director of the millennium

The box office performance during the 2015 Spring Festival was still very encouraging, with a total of more than 30 billion yuan.

Although this cannot be compared with the box office of more than 16 billion yuan for a movie like "The Mermaid" in , it is already an explosive growth compared to the previous two years.

In other words, from 2010 to 2019, the box office market has been rising steadily during the Spring Festival every year.

Until it was destroyed by another severe winter in the film industry brought about by that damn epidemic.

For this reason, the competition in the Spring Festival period is very fierce now. It can be said to be the most important period of each year. The era when the Lunar New Year period was number one is over.

And in the eyes of Light and Shadow Times, this year's Spring Festival is the time for "War of the Demon Tide" to show its power.

As early as the second half of 2014, Guangying Times had been promoting the film in advance, with a total of three waves of publicity. Everyone who should and shouldn't know about the film knew about it.

Although we cannot say that the entire nation has been covered by this wave of publicity, it can be said that except for those remote and impoverished villages and elderly people over 60 years old, most ordinary people, even those who do not usually go online, have learned about the movie "War of the Demon Tide" offline, through newspapers and television.

In order to achieve this effect, Guangying Times spent 1.5 million yuan on publicity and promotion alone.

This is the case now. If it’s a few years later, even if we spend 2 million yuan, I guess we won’t get such a good publicity and promotion effect.

Guangying Times attaches so much importance to this movie, and as the company's biggest boss, Wu Yuan certainly has to pay attention to it as well.

On February 2015, 2, the 15th day of the lunar calendar, just after Valentine's Day, "War of the Demonic Tide" held several preview screenings in Beijing and Shanghai.

Preview screening, also known as pilot screening, refers to the screening of designated films in individual local theaters, usually in advance of films that have not yet been officially released.

Preview screenings have a history of more than half a century in Hollywood, but are relatively new in China.

Although Hero had made a movie as early as 2002 (once again, I admire Zhang Yimou's courage to try new things).
However, in order to be eligible for a nomination for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, "Hero" was screened in Shenzhen for seven days in advance.

After "Hero", the "preview screening" method did not become popular.

Preview screenings really became popular in mainland China as a byproduct of the explosive growth of the film industry after 2010.

At the beginning, everyone was just learning from Hollywood, gathering theater managers, film critics, media people, target audience representatives, etc. together for "preview screenings" as an important means of film distribution and promotion.

But as the scale of the "preview screenings" becomes larger and larger, more audiences can get the opportunity to watch the "preview screenings". The preview screenings have gradually expanded from just one or two shows in the beginning.

Wu Yuan clearly remembered that before he woke up from his dream, some movies were so outrageous that the box office of the preview could reach 100 million or 200 million yuan, which was almost the same scale as the public release, but they still shamelessly said that they were just "previews" in order to have the reputation of box office promotion after the public release.

For example, if the box office of the preview has already reached 2 million, and then even if the box office on the first day of release is only 5000 million, the producer will still have the nerve to put up a promotional slogan saying that the box office on the premiere day will exceed 2.5 million, luring unsuspecting fans into the cinema to watch the movie.

After all, 99% of movie fans won’t care whether a movie has been pre-screened or how much the pre-screening box office is. They will only look at the premiere box office. If they see that the premiere box office has exceeded a certain number of billions, they will naturally think that the movie is a box office hit and they will go and see it.

They don’t know that two-thirds of the so-called premiere results were from the box office revenue from advance screenings half a month in advance.

This can be considered a fraud, but when the producers play word games, no one can say it is not. Wu Yuan is very aware of this method, but he still doesn't have the nerve to use it. "War of the Demon Tide" also disdains to use this method of substituting one thing for another.

There were only four preview screenings this time, two in Shanghai and two in Beijing, which together could only generate a few hundred thousand in box office revenue.

The first show in Beijing and the first show in Shanghai were attended by specially invited industry insiders and friends of the leading actors, while the second shows were only for preview audiences.

On that day, Wu Yuan also took Liu Yifei to attend the preview in Beijing in a low-key manner.

Because he did not participate in any production of "War on Tide" and was not listed as a producer or anything, he did not go on stage to steal the show. He even deliberately avoided the questions and fan interaction sessions after the preview.

He just watched a movie with Liu Yifei with the attitude of an audience.

This 138-minute movie is still a little immature compared to Hollywood's top special effects blockbusters, but it is definitely brilliant.

As a popcorn movie, the plot naturally does not need to pursue any depth.

The story of "War of the Demon Tide" takes place in modern 2020, which is 6 years later.

Ever since Liu Bowen opened the connection between the earth and the sky, the connection between the human world and the two worlds of heaven and demons has been severed. The cultivation sects and cultivators in the human world either moved to the earthly immortal world and the demon world, or disappeared from the world.

In modern times, it is already the Dharma Ending Age, and all strange people and events have become legends.

And in this era when all things have ceased to exist, the demon god who had been sealed for a thousand years, with the help of a descendant of the demon sect (played by Yuan Hong), escaped the seal set by Kunlun and Shushan, returned to the human world, and cholera the world.

At this critical moment, the 24th generation leader of Shushan who had been frozen from the Tang Dynasty to the modern time, the saint of a certain generation who was sealed in the Kunlun Tianchi, and the pure yang immortal who came down from the heaven at the cost of being seriously injured all came.

Of course, as a modern story, these "ancient people" are not the main protagonists.

The most important protagonist is Zheng Yong, a high school student who picked up a book of legendary stories and always believed that these legends were true and not lies.

It was Zheng Yong who awakened these "superheroes" and united them. With the help of the modern Super Power Bureau, they finally defeated the devil, re-sealed him, and saved the world.

Overall, the story follows the same pattern as most Hollywood blockbusters.

The world suddenly faced a crisis of destruction, and a group of heroes gathered to save the world.

This is a very old-fashioned, but enduring, passionate routine, whether in Hollywood or Japanese anime, it is a classic among classics.

On the contrary, this kind of "orthodox and passionate anime" is rarely seen in China.

"Battle of the Demons", whose main storyline draws on Japanese high school students saving the world and Hollywood superhero movies, is not new at all, but with good enough special effects, this movie can still bring a "brand new experience" to most Chinese movie fans!
For so many years, we have seen Japanese high school students and American superheroes saving the world, but we have never seen a blockbuster movie where Chinese people save the world!

As soon as the preview of "Battle of the Demonic Tide" ended, the public opinion about this movie on the Internet exploded! (End of this chapter)