For movie fans, “Dune” is an annual masterpiece worth looking forward to; for ordinary viewers, “Dune” is just a long-awaited Hollywood Blockbuster movie.
For Legend Films, “Dune” is the sign of the future “Blockbuster movie”. But for Chinese audiences, “Dune” is too “unfamiliar”.
It is this differentiation of evaluations that “shelves” Sand Dune in the Chinese film market.
Related Post: Nolan praised “Dune”: it was born for the big screen.
But obviously, the controversy of “Dune” is obviously not big enough. The reason is that the reputation of this film is not enough for most ordinary audiences.
Even on the first day of the show, “Sand Dune” had a dominant position in the film, but it was still rejected by “The Battle at Lake Changjin”, which was released for 23 days.
Related Post: “Dune” reached a global box office of 220 million US dollars.
With a slightly differentiated reputation, the final outcome of “Dune” is nothing more than a 200 million “imported film.”
Many Chinese fans once again complained about “Dune”, and the same “resistance” also appeared in the re-screening of “The Lord of the Rings” in the first half of the year.
Movie fans think that ordinary audiences do not understand “classic”, and ordinary audiences ridiculed “this is the classic?”
There is no end to this controversy. The reason is that the two sides have already parted ways with regard to the standards of “excellence.”
Today’s American Blockbuster movie is no longer the “cool film” familiar to ordinary audiences.
Although ordinary audiences have long been numb to American cool film.
Related Post: “Dune”: A classic science fiction that spans the ages, an epic masterpiece destined to stay in history.
But when the so-called “Blockbuster movie” lacks the cool gene and walks towards the audience with literature and art (dullness) and epic (lengthy), the audience will still not be willing to pay for the so-called high-level sense.
But for movie fans and the American “Blockbuster movie factory”, Blockbuster movie should also have a breakthrough.
Blindly manufacturing “cool film” obviously can’t always satisfy the increasingly discerning global audience.
From the perspective of film history, all those “epic classics” are all sought after by future generations through “anti-current Blockbuster movie”.
It is the differentiation in the “consensus” of Blockbuster movie that has created the “divergence” in evaluation today.
Related Post: “Dune”: Chinese audience boycotts the 3D IMAX version, they want to watch the 2D version.
1.The audience’s “sand dunes”
“I know it’s great, but it’s not as good as I like.”
The performance of “Dune” in mainland China is mediocre in any dimension, but the controversy over word-of-mouth has become a “little climax” for this film.
Irrational ordinary viewers denounced this as a “bad film”, while a slightly sane ordinary audience would decorate it with a “high-level sense”.
“Although the film is advanced, I still can’t love it.”
In the previous re-screening of “The Lord of the Rings”, the “bad movie attack” was actually much larger than “Dune”, especially wearing the “classic filter” would make word-of-mouth backlash more intense.
At that time, many fans began to protect the classics.
These so-called post-00s, so-called spectators, buy tickets to enter the venue without even knowing the basic information.
But if a “classic” like “The Lord of the Rings” only sells tickets to fans who understand the content, those who don’t know the basic information will not buy tickets to watch the movie.
Then, movie fans will inevitably issue another condemnation that “the classics are beginning to be cold now, and these so-called post-00s will not even watch the classics.”
Fans blamed the “original sin” on short videos and the short and fast “fast food culture”.
Fundamentally speaking, this is not wrong. Indeed, in an era of increasingly fragmented, audiences have a barrier to accept epics and classics.
But this kind of blame actually has its own “original sin”. Can the so-called “episodes of the era” and “classic Blockbuster movie” make everyone clapping their hands and cheering?
For the main audience in the current market, the vast majority of them are American cool films that have grown up with them.
Their key word for the so-called “Blockbuster movie” is “cool”. This cool can be divided into visual cool, rhythm cool, story cool, character cool, and theme cool.
Although the “cool film bombing” for 10 consecutive years made Chinese audiences feel indifferent.
But this does not mean that the audience will be able to accept the dull and lengthy “Dune”-style Blockbuster movie when they turn their heads.
Especially before the movie was released, the movie trailer was still full of “cool film vocabulary”.
It is difficult for the audience to accurately collide with the “cool” in the audience’s mind in every detail that the audience sees when they enter the theater.
Naturally, bad reviews will follow.
It’s not difficult to understand the love of movie fans for “Dune”.
As the most far-reaching influence in Europe and America, and the most difficult original science fiction adaptation, the completion of “Dune” is indeed satisfactory.
But likes and hates never conflict. The evaluation standards of movie fans and ordinary audiences have never been inconsistent.
2. “Dune” is The “Star Wars” of the Times
A generation of “Star Wars” has the genes of a generation of “Star Wars”.
For “Dune” director Denis Villeneuve, “Dune” obviously has his own personal style.
The 54-year-old Denis Villeneuve is not a new director. Before that, he directed “Incendies” in 2010 and represented Canada as a finalist for the 83rd Academy Awards for best foreign language film.
In 2016 and 2017, Denis Villeneuve brought “Blockbuster movie” for two consecutive years.
“Arrival” and “Blade Runner 2049” brought him extremely high praise in the industry, and the two films also scored 7.8 points and 8.3 points on Douban.
However, “Arrival” was released in mainland China at the beginning of 2017 at a box office of 109 million, and “Blade Runner 2049” was released in October of that year at a box office of 76.959 million.
The cat’s eye audience ratings for the two films were 7.8 and 7.3 points, respectively.
Box office performance and audience ratings are certainly not the only criteria for evaluating a director’s excellence.
But in the commercial film market in China, he directed Hollywood productions again.
Although this cannot be a coordinate system for evaluating the ability of Denis Villeneuve’s director, it suffices to show that Denis Villeneuve’s directorial style has always been out of the taste of ordinary Chinese audiences.
In Denis Villeneuve’s opinion, both “Arrival” and “Blade Runner 2049” are his preparations for directing “Dune”.
Therefore, the overall style of “Dune” today is very “Villeneuve”.
If “Dune” is the “Star Wars” of the times, its 156-minute film length, anti-climax story advancement, and the anti-Blockbuster movie structure’s dull and massively barrier-like cultural attributes are its “genes.”
As a science fiction novel that is extremely difficult to adapt, the original work of “Dune” contains a lot of scenes that are difficult to visualize.
And the huge worldview even makes a 156-minute movie just “the beginning of everything.”
From the director’s point of view, the challenging nature of “Dune” may change his entire career as a director.
Once “Dune” can be successful, this will be self-evident to his position in film history.
To this end, the director invited Eric Roth, who wrote “Forrest Gump” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, and Jon Spaihts of “Prometheus” to adapt the script together.
In terms of final presentation, Dune currently only presents the first half of the first novel on the screen.
The second half of the first novel and the second novel are all in the director’s future plans.
So “Dune” started off as a trilogy at least.
Judging from the entire volume of the movie, “Dune” is indeed the “Star Wars” of the times.
But it is precisely because of this volume that if the director expects the audience to do their homework and walk into the theater with a “pilgrimage” mentality to appreciate the classic “Dune” in the future, this is also a fantasy.
The instinctive consumer demand of ordinary audiences for movies and the “artistic appreciation” of movie fans for movies should not be roughly evaluated on the same line.
Whether it is a classic or not depends on whether there will be a certain intersection between ordinary audiences and movie fans in the future for the evaluation of art.
Rather than whether the sound volume of the two is sufficient, there is an overwhelming advantage.
3.Blockbuster Movie may be getting harder
Parting ways for the “excellent” standard.
In the wildest era of the Chinese market, the audience’s rejection of “American Blockbuster Movie” is accumulating.
In the “American Blockbuster movie” at that time, the boring content of the content became a typical attack.
Although many series of films are still at the box office in the global market, Hollywood also knows that this kind of “popcorn” is difficult to continue to reproduce.
As a result, Hollywood’s standards for “Blockbuster movie” have also changed in recent years.
Although “Sand Dune” failed to produce two parts at once through the mode of shooting as the director wanted, it was also supported by a solid deal of 165 million U.S. dollars.
Although from the “scale” of production costs, 165 million US dollars is not too high, but considering the risk of “Dune”, this is still an extremely bold investment.
Today, the global box office of “Dune” has exceeded 200 million US dollars, but the current box office results and whether the synchronization of the theater network can give the filmmakers the courage to continue production is unknown.
Related Post: “Dune 2” is here! Legendary Pictures confirms “Dune” will shoot a sequel.
However, for the current Hollywood, it is experiencing an “anti-Blockbuster movie movement.”
Some series of “popcorn” as the starting point gradually completed the “historical mission”, and many series ushered in the end.
The newly opened Blockbuster movie added a strong cultural attribute, and began to counter “structure” in the film’s temperament.
Although this batch of new Blockbuster movies can still provide the audience with a maximum visual beauty, there are indeed great risks because of the “anti-climax” in the story and the “high barriers” in the culture.
Last year, Nolan’s “Tenet”, from the actual word-of-mouth evaluation, Nolan’s work could not be without controversy. The “high threshold” for ordinary audiences will inevitably appear to be divided in word-of-mouth.
In the end, the film was released in mainland China at a box office of less than 500 million, but it was already the box office champion of imported films in the mainland China movie market last year.
This year, “Fast and Furious 9”, which is “familiar” by ordinary audiences, has brought back the face of imported films.
“Fast and Furious 9” has a cumulative gross box office of 1.39 billion, ranking fifth in the current annual box office.
“Godzilla vs. Kong” also scored 1.23 billion, ranking eighth at the annual box office.
However, the third-place imported film “Free Guy” is only 612 million. If the same result is placed in 2019, it will rank out of the top ten imported films.
Today’s Chinese audiences are extremely disgusted with the empty “popcorn sequel”, but they are also indifferent to the dull and long “new classic”.
Under the two-way “disgust”, the status of imported films in mainland China has also been reduced and reduced.
As of the end of September this year, imported Hollywood films accounted for only about 10% of the box office in the Mainland.
However, everyone who is familiar with the box office structure of the mainland film market knows that at one time, the proportion of imported films was as high as 60% in the heyday.
Even when it comes to Hollywood imported films, the top three imported films in 2019, “Avengers 4,” “Fast and Furious: Special Operations,” and “Spider-Man: Far From Home” have accumulated more than 7 billion box office.
In 2018, the cumulative box office of “Avengers 3”, “Aquaman” and “Venom” reached nearly 6.3 billion.
Hollywood must need “new classics” to support its future “Blockbuster movie universe”.
But for Chinese audiences, high cultural barriers, anti-structural narratives, and anti-climax “feature films” are bound to be difficult to have a big market.
No matter how high the artistic achievement of these films, the outstanding visual beauty, and the huge worldview, in essence, this is not an American Blockbuster movie “understanding” by Chinese audiences.
