Look! Beyond Gone with the Bullets, the 2014 Year-End Season Has 8 More Films, 3 Defining Traits and 3 Open Questions

The year-end season is the most important window in the film calendar, and it is usually where we see the year's best domestic films. Here are the films and trends worth watching this year.

With The Crossing (Part 1) opening in cinemas today, this year's year-end box-office race has officially begun.

December is the most reliable month of the year for box-office revenue, and in most years it is also the highest-grossing. Audiences are keen to see films before the new year, and studios hold back their biggest card of the year for this window, hoping that good timing, a good position and a little luck will win them a high place in the box-office rankings.

This window produces results. In 13 of the past 15 years, the top-grossing Chinese-language film on the mainland came out of the December season. The only two misses were The Founding of a Republic in 2009 (September) and Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons in 2013 (February).

It is also the window where policy intervention is most visible. To protect domestic cinema, December usually has no major imported films, and above all no Hollywood blockbusters. This year is no different. Of the 21 films confirmed for December release, only the Korean film The Admiral: Roaring Currents is foreign, and it moved from late November to mid-December only because its schedule changed. The other 20 are all domestic productions.

This year's year-end race is arguably the most popular, the most fiercely contested and the hardest to call in recent years. QDaily has summed up the 2014 season: its defining traits and open questions, the key films worth watching, who might emerge as the winner or the dark horse, and who might taste defeat.

Three Defining Traits of This Year's Season

Trait one: big-name directors and big Chinese-language productions everywhere

This is a big year for Chinese-language cinema, and many of the country's top directors have new work out. Films by Zhang Yimou, Peter Chan and Ning Hao are already in theaters, and several more directors have chosen December. John Woo's The Crossing (Part 1) opens first, followed by Zhang Yibai's Fleet of Time, Tsui Hark's The Taking of Tiger Mountain 3D and the film many people are waiting for most, Jiang Wen's Gone with the Bullets. Meet Miss Anxiety, meanwhile, is directed by the well-known Korean director Kwak Jae-yong, whose earlier films include My Sassy Girl and The Classic.

Big-name directors also guarantee a certain level of investment and a strong cast. The cheapest of these films cost at least 50 million yuan, and the most expensive, The Crossing, reportedly cost 400 million yuan. As for the stars, we will simply post the poster for The Crossing and say no more.

Trait two: the key films are spread across the month, which helps the box office

The season's five first-tier films, The Crossing (Part 1), Fleet of Time, Meet Miss Anxiety, Gone with the Bullets and The Taking of Tiger Mountain 3D, open on the 2nd, 5th, 12th, 18th and 24th respectively. Apart from the first week, when two of them open together, each film has a weekend to itself. Spreading them out secures each film its own share of screenings. It also avoids a repeat of the 2012 season, when The Last Tycoon and The Guillotines opened in the same week and both lost, handing victory to Lost in Thailand, which had moved its release forward by a week. And with a major release arriving every week, the market as a whole should stay hot throughout December.

Trait three: Double 11 and other e-commerce platforms brought the competition forward

Taobao used film presales to warm up its "Double 11" shopping festival and draw traffic, so, as we reported earlier, the year-end contest started early. In the 10 days from November 1 to 10, Taobao and Weibo together sold more than 700,000 movie tickets. By our count, as of 4 p.m. on November 10, Gone with the Bullets ranked first with 236,000 tickets presold, followed closely by Fleet of Time with 232,000 and The Crossing (Part 1) with 142,000. Presale numbers, especially those built up in a short time, show how eagerly audiences are waiting for a film, and cinema managers use them as a reference when they settle their final screening schedules.

Three Open Questions for This Year's Season

Open question one: can the year-end season push the full-year box office past 30 billion yuan?

Officials and industry people alike have set 30 billion yuan as this year's target. It means more than a simple growth figure: it is an endorsement of the mainland market's prosperity and influence, a little like the "protect 8 percent" GDP growth target we used to chant about. Thanks to films such as Transformers: Age of Extinction, Breakup Buddies and The Monkey King, each of which grossed more than 1 billion yuan, the mainland box office for the first 11 months of the year has already reached 26.8 billion yuan. Unless something goes badly wrong in the year-end season, the target should be met without trouble.

Open question two: how many records will Gone with the Bullets break?

"Eagerly awaited by all" is no exaggeration for Jiang Wen's new film. Put into numbers, that anticipation comes to 120 million yuan in presales. That was the figure the studio announced on November 18, and Yan Yunfei, publicity director of Gone with the Bullets, told us presales "have already far exceeded that number." Another of our reports shows how much pull the film has with ticketing channels: Gewara, iQiyi and WeChat's movie-ticket service are all competing to sell its presale tickets.

Back to the records. If Gone with the Bullets grosses more than 665 million yuan, it will overtake Let the Bullets Fly as Jiang Wen's highest-grossing film. Above 1.167 billion yuan, it will replace Breakup Buddies as this year's top Chinese-language film. If it climbs past the 1.26 billion yuan of Lost in Thailand, it will become the highest-grossing Chinese-language film of all time, with only one rival left ahead of it, and that one looks out of reach: Transformers: Age of Extinction, at 1.97 billion yuan.

Open question three: which film will be the season's biggest disappointment?

Last year's Personal Tailor took 718 million yuan, but film fans' verdict on it bore no relation to its box office. Its average score on Douban is only 5.6, the lowest of any Feng Xiaogang film. We have already seen several of this season's films, some of them at preview screenings, and we think the contest for "most disappointing" will be fiercer than usual this year. Over the coming weeks, QDaily's new-release column will introduce and analyze these films, to help you decide what to see and to judge the most disappointing film more fairly.

Nine Films Worth Watching This Year

We went through the 21 films opening in December and, weighing commercial factors such as production company, creative team, production process, marketing and critics' word of mouth, picked the 9 we think are most worth watching this season. (Ranked by how much attention they deserve, highest first.)

NO.1 Gone with the Bullets

For both artistic quality and box-office prospects, Gone with the Bullets is the film we are most looking forward to this season.

Director: Jiang Wen is the main reason we are paying so much attention to this film. With In the Heat of the Sun, Devils on the Doorstep and The Sun Also Rises, he proved he can work at a very high artistic level, and with Let the Bullets Fly he showed everyone that he can make a film that is both good and popular. He is the film's best endorsement.

Production: The English title, Gone with the Bullets, suggests that Jiang Wen sees the film as connected in some ways to its predecessor, Let the Bullets Fly. It tells an entirely new story, but it may resemble the earlier film in narrative style and structure, which should make it easy enough for audiences to follow. According to figures released by the studio, the production budget of Gone with the Bullets rose from US$18 million to US$50 million (300 million yuan), and it is the first film shot with IMAX 3D cameras, which help Jiang Wen show 1920s Shanghai as he pictures it.

Marketing: The film's marketing does not carpet-bomb audiences; it relies on ideas instead: unusual poster designs, an advertisement laid out on a plot of land at Beijing Capital Airport's Terminal 3 so that it can be seen from the air, and a press event announcing that presales had passed 100 million yuan. All of it has won plenty of media attention.

NO.2 Meet Miss Anxiety

Meet Miss Anxiety is the only major romantic comedy among December's releases. With Tong Dawei and Zhou Xun paired up, it may give the year-end season a different note.

Genre: You have to admit that for mainland audiences today, the main reason to go to the movies is to relax. That is why comedy has done so well in the market in recent years, and it may be Meet Miss Anxiety's strongest weapon against its rivals.

Stars: Fleet of Time puts 30-year-old actors in school uniforms to play high-school students; Meet Miss Anxiety is cast more sensibly. The quirky Zhou Xun plays a girlfriend hit by early menopause, and the warm-hearted Tong Dawei plays the boyfriend who keeps devotedly caring for her even though she bullies him. Women Who Know How to Flirt Are the Luckiest, also starring Zhou Xun, is still in theaters and has grossed close to 100 million yuan. And as a guest on Jiangsu TV's If You Are the One and Hunan TV's Where Are We Going, Dad?, Tong Dawei has built up a good deal of popularity.

Director: Kwak Jae-yong, the Korean director of My Sassy Girl, handles this kind of film with ease, which makes us a little more hopeful about the film's overall quality.

NO.3 Fleet of Time

What we expect from Fleet of Time is a strong market performance, not that it will move anyone.

Marketing: Domestic films are still in the business of selling audiences their own youth, and Fleet of Time is the best example. Zhang Yibai may be the director in China who best understands how to sell something. That is why he made the film and its posters as arty and as pretty as possible; why he was willing to spend several million yuan to have Faye Wong sing a song for it (reposted hundreds of thousands of times on Weibo); and why he knows exactly where his core audience is and is willing to visit a different city and university campus every day. So far, it has paid off. On November 29, presales brought in more than 20 million yuan in a single day. Add the earlier "Double 11" presale results, and that is why we are most curious about this film's box office.

Cast: After Faye Wong, Eddie Peng may be the one other performer who can bring a film some box office of his own. Look at Peng's record over the past three years: the two Tai Chi films, 270 million yuan; Cold War, 250 million; Love, 130 million; Unbeatable, 120 million; A Wedding Invitation, 190 million; and Rise of the Legend, still in theaters, 160 million. Not one of them grossed less than 100 million yuan. Next to him, the other leads, Ni Ni, Zheng Kai, Wei Chen and Chen He, are all somewhat weaker draws.

Director: Zhang Yibai seems to have put all his energy into making Fleet of Time look beautiful rather than making it more watchable or more true to life.

NO.4 The Crossing (Part 1)

It is hard not to pay attention to The Crossing: four years in planning, nine months of shooting, a 400 million yuan budget, John Woo directing, and a cast of top actors from the mainland, Japan and Korea, including Zhang Ziyi, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Huang Xiaoming, Song Hye-kyo, Tong Dawei, Masami Nagasawa and Qin Hailu.

Director: John Woo's last film as director was Red Cliff in 2008. A little worryingly, his best-reviewed work all dates from the last century, decades ago, and we do not know how well he reads today's market and audiences. He says The Crossing is the film he has most wanted to make in his life. If so, we at least know John Woo gave it everything; whether the film is any good is another matter.

Cast: Every element looks strong, yet that makes us more cautious about a film like this. First, only the first half is being released, so audiences will not see the whole story, and that directly hurts the experience. Second, with so many leads, balancing their screen time is a big problem, and we worry that dividing it too evenly will make the story feel loose.

Special effects: Apart from the actors' faces, the film's biggest strength may be its special effects. But the effects matter most in the second half, after the disaster begins, so in the first half they may count for less.

NO.5 - NO. 9

Kung Fu Hustle 3D re-release

Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle was the mainland's top-grossing film of 2004, a highly entertaining kung fu comedy. Never mind how well the 3D conversion works: even in its original version, it would be far more watchable than many of the films released alongside it.

Love on the Cloud

Directed by Gu Changwei and starring Angelababy and Chen He, it tells how a screenwriter, played by Chen He, wins the heart of a car model, played by Angelababy, one script at a time. Please do not be surprised or angry at the heavy WeChat product placement. The film was made to order for WeChat, and it is also stuffed with internet buzzwords and jokes only the teller finds funny.

The Admiral: Roaring Currents

This year it overtook Avatar to become the most-watched film in South Korean history, and it earned Best Film, Best Director and Best Actor nominations at the 51st Grand Bell Awards. Its star Choi Min-sik is known for Oldboy, New World and Taegukgi; co-star Ryu Seung-ryong is known for Miracle in Cell No. 7 and Target.

Rampaging Detective

The season's only detective mystery, with some comedy mixed in. It stars Ethan Juan, Zhou Dongyu and others. I hold out little hope for any domestic film that tries to be a "brain-burner."

The Taking of Tiger Mountain 3D

Produced by Bona Film Group and directed by the famous Hong Kong director Tsui Hark. I had assumed that even if the story was weak, we could at least enjoy the special effects, as with Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon. But after watching the trailer for The Taking of Tiger Mountain 3D, well, good luck to Tsui Hark.