This year's film Dragon Boat Festival is not hot. According to the data of Lighthouse professional edition, as of 18:40 on June 5, the total box office (including service fee) of the Dragon Boat Festival stalls reached 172million yuan, with a total of 4.925 million tickets and 1.0625 million sessions. According to the latest statistics, as of June 4, the total number of cinemas in China has reached 9648, with a business rate of 79.7%.
It is generally believed in the industry that this round of epidemic has been effectively controlled. With the continuous improvement of the prevention and control situation and the recovery of offline cinemas, it will promote the return of squeezed content and drive the film industry to fully restore confidence.
Zhangrongdi, an industry analyst at the lighthouse Research Institute, told the Securities Daily, "the overall box office revenue of the Dragon Boat Festival this year is slightly lower than that of the May Day, but the average one-day box office level is close to that of the May Day, both at about 60million yuan."
Throughout the year, the Dragon Boat Festival is not a key schedule, but for theaters that need to "recover", this year's Dragon Boat Festival is more like a "warm-up" to test the market with small and medium-sized films, so that the film makers can restore confidence, so as to save energy for the next market recovery and prosperity.
According to the lighthouse data, the top three films at the box office are: secret love · orange born in Huainan, the League of bad guys and Doraemon: Daxiong's little war in the universe 2021. The box office of these three films during the period is 45.668 million yuan, 40.405 million yuan and 24.009 million yuan respectively
In terms of attendance, the average attendance of the above three films was 5, 8 and 5 respectively. In other words, the best performance "secret love · orange born in Huainan" has only 5 viewers per screening
"The shortage of films is still serious. The top three films at the box office are released on June 2, April 29 and May 28 respectively. The films of the Spring Festival are still being released. For cinemas and audiences, there are too few choices. Since June 1, only seven new films have been released, most of which are of the type of zero publicity, and there are not many interesting ones." A cinema manager told reporters that he expected the new films released in mid and late June to turn the tide.
Jurassic world 3 has been set for June 10, and may be the first shot of summer blockbuster. At present, 324400 people have expressed "want to see" the film on the lighthouse platform. A securities analyst focusing on the TMT industry told the Securities Daily that the screening end has stabilized at present, but some film makers still hold a wait-and-see attitude and dare not easily test the water with heavy content. At this time, the release of the imported film Jurassic world 3 will certainly increase the confidence of film makers to set the file if it can trigger a movie viewing boom.
The Research Report of GF Securities said that at present, the content end of the film market presents "larger head, longer tail and missing waist". During the epidemic period, the box office concentration of films increased. This is because the repeated epidemic has led to a significant reduction in the "social value" of films. Audiences are more cautious in choosing film viewing content. The center of loyal and flexible film viewing people has obviously moved down. However, the audience's consumption demand for high-quality film content has not been reduced due to the epidemic.
According to the research report, as the national epidemic continues to improve, it is expected that local cinemas will gradually resume normal operation after June. "We expect the box office excluding service fees to reach 41.5 billion yuan in 2022, returning to 70% of the level in 2019. It is expected that the national box office will increase by 62% year-on-year to 67.3 billion yuan in 2023."
In terms of box office distribution, according to the lighthouse data, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu and Chongqing performed well at the Dragon Boat Festival this year, and Chengdu and Xi'an also performed well at the box office.
"This year, the Dragon Boat Festival stalls have been greatly affected by the epidemic. Shanghai cinemas are still shutting down. The number of operating cinemas in Beijing is less than 100, and the operating rate is close to 40%." Zhangrongdi further said.
In the view of the above analysts, the recovery performance of the sinking market of the film industry is better than that of the first and second tier cities. Take the Dragon Boat Festival stalls as an example. The box office revenue of the third and fourth tier cities was 75.09 million yuan, which has recovered to about 40% of that of the same period last year. "On the one hand, most cinemas in cities below the third tier are open as usual; on the other hand, cross city and inter provincial tourism is reduced during the epidemic period, and the demand for local entertainment is increased; in addition, the penetration rate of cinemas in cities below the third tier is low, and the marginal improvement space of users' viewing demand is large."
On the whole, there is still a large demand space for movie viewing in China's second to fifth tier cities. According to the Research Report of GF Securities, the number of movie viewing per capita in China's first to fifth tier cities in 2019 was about 3.36, 2.08, 0.87, 0.62 and 0.47 respectively, compared with about 3.76 in the United States in 2019.
"In the past, troublemakers in the Internet industry used low prices to attract film users. Judging from the situation in recent years, the era of low price tickets has passed. In the future, it is more the quality of the film that determines whether the audience enters the cinema." Ye Dong, CEO of Yuedong culture, told the Securities Daily.