CATDOLL: "Seer" movie lost five consecutive championships in the summer season, seeking a breakthrough is the real

This year's summer movie season is full of blockbusters and surprises. The fifth movie of "Seeker", which was once boldly declared to be an animation exclusively for the post-00s, lost its five consecutive championships in the face of the double suppression of "The Monkey King: Hero is Back", which represents the highest level of domestic animation, and "Monster Hunt", which is comparable to Hollywood blockbusters.

Judging from the previous box office results, the first four movies of "Seer" have a cumulative box office of 230 million yuan, and have been the box office champion of domestic animation movies in summer for four consecutive years. This is undoubtedly a very good result. Especially last year, "Seer Movie 4: Holy Demon War" had a box office of 62.31 million yuan, surpassing Shanda's "Dragon Nest Dawn" and Tencent's "Lock Kingdom 3" to become the box office champion of the summer animation.

However, as of yesterday evening, the box office of Seer 5: The Rise of the Thunder God (hereinafter referred to as Seer 5) exceeded 40 million in 4 days. Although it has refreshed the first-week box office record of the series, compared with the 95.1 million in the first week of The Return of the Great Sage and the 640 million in the first week of Monster Hunt, Seer 5 is obviously not in the same order of magnitude.

Fortunately, there is only one animated film released in the mainland market this weekend, so there is still a lot of market space left for "Seer 5".

Market competition is fierce, if you don’t advance, you will fall behind

The box office of a series of movies is like sailing against the current. If you don't move forward, you will fall behind. In the context of a hot market and a box office blowout, according to the growth rate of 30 billion in the domestic box office last year and 40 billion expected this year, the average box office growth of each movie should reach 33%. According to Maoyan Movie data, "Seer 5" had a box office of 11.74 million on the first day and 40.51 million in the first week. Compared with the first week of 39.28 million of the previous work "Seer 4: Holy Demon War", the fifth part only had an extra 1 million box office.

The difficult growth of the box office of "Seeker" is closely related to the fierce competition in the domestic animation film market. The two most popular movies this summer, "The Return of the Great Sage" and "Monster Hunt", are both animation-themed, and they have rewritten many Chinese box office records in just one month. On July 16, "Monster Hunt" set a record for the first-day box office of a mainland movie, and on July 18, it broke the single-day box office in the mainland; on July 25, "The Return of the Great Sage" surpassed "Kung Fu Panda 2" to become the box office champion in the history of animated films. And at midnight yesterday, "Monster Hunt" broke the record of "Lost in Thailand" two years ago with a box office of 1.276 billion, and won the box office champion of Chinese films.

With these two "100 million yuan big hits", other cartoons have become cannon fodder. "Pig Man: Final Battle", which took the lead in this summer's movie season, is also a series of movies. Although it had a box office of 29.73 million in the first week, it has fallen off a cliff since the 13th, and the current cumulative box office is 45.09 million. "Aura Star: Assault on the Temple", which was released on the same day as "Case 5", also had a very bleak box office and has not yet broken 10 million. In addition to domestic films, the only imported cartoon, "Shaun the Sheep", which was released on the 17th, has a Douban score of 8.5, but its box office performance is also mediocre, with 26.46 million in the first week and a current cumulative box office of 45.8 million.

It can be seen that with the emergence of high-quality domestic animations, the audience's viewing choices have increased and their tastes have improved, the polarization of the box office will become more and more obvious, and bad movies will have no place to stand. Compared with the 350 million yuan investment and 6 years of production of "Monster Hunt" and the 10 million US dollars investment and 8 years of production of "The Return of the Great Sage", "Seer 5" is known as "heavy investment, comprehensive upgrade of animation technology and visual effects, and the production team is top in the industry", but the production time is only 1 year after all.

Compared with previous years, this year's publicity and promotion efforts have been greatly strengthened. Among the investors of "Seer 5", in addition to Taomi Company, Enlight Pictures, which is good at using small costs to win high box office, has participated in the production and distribution of the series since the third film. Beijing Kaku is also cooperating for the second time. The newly joined iQiyi brings powerful Baidu big data resources, laying the foundation for the film's full platform efforts. Overall, except for the loss to "The Monkey King" and "Little Demon", "Seer 5" can be regarded as a normal performance, seeking progress in stability.

How to break through to create a breakthrough for all age groups?

If the Monkey King: Hero is Back, which relies on strong word-of-mouth, represents the pinnacle of the Chinese animation pyramid, then the Seer series is a typical example of the operation of the animation and game industry chain. For Taomi, which started out as an online community game, Seer has its own unique development path.

In order to build a mature IP and create a full industrial chain, since the release of the first animated film "Seer" in 2011, Taomi Company has been laying out the animation film market at the pace of two big movies every year (the big movie "Mole Manor" during the Spring Festival and the big movie "Seer" during the summer vacation).

However, unlike the truly "all-age" animation "The Monkey King: Hero is Back", the consumer age group of Taomi's two core IPs, whether "Seer" or "Mole Manor", has always been around children aged 6 to 14. This has led to a relatively limited target group for its derivative films.

Faced with a broader market, Taomi is no longer content to remain isolated and is consciously beginning to expand the age range of its consumer groups. It says that the company's movies and games can attract audiences of teenagers over 14 years old or even older. After all, the more mature the audience, the stronger their viewing autonomy and consumer purchasing power.

Compared with the previous four games, "Series 5" can be said to have a sudden change in "style". The character modeling is subversive compared to "Series 4". The gods of war have been upgraded from masks to human faces, with more handsome appearances and richer and more three-dimensional facial expressions. The story setting, animation technology and visual effects, as well as the realistic creation of battle scenes have made great progress.

Taomi Company said that in the future, the company will not only have further breakthroughs in quantity, but will also produce 300 episodes of animation and 5 movies. At the same time, it will pay more attention to the upgrade of the production quality of the Seer world view and create a new superhero star image represented by the "God of War Alliance". The special effects team of "Seer 5" used the same level of special effects technology as top cartoon companies such as Disney and DreamWorks. The whole film has nearly 300 special effects shots, which is the first step towards a large-scale production.

The IP image is weak, how to layout the entire industry chain?

As a game company, Taomi CEO Wang Haibing emphasized Taomi's "Seer" strategy when talking about the company's overall development strategy for the next five years at the "Seer 5" movie launch conference on July 23: Taomi will work together in three aspects: "content", "brand" and "business ecology" to create a national classic animation brand.

Along with the release of the movie, Taomi announced five mobile games around the IP of "Seeler", covering MOBA, parkour, card, horizontal fighting and other types. In addition to mobile games, animation, web games, and other products as well as derivative products such as books and toys will all be developed around the animation. There is no doubt that the core IP will be the soul of the entire industry chain.

Although the box office has been good over the years, the scores of Seer movies on Douban are very low: Seer 1 scored 3.2, Seer 2 scored 4.1, Seer 3 scored 4.6, Seer 4 scored 4.2, and the fifth movie scored only 3.3. Perhaps this is inconsistent with the real feedback from the target group (children aged 6-14), but the "Seer" IP, as the core of the strategy, is indeed facing the dilemma of lack of word-of-mouth.

From robots to superheroes, "Seeler 5" has a major protagonist change this time, focusing on the concept of "God of War Alliance". However, in the audience feedback, many people said that the protagonist's image is suspected of plagiarizing the American Marvel series and the Japanese Dragon Ball, and the posters and trailers are exactly the same as "Fast and Furious 7".

In fact, in the early stages of the production of "Seer 5", Wang Yu, vice president of Taomi and producer of "Seer The Movie", and his team personally went to Los Angeles to visit the 92-year-old "Father of Marvel" Stan Lee, who also made some suggestions on the final image of the protagonist.

Although imitating high-quality IPs is understandable, "superheroes" as imported products are already familiar to the majority of Chinese audiences. If we simply move the popular IPs in adult movies to Seer, then Taomi may still only attract audiences of lower age groups. In the long run, the key to Seer's escape from the shadow of "Marvel" and improve its reputation may still be the word "originality".