Behind a Seemingly Friendly New Year Season, a "Cold War" Among Film Companies

Using their own cinema chains, ticketing-app subsidies, huge paid previews, waiving their box office share in breach of industry rules: film companies will try almost anything to win the New Year season.

With three "blockbusters" — Mojin: The Lost Legend, Mr. Six and Devil and Angel — China's box office in December 2015 finally shook off the gloom of several weak years and closed the month at a healthy 4.22 billion yuan. That made the 2015 New Year season the most successful in years.

Some put this down to the films agreeing that "harmony makes money." In early December, Mojin: The Lost Legend, Devil and Angel and Mr. Six released a joint trailer, announcing that they had formed a New Year film alliance and would promote themselves together.

In hindsight, the alliance was more form than substance, a polite gesture. The "cold war" behind these films showed no sign of easing. On December 28, at a press event for Mr. Six in Shanghai, its star Feng Xiaogang said: "Huayi is the well-behaved kid who gets bullied. It doesn't stage paid previews in other films' release windows, and it doesn't do what some films do and tell cinemas it's giving up its first-day share of the box office and handing all of it to them. Of course cinemas will then give you every screening."

The "paid previews" Feng meant were, of course, those of Surprise, the film spun off from the web series Wanwan Meixiangdao. On December 12, the "Double 12" shopping day, its "paid previews" took nearly 20% of all screenings in the country, about what a film gets in a normal release. As for "giving up the first day's share," many suspected Feng was taking a swipe at Deng Chao's Devil and Angel. Devil and Angel, which opened the same day as Mr. Six, got 42.2% of all screenings; Mr. Six got only 22.56%.

Whether or not Feng's claims are true, they show at least one thing: faced with the huge cake that is the New Year box office, no film company will let go of its slice lightly.

The New Year season is a window every major film company prizes

The New Year season began in Hong Kong. At every holiday, Hong Kong studios would release a few lively, crowd-pleasing films; moviegoers in a festive mood were happy to see them and flocked to cinemas, and over time this became a release season of its own.

In mainland China, the rise of the New Year season is inseparable from one name: Feng Xiaogang. Starting with The Dream Factory in 1997, a Feng New Year comedy opened every December. His films made people laugh and suited the holiday mood perfectly. From 2003, Zhang Yimou's martial arts blockbusters joined the window too, and the New Year season was born.

The New Year season was once considered China's most important release window, because it really did bring in a large share of the year's box office. In 2012, for example, the year's total was 16.8 billion yuan, and in December alone the New Year season brought in 2.5 billion yuan from just two films, Lost in Thailand and CZ12. In 2015, December was again among the top-grossing months, second only to July and the summer season.

The New Year season has been fading over the past two years — December box office was 2.2 billion yuan in 2013 and 2.5 billion in 2014, growing far more slowly than the year's total — but it is still a big cake, and it still accounts for a considerable share of annual box office.

For most film companies, December also matters for another reason: it is their last chance to push up the year's results.

China's established private film companies, such as Huayi Brothers, Enlight Media and Bona Film Group, are all publicly listed, and December is the last month of their financial year. Whether they can turn in a good-looking annual report and win over investors depends on that final month. So they will not pass up the last sprint, and competition across the season will only grow fiercer.

There is one more important reason. Over the past 20 years, more than half of the annual box office champions came out of this window, especially the stretch from Christmas through the New Year's Day holiday. So studio bosses always put their most marketable films here, hoping to bring home the box office crown. When heavyweights meet, a fight is inevitable.

Too many films, too little box office: every trick, open and covert, comes out

As competition intensifies, however big the New Year cake is, there may not be enough to go around. So every year-end the major studios go all out and cram their best films into this window. This season it was Mojin: The Lost Legend, Mr. Six and Devil and Angel. Last season it was Gone with the Bullets, The Taking of Tiger Mountain and The Crossing. The year before, it was Personal Tailor, Police Story: Lockdown and Firestorm. Good or bad, these are all films with big casts and big budgets, the films best able to draw audiences.

But clearly that alone does not give anyone a decisive advantage. So in recent years we have seen many studios come to blows over this market, even dropping all pretense of civility. One of the earliest cases was the 2011 New Year season, with The Flowers of War and Flying Swords of Dragon Gate.

At the time, the market expected big things from both. The first was directed by Zhang Yimou and cast Christian Bale, who had played Batman, in the lead. The second had an impressive pedigree too: directed by Tsui Hark, starring Jet Li, Zhou Xun, Chen Kun, Li Yuchun and others.

The two films were originally scheduled to open on different days. But Bona Film Group, the studio behind Flying Swords of Dragon Gate, struck first: its president, Yu Dong, moved the film's release forward to open alongside The Flowers of War. "After careful consideration, we feel Flying Swords of Dragon Gate cannot miss the precious weekend of December 16. The quality of this film gives us absolute confidence in facing any opponent."

Yu Dong then went on a TV program and mocked The Flowers of War, accusing it of "inflating the film's budget to 600 million yuan, trading on borrowed prestige in its North American publicity, and passing its investment risk on to the audience."

The Flowers of War producer Zhang Weiping hit back, declaring that he would not supply prints of the film to Bona Cinemas, the chain owned by Bona Film Group.

In the end, nobody won. Flying Swords of Dragon Gate finished at 540 million yuan and The Flowers of War at 590 million yuan. The 2011 box office crown went to Transformers: Dark of the Moon, with 1.07 billion yuan.

After the cautionary tale of Flying Swords of Dragon Gate and The Flowers of War, spiteful release-date clashes became much rarer. In the 2012 New Year season, for instance, five films — The Grandmaster, The Guillotines, The Last Tycoon, CZ12 and Lost in Thailand — were at one point all set for December 20. But the billed "bloodiest New Year season in history" never happened. Lost in Thailand moved up to December 12 and became the first Chinese-language film to gross more than 1 billion yuan.

That is not to say the New Year season turned friendly. Starting with the 2014 season, studios began enlisting outside help for their marketing, and the help they leaned on most was ticketing apps.

Studios wanted to sell more tickets and ticketing apps wanted more users, so they began heavily subsidizing tickets, which made tickets in last year's New Year season absurdly cheap.

Tickets presold on Tmall for Double 11 cost just 19.9 yuan each, and less than a week later WeChat Movie Tickets launched 9.9-yuan tickets. After that, iQiyi's midnight screenings of Gone with the Bullets and Maoyan's presales for My Early Menopause Girlfriend were also priced at 9.9 yuan.

9.9-yuan tickets did pull moviegoers into cinemas, but it is hard to say they won any film a bigger share of the New Year market. Look at last year's films: the much-anticipated Gone with the Bullets and The Crossing (Part 1) both flopped, to everyone's surprise, while The Taking of Tiger Mountain rode strong word of mouth to become the biggest winner.

So by this year's New Year season, there were fewer 9.9-yuan tickets (partly, of course, because the money to burn had run out), and more "rule-breaking" tactics. A week before its release, Surprise held a paid preview that looked nothing like a preview: it took nearly 20% of screenings and grossed 110 million yuan. Both figures crushed films already on normal release at the time, such as Point Break and The Final Master.

This is clearly a double-edged sword. For a film that is good enough, a large early preview can build word of mouth. For Surprise, it became the biggest blunder: the bad word of mouth from the previews largely dragged down its run. A final 320 million yuan is not a disaster, but it fell short of the studio's expectations.

A preview on the scale of Surprise's also caused considerable resentment, because although it was billed as a paid preview, it was in practice no different from a normal release, and it undermined the industry rule of "fixing a release date."

Films announce a fixed release date in advance to avoid cutthroat competition. Star Wars, for example, announced early on that it would open on December 18, 2015, so other films could stay out of its way and give themselves a better shot at the box office.

A preview as large as Surprise's makes a fixed release date meaningless. Films that had planned to dodge competition by opening before Surprise ended up colliding with it, and naturally fared badly. That was not their fault; Surprise simply broke the rules.

As for the "no box office share on the first day" that Feng Xiaogang described, that is even more outrageous. Done to grab more screenings for a moment, it wrecks the balance between studios and cinemas, and only intensifies cutthroat competition among studios. If every studio did this, cinemas would end up scheduling whichever film offered the biggest kickback rather than judging films on quality. That plainly does not serve audiences either.

Just two days ago, Detective Chinatown and Devil and Angel traded insults over posters. On the night of January 1, a party suspected to be Detective Chinatown's promoters posted the two posters below on WeChat Moments. Lines like "Devil terminator, a shot in the arm for the box office" read like a call to open fire on Devil and Angel.

Devil and Angel was never going to sit still under such an attack. It posted on Weibo calling the poster above "the ugliest poster of 2016". That is hardly an exaggeration: promoting your own film by taking veiled shots at a rival is about as low as marketing gets.

Afterward, Detective Chinatown's studio, director Chen Sicheng and star Wang Baoqiang all said the poster was not official, and blamed the "Aipobosi Technology Company" that had posted it. The Devil and Angel side said it would not discuss the matter again. The affair seemed to end there, but it is just a small sample of the competition among New Year films.

Whatever the marketing tricks, quality is what guarantees the box office

Using their own cinema chains, ticketing-app subsidies, huge previews, waiving their box office share in breach of industry rules: New Year films compete by every means imaginable. But none of these may achieve anything.

In fact, if you look at the big winners of the past few New Year seasons, you find that the films that really win are the genuinely good ones.

In the 2012 New Year season, we watched Lost in Thailand set records. It is no masterpiece, but as a genre comedy it was very well made, its jokes were not crude, and it even had a quiet depth in how it reflected the confusion and anxiety of China's middle class today.

In the 2014 New Year season, squeezed between Gone with the Bullets and The Crossing (Part 1), The Taking of Tiger Mountain broke through and finished with 880 million yuan. It did no special marketing either; next to the other two films, it stood out simply for its solid, well-told story.

In the 2015 New Year season, Mojin: The Lost Legend and Mr. Six were the biggest winners. The first is seen as the best the Chinese film industry can currently do; the second captures precisely how old Beijingers hold on to their ways and clash with a new era. Their takings of 1.5 billion yuan and 700 million yuan were well deserved.

Of course, we are not saying marketing doesn't matter. Studios at least need to tell potential moviegoers that another big film is coming at year's end, and that they are welcome to come and see it. But we hope studios will stick to fair competition and work hard to make good films. What goes around comes around: break the industry's rules today, and the rules may make you pay tomorrow.

And don't forget: audiences are always smarter than you think.

Cover image: Douban