestic films will get better and better, and the box office will get higher and higher, while Hollywood films are gradually falling into formulaic patterns, being poisoned by political correctness, and becoming increasingly low quality.

But others believe that the domestic film industry is on its last legs and is in grave danger.

Since joining the WTO, China has opened its film market, and Hollywood has flocked in like sharks smelling blood.

These investors, operating without bloodshed, aim to completely dominate the domestic film market.

It must be admitted that domestic films at this time are indeed far behind Hollywood, whether in terms of plot, visuals, or even special effects, they are all far behind.

Currently, the highest-grossing film in the domestic market is "Avatar," with a total box office of 1.3 billion yuan.

The highest-grossing domestic film is "Aftershock," which grossed 650 million yuan, only half of what other films make.

This one movie alone grossed more than the combined box office of several of its successors.

Of the top ten highest-grossing films in the domestic market, half are Hollywood blockbusters, and three of the top five are Hollywood films, with only two being domestic productions.

During this period, when people discussed a movie's box office performance, they would instinctively talk about the box office of domestic films and actively ignore Hollywood movies.

Because everyone generally believes that Hollywood movies are a level above domestic movies, they are not products of the same class, and there is no need to compare them.

This is still the result of biased and underhanded dealings within the domestic system.

In order to protect domestic films and prevent the film market from being completely dominated by Hollywood, Han Sanping has done a lot of dirty tricks over the years, suppressing Hollywood blockbusters both openly and covertly.

They might deliberately schedule a Hollywood blockbuster for a bad release window, or release two Hollywood blockbusters at the same time.

Even so, domestic films still can't beat Hollywood blockbusters.

"The blockbuster I'm talking about is a period epic like 'Hero'," Han Sanping added.

He is worried about the current state of domestic films.

The film industry is an important part of the cultural industry, and the top leadership will absolutely not allow the market to be completely dominated by Hollywood.

As the chairman of China Film Group, Han Sanping was the first to bear the brunt.

When "Hero" was released in 2002, it not only grossed 200 million yuan at the domestic box office, but was also exported to China, earning hundreds of millions of US dollars and spreading Chinese culture.

It was from this movie that China began the era of commercial films, and stopped rushing to make art films.

With this successful example before her, Han Sanping became obsessed with making blockbusters, especially period dramas, hoping to use them to compete with Hollywood movies.

To this end, he specifically proposed a blockbuster strategy, hoping to revitalize domestic films and preserve the domestic film market through large investments and large productions.

Major domestic directors, such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and Feng Xiaogang, have all directed period epics under his influence.

It also sparked a trend of period dramas in China.

Xu Feng's first film was "The Warring States" because he was influenced by this trend.

Because leading actresses in period dramas can easily boost their careers, Starlight Entertainment invested in "The Warring States" and cast Sun Honglei and Wu Zhenyu as supporting actresses for Jing Tian.

However, Han Sanping's blockbuster strategy was not executed smoothly, and could even be described as a failure.

Starting with *The Promise*, followed by *House of Flying Daggers*, *Curse of the Golden Flower*, *The Banquet*...

None of these films performed well.

The domestic box office was poor, and the overseas box office was even worse.

In particular, the Hong Kong director Wu Baige's film "Red Cliff" gave all the main roles to Hong Kong actors, deliberately letting mainland actors elevate the status of Hong Kong actors.

Han Sanping tolerated all of this, but the final result was extremely bad.

Han Sanping had become somewhat disappointed with these big-name directors and began to turn her attention to other directors.

Xu Feng thus came into his view.

Regardless, Xu Feng is a director with 400 million yuan in box office revenue, ranking fifth on the list of domestic film box office charts. His achievements have surpassed all previous blockbusters, especially "Red Cliff".

Although this film's success mainly relied on marketing, it was still better than those directed by big-name directors.

Han Sanping thought about it very deeply.

The poor performance of "The Warring States" was mainly due to the abruptness of the character Jing Tian, ​​which led to the film's poor quality.

Putting aside the character Jing Tian, ​​Xu Feng's films are actually quite good, better than the blockbusters made by those big directors.

Even without considering Jing Tian, ​​"The Warring States" is better than Wu Baige's "Red Cliff" and "The Promise".

If he can fully support Xu Feng and not be hindered, the quality of the film will definitely be better.

Moreover, Xu Feng is so young; if he is properly trained, he will become a pillar of Chinese films in the future.

"I have indeed thought about making blockbuster films," Xu Feng said.

"oh."

Han Sanping's eyes lit up, and Wang Changtian, who was standing next to her, also became interested.

"Chairman Han, the situation of domestic films is indeed not very good right now, and I completely agree with your blockbuster strategy."

"But I think making purely period epics is useless; it can't compete with Hollywood at all. We need to upgrade."

"How so?" Han Sanping's interest was piqued.

Xu Feng's words hit a nerve, mainly because he really liked Xu Feng's confident demeanor.

"Mr. Han, these days Hollywood blockbusters are all about superheroes. Every single one of them has special abilities. Their fight scenes are full of special effects—flying, teleporting, shooting webs, summoning lightning, and there are even mutants."

"In this situation, even if we still make period dramas and martial arts films, no matter how well the action scenes are made, they can't compare to the coolness of someone with superpowers. They are inherently inferior to others."

"They're using machine guns and cannons, while we're still using broadswords and spears. Our weapons are inferior to theirs, so how can we possibly win? If we want to defeat them, we definitely need to upgrade our weapons first."

"Be more specific," Han Sanping said, her heart itching with curiosity.