Chapter 346 Golden Rooster and Golden Horse
November 10, 2008, sunny.
Tokyo.
In the past week, the Chinese films "Red Cliff 1" and "Gravity", which have become famous in Japan, have officially opened in more than 400 cinemas in Tokyo.
Rarely, the Tokyo film market, which has been quiet for a year, has become hot. Long queues have formed in major cinemas. Audiences and fans in Tokyo and from surrounding cities and counties have waved their money to buy tickets for the upcoming shows.
Among them, two-thirds of the audience bought tickets for "Red Cliff 1", and less than one-third bought tickets for "Gravity".
Compared with the ordinary space science fiction films in the eyes of Japanese audiences, "Red Cliff 1" with the theme of the Three Kingdoms is indeed more pleasing to the audience.
At least on the opening day, more fans chose to watch "Red Cliff 1".
This also made Wu Baige very excited and regained some face.
The Japanese market has always been regarded as Wu Yuan's big ticket bank. Among the directors from both sides of the Taiwan Strait and Hong Kong, no one has such a huge box office appeal in Japan as Wu Yuan.
But now this "monopoly" seems to be broken by Wu Baige.
With the Three Kingdoms + Jin Chengwu, two points that Japanese movie fans are very interested in, "Red Cliff: Part 1" has triggered a wave of movie watching as soon as it was released.
On the Internet, the Heisei men who watched the movie as soon as possible also gave a lot of comments on the movie.
In general, although the mainland audience is not very satisfied with Wu Baige's magical plot changes in "Red Cliff", the Japanese audience is still quite acceptable.
They even have no objection to letting Lin Chiling play Xiao Qiao as the protagonist.
Originally, Xiao Qiao is a well-known beauty in the Three Kingdoms in Japan. It doesn't matter that the story revolves around her and Zhou Yu.
As for the phrase "Meng Meng, stand up" that was mocked by the mainland audience, because of the re-dubbing, and the word "Meng Meng" lost its flavor after being translated into Japanese, it did not cause any complaints among the Japanese movie fans.
This made "Red Cliff: Part 1" have a very good reputation and box office performance in Japan within three days of its release. The cumulative box office in three days exceeded 1 billion yen, and it won a lot of attention from Japanese movie fans.
In comparison, the box office performance of "Gravity" in Japan was relatively flat, with a box office performance of only 400 million yen in three days. Although it also showed an upward trend, this kind of hard science fiction movie really has no good soil in Japan.
Japanese movie fans have never been very interested in "science fiction" themes. Whether it is the once popular "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" in the world, or the later surreal soft science fiction Marvel series of movies, they have failed many times in the Japanese box office market and cannot beat local small fresh movies.
Wu Yuan naturally cannot change the preferences of Japanese movie fans by himself.
However, the Japanese reputation and ratings of "Gravity" are still very high. On the Japanese film review website, the opening score reached 8.5 points and is still rising.
In terms of plot depth and thought depth, Gravity is several dimensions higher than Red Cliff 1. Even the most cunning film critics have to admit that this movie is excellent.
Although it is a little worse than Red Cliff 1 in terms of box office, Gravity is higher than Red Cliff 1 in terms of word-of-mouth rating, which can be regarded as a comeback.
However, what really makes Wu Yuan proud is the market share that Gravity has snatched from Red Cliff 1 after the two movies were released at the same time.
Judging from the current box office trend, the box office forecast for Red Cliff 1 in Japan is only around 4 billion yen, which is 1 billion yen less than the 5 billion in the original time and space.
The Japanese box office forecast for Gravity is around 2.5 billion yen, which is not a lot. At least compared with the box office of Your Name, which is more than 10 billion, the gap is huge, but converted into RMB, it is also 150 million, and the light and shadow era can get 40 million.
It has to be admitted that making high-cost hard science fiction movies is really thankless.
In the absence of a global market, "Gravity" only relied on the Asian market, with a cost of 350 million yuan, even if the money from selling European and American distribution rights was added, it only made about 100 million yuan, which is the work with the lowest profit ratio of Wu Yuan's filmmaking so far.
However, this movie did earn Wu Yuan a lot of other hidden benefits in China.
Awakening the "science fiction dream" of domestic movie fans is a good thing, becoming a business card of Chinese movies is another good thing, and Chinese-language movies have mastered the science fiction field on the crown of movies, which is another good thing.
If Zhang Yimou became a national master after the opening ceremony of the Olympics, and opened up a level gap with other directors in the mainland, then Wu Yuan also jumped out of the level after the release of "Gravity" and stood on the same level as Zhang Yimou.
Although the position of the national master may not be comparable, it is only half a step behind at most, and there is still a clear gap with other directors who are not at the same level.
Even the Golden Rooster Awards, which had always rejected Wu Yuan, were ordered to invite Wu Yuan to participate and present the award to Gravity.
Although the new Golden Rooster Awards will not open until October next year, it has basically been decided that Gravity will be the best film of the Golden Rooster Awards next year.
Gong Li will also win the Golden Rooster Best Actress Award for the third time with this movie, becoming the first actress to win three Golden Rooster Best Actress awards.
In fact, when Wu Yuan got the news, his first thought was not to flatter the Golden Rooster.
However, the person who notified him was the leader of the Ministry of Culture, and the leader was so gentle and soft-spoken. Not only did he say a lot of good things, but he also brought up the argument of "uniting domestic comrades", so Wu Yuan couldn't refuse to participate.
But he also saw clearly that the Golden Rooster was really hopeless. The important awards were either internally determined by the nepotism organizing committee to their own juniors, or designated by the top, and had nothing to do with fair selection at all.
The Golden Horse also sent an invitation to Wu Yuan this year.
It was not "Gravity", but "A Man Called Li Wen Decides to Die" was nominated for the 45th Golden Horse Awards for Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress.
God knows why "A Man Called Li Wen Decides to Die", which was not released in Taiwan, received so many nominations.
Anyway, this is not the first time that the Golden Horse Awards have done this, so much so that the award-winning guests have asked a soul-searching question about the film release mechanism in Taiwan: "Why haven't we seen many of the nominated films in Taiwan?"
"We should allow more excellent mainland films to enter Taiwan's cinemas so that Taiwan's movie fans can also enjoy them."
See, there are still sober filmmakers in Taiwan, although not many.
It is also because of this that after receiving the invitation from the Golden Horse Awards this time, Wu Yuan counted on his fingers and found that there are still ten years before the 2018 Golden Horse Awards, so he can go to the Golden Horse Awards this year.
Relatively speaking, "the most fair and just of the three awards" is indeed more worthy of participation among the three Chinese awards.
However, even if it is the most fair and just Golden Horse Awards, in the original time and space, this year's "The Warlords" will beat "Assembly" to win the Best Feature Film and beat "Cape No. 7" to win the Best Director.
You tell me that this award is fair and just?
You lose if you take it seriously.