Millennium director

June to August has always been a popular period for movies, especially overseas.

However, the hottest period in the Chinese market has always been the Lunar New Year period in December, and the National Day and Spring Festival periods are also relatively important periods.

However, last year, the summer period of 2015, performed very well.

The total box office of domestic films in the 2015 summer period was 7.813 billion yuan. The top three last summer films, "Monster Hunt", "The Pancake Man" and "The Monkey King: Hero is Back", attracted more than 4 billion yuan in box office.

Among them, "Monster Hunt" had the highest box office (and the highest water content), and "The Monkey King: Hero is Back" had the best reputation, and even set off a wave of the rise of domestic animation.

However, no matter how glorious it was, it was last year.

Whether this year's summer period will be good, current industry practitioners are full of confidence.

Because the movies that have been confirmed for this year's summer season include "Warcraft", which has a volume of at least 2 billion yuan, and "X-Men: Apocalypse" and "Jason Bourne", which are also Hollywood blockbusters.

In the field of domestic films, there are also movies such as "Big Fish and Begonia", "The Wasted Times", "Skiptrace", "Cold War 2", "Line Walker" and "Three's Journey".

However, Wu Yuan vaguely remembers that there seems to be no memorable movie in this summer season.

The only movie that can be said to have left an impression is the animated movie "Big Fish and Begonia".

As for live-action movies, whether it is Hollywood blockbusters or Chinese-language movies, all of them failed.

Some investors wanted to make a lot of money in this summer season with a certain movie, but in the end they lost all their money and disappeared from the film industry.

At the end of the 2016 summer season, no movie box office exceeded 1 billion yuan. The box office of domestic movies shrank by 3.13 billion yuan compared with the same period last year.

"It's bleak, there are no movies to support it, and everyone is disappointed with the summer season."

"I really can't choose a bad movie, because they are all bad."

This is Wu Yuan's impression of this year's summer season.

What he didn't know was that, even more embarrassingly, this year's bad domestic movies almost took over the entire summer season.

Especially domestic horror movies.

I don't know what happened, but this year's summer season has scheduled a bunch of horror movies, including "The Sound of Magic City" and "The Wheel of Devil", all of which are domestic horror movies, most of which are rated below 3 points.

Later, some netizens commented under these domestic horror movies: "I'm embarrassed to be discovered that I watched this movie."

Youth films used to be the main box office drivers of the summer season, but this year they are almost all bad and have been collectively complained about.

The domestic youth films that occupied the main market of the summer season in previous years have not performed well this year.

The blockbuster movies that were praised by word of mouth last year did not appear.

In the current mainland film industry, capital operations such as high guaranteed releases have become the mainstream, and it is precisely because of this "high guaranteed" that this summer season will cause many film and television companies to go bankrupt.

No matter how big the guaranteed amount is, if the movie is not good, the audience will not buy it.

There are many examples of this. For example, before the release of "One Step Away", everyone was very optimistic, and all theaters gave it a high screening schedule.

But after the premiere night, theater managers across the country did one thing, which was to adjust the screening schedule.

The next day, many screenings of "One Step Away" were withdrawn, and the screening schedule was directly cut by more than half.

It has been so long that Wu Yuan actually doesn't remember the exact situation of the 2016 summer season. He doesn't even know that 100 movies were released in the three months of this summer, but two-thirds of them had a Douban score of less than 5 points, which is called the worst summer season in history.

But after he saw the list of movies that Li Xiaoping handed over and have been confirmed to be scheduled for the summer, he immediately confirmed that "Ready Player One" will be scheduled for the summer!

"The Warcraft movie is scheduled for June 8th, and it will be released in China two days earlier than in North America?"

Wu Yuan felt a little amused as he pointed at the Warcraft movie that was ranked first on the list.

Li Xiaoping believed that this movie was the most threatening movie in the entire summer season, with a box office potential of at least 2 billion yuan, and it was a movie that must be avoided.

To be honest, before the release of the Warcraft movie, all the publicity for this movie was indeed perfect.

From online to offline, it seems that everyone was once a dog of the Alliance or a dog of the Horde, and they wanted to buy a movie ticket for their youth and go to the cinema to watch this movie.

In short, the momentum was very huge, giving people a feeling that the box office performance would break records.

In addition, the film company has been promoting the fact that A-Zu joined, which added fuel to the fire.

But Wu Yuan is very clear about the box office performance of Warcraft. This movie is a typical case of the greater the hope, the greater the disappointment.

Warcraft is far from a perfect movie. Before its release, countless film critics and experts believed that the box office of this movie was at least 2 billion yuan, and then the box office in the mainland finally only received 1.47 billion yuan, which was far below expectations.

The North American box office was even lower, with only $10 million on the first day, $24 million in the first three days of its release, and a final box office of $47.08 million, less than $50 million, and even less than a quarter of the mainland box office.

It can only be said that domestic audiences are too generous and are much easier to fool than North American audiences.

Of course, no one knew that the highly anticipated "Warcraft" would perform so poorly.

Wu Yuan didn't want to act like a prophet in front of Li Xiaoping and predict that the box office performance of this movie would be poor.

Besides, the box office of 1.4 billion yuan is not a small amount, so there is no need to compete with this movie for the release date.

After thinking about it, Wu Yuan nodded and said, "Then let's schedule it in July, the second week of July."

There are many movies released in the first week of July, including "Big Fish and Begonia" and "Cold War 2", which are relatively popular movies.

The schedule of the second week of July is currently relatively empty, and only "Lu Yao Zhi Mali" can be considered to have spent money on publicity, and the rest of the low-cost movies are not worth mentioning.

If "Ready Player One" is released in the second week of July, that is, on the 15th, then "Grave Robbers' Chronicles" will be released in the next half month until August 5, which may pose a little threat to "Ready Player One".

However, Wu Yuan has always looked down on this kind of fan-oriented movies, not to mention that this "Grave Robbers' Chronicles" movie is played by Xiaolu, one of the four returning sons, so there is no threat at all.

Besides, by that time, Ready Player One would have been released for two weeks, and the box office revenue would have been mostly earned, so it wouldn’t matter if it had any impact.

Li Xiaoping also thought this was a good choice. After receiving the schedule from Wu Yuan and confirming it again, she nodded and agreed, “July 15th is indeed a good date. The Legend of the Gods starring Jet Li, Fan Binbin, and Huang Xiaoming will be released on the 29th, so there will be a two-week window.”

“The Legend of the Gods?” Wu Yuan sneered and said indifferently, “Don’t worry about this movie!” (End of this chapter)