The blind box of ＂Hometown Love＂ has become popular. What step has the derivative development of domestic film and television dramas reached？

236 yuan a set, sold out in 6 hours, the sales reached 20 million … This is the sales data circulating in the market about the theme blind box of "Country Love". Although not everyone has seen the "Country Love" series, this theme blind box has been sought after by many netizens once it was launched. On Weibo, the reading volume of topics related to # country love blind box reached nearly 30 million. "Did you grab Liu Neng?" became a chat-up signal for friends, and the e-commerce APP was opened, and the figure of country love blind box appeared on both the opening page and the home page.

From the original drama series derived from sketches, it has evolved into an explosive IP with a certain national popularity, and the influence of "Country Love Story" in the audience is increasing.The launch of the same blind box not only helped the drama attract more young people, but also brought some new ideas for domestic film and television dramas to create IP derivatives.

"Hometown love" set off blind box fever

Domestic film and television dramas finally have explosive derivatives?

At the beginning of March, the TV series "Country Love", which has been broadcast for 13 seasons, officially entered the game world, and launched a series of blind boxes of "Country Love" including "Five Heavenly Kings" Zhao Si, Liu Neng, Guang Kun, Xiaofeng and Bigfoot for netizens. Among them, the price of a single blind box is 59 yuan, and the price of a set of boxes is 236 yuan. The first batch of blind boxes were sold out in just 6 hours after they were pre-sold, and the topic was raised on social platforms such as Weibo and friends circle.

According to the data released by Youku platform, most of the people who paid for the "Hometown Love" blind box this time were young people. Among them,Buyers under the age of 30 account for nearly 80%, and buyers aged 18-25 account for nearly 30%.. It is worth mentioning that the blind box set contains four blind boxes, but "Liu Neng" is set as a hidden model, and the chance of winning is only 2%. It is reported that due to the high rarity of Liu Neng’s blind box, it is very popular among netizens, and the price of some Liu Neng’s blind boxes once reached thousands of dollars on second-hand platforms such as idle fish.

Since its birth in 2006, the series "Country Love Story" has gone through 15 years and has become one of the longest-lived domestic dramas in the market. An interesting phenomenon is that at first "Hometown Love" was despised by young audiences as "too embarrassing and too rustic". However, after the first launch of the blind box this year, it was young people who paid the bill first. After 15 years of IP precipitation, what are the reasons why the blind box of Hometown Love became popular overnight?

The first is to ensure the stability of the audience of the series, and constantly cultivate the fans of the series with a relatively fixed lineup and style, so as to contribute to the commercialization of IP.. Since the first "Country Love", Benshan Media, a subsidiary of Zhao Benshan, has been the main producer of this series, and "Zhao Jiaban", which brings together many comedians, has also provided a stable creative delivery for this series. "Even after more than 10 years, Xie Dajiao is still the actor Yu Yuexian who wears red gloves and stands at the door of a small shop to sell goods."

At the same time, the 15-year-old "Hometown Love" series still insists on carrying out the "local flavor" style to the end, contributing a lot of top-notch topics. Liu Neng and Zhao Si in the play have become familiar roles in film and television dramas, and Zhao Benshan’s golden sentence and "thank you for flying" emoticons widely circulated on the Internet have also been widely spread among young viewers, which provided rich materials for netizens’ second creation and effectively helped to break the circle of the series, which is also the main reason why the "Hometown Love" blind box was first noticed by young netizens after its launch.

Finally, the popularity of the "Hometown Love" blind box is also inseparable from the advantages of the platform.. The theme blind box of "Hometown Love" series launched this year was authorized by Benshan Media to be developed by Youku, a broadcasting platform, and Youku fully linked Ali resources such as Tmall and Ali Fish to get through all aspects of content production, sales and marketing. It is worth mentioning that, as an innovative entertainment section under Alibaba Group, Alibaba Fish mainly promotes two major businesses, including authorized cooperation for developing consumer goods for IP and integrated marketing. With the integration of various resources, the blind box of "Hometown Love" went out smoothly once it was launched, and the development of the blind box of "Hometown Love" also provided some reference experience for the commercialization model of IP of domestic film and television dramas in the future.

From monster hunt to Nezha

Development status of IP derivatives in domestic film and television dramas

For some head video IP, there is a certain ceiling only by content revenue.IP derivatives can not only expand the influence of IP, but also enrich the publicity channels of IP content..

At present, the scale of China’s IP derivatives industry is still far from Europe, America and Japan. However, with the improvement of IP content quality and the change of users’ consumption habits in recent years, some domestic film and television dramas have also begun to try to enter the field of IP derivatives, and further increase the commercial liquidity of IP content by launching hand-made, blind boxes, picture books and the same clothes related to film and television dramas.

Take "Catch the Demon 2" released in the Spring Festival of 2018 as an example. After the popularity of the first film, the role of "Hu Ba" in the film was favored by the majority of young audiences. Before the release of "Catch the Demon 2", Ali Fish owned by Alibaba Pictures signed a cooperation agreement with Fang Anle Film, the producer of "Catch the Demon 2". As an authorized partner of domestic derivatives of "Catch the Demon 2", Ali Fish also cooperated with Alibaba resources such as Taobao, Tmall and Taobao Film to further open the derivatives market of "Catch the Demon 2".

During the film’s release, Catch the Demon 2 not only carried out IP linkage with many famous brands such as Suning, Pizza Hut and McDonald’s, but also launched the same "Hu Ba" doll. At the same time, the film also joined hands with Guangzhou Changlong Paradise to hold a number of theme activities. During the activities, there were a large number of popular characters such as Hu Ba and Meng Yao in the park, and a 13-meter-wide giant FRP sculpture of monster hunt Group Demons was exhibited for the first time, which became a popular place for tourists to compete for photos.

Of course, due to the lack of standardized and productized derivative development logic, there were not many cases in China that could develop IP derivatives on a large scale like Catch the Demon 2 in the past. The reason is that the quality of domestic films appearing on the market at present is mostly uneven, and it is difficult to predict the explosion. However, the development of IP derivatives takes a certain period, which is more suitable for serialized works, so it is difficult for most films to lay out the derivative content in advance.

Take Ne Zha, an animated film released in the summer of 2019, as an example. The film topped the annual box office with a box office of 5 billion yuan, and the images such as "Nezha" and "Ao Bing" in the film also became the top stream in the film and television industry overnight. However, the official did not successfully predict the popularity of the film in the early stage, nor did it develop derivatives for this IP. The confusion of IP authorization further led to the proliferation of piracy and cottage derivatives in the market. For example, two months after the film was released, 15,000 Nezha brooches were sold on Taobao without official authorization.

In response to this phenomenon, the distributor Enlight Film only issued an official statement to resist piracy and cottage products, and after rushing to register more than 1,000 trademarks related to the film "Nezha", the development of derivatives of the film ended hastily. One thing is certain,The absence of the official in the development of Nezha derivatives has invisibly lost more business opportunities for this explosive content..

How does IP Kingdom Disney create derivative content?

The development of IP derivatives for film and television in China is still in its infancy, but in the global scope, the United States and Japan are undoubtedly the two countries that export the most IP, and at the same time, compared with other countries and regions, they also have larger IP derivatives market scale. Among them, Japan’s IP derivatives market is mostly composed of ACG content such as animation and animation. In the animation field, Japan’s derivatives market is about 80 times that of China.The film and television IP derivatives market in the United States is more mature. In the last century, Hollywood film companies represented by the five major film studios laid out IP commercial operations early..

Among them, Disney, which has the largest number of IP and the most influential, is the most typical. Film and television content is the core industry of Disney. At present, Walter Disney owns several subsidiary film companies, such as Pixar, Marvel Comics, Lucas and Twentieth Century Fox, and continuously delivers IP of film and television content to them. Walter Disney, the parent company, has created a number of well-known IP images such as Mickey Mouse, Snow White and Mermaid since its establishment in the early last century, and many categories such as toys, games, books and daily necessities have been derived from these IPS, covering all aspects of public life. At the same time, Disney theme parks all over the world have become its main source of income.

Since the beginning of this century, Disney has successively acquired Pixar, Marvel Comics, Lucas and Twentieth Century Fox Pictures, which has further expanded its IP kingdom and formed Disney’s core assets.

Since the creation of Marvel Movie Universe in 2008, 23 blockbuster movies have been released in 12 years, and the global box office has exceeded 20 billion US dollars, greatly expanding the user base of Marvel Comics IP and driving the audience’s buying enthusiasm. It is understood that at present, Marvel Comics’s annual derivative income has reached 1 billion US dollars. With the opening of the next stage of Marvel movie universe, Marvel Comics will also extend its reach to the fields of drama and animation, which will bring greater commercial value to Disney.

From Disney’s idea of creating an IP business map, it can be seen that the basis of the development of film and television drama derivatives lies in deepening the content and establishing a rich series of IP matrices.. Take Marvel Comics as an example. At present, the Marvel movie universe has only gone through 12 years, but as early as the last century, Marvel comics have sold well in North America and even the global market, accumulating enough IP deposits and a broad audience. On the other hand, at present, some domestic film and television IPs are too hasty in derivative development. For example, Ne Zha’s "monster hunt" lacks a serialized IP matrix, and the content has not been universally empathetic by the audience, so it is often difficult to achieve remarkable results in the derivative market.

Secondly, the development of IP derivatives also needs the cooperation of upstream and downstream industries.. In the past 100 years, Disney has not only accumulated a large number of well-known IP, but also built a complete IP development industry chain of "movie-derivative-live entertainment". At the same time, Disney can further improve the efficiency of IP realization by means of IP evaluation, talent training and tracking user preferences. For domestic film and television content, in addition to building a more complete IP worldview, it is also necessary to cooperate with IP copyright owners and operators to formulate appropriate derivative categories for IP, and continuously improve the quality and development efficiency of derivatives, thus successfully expanding the commercial value of content IP to derivative fields.

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