In 2024, when the martial arts film industry is regarded as a renaissance, Xu Ke returns with "Shooting Condor," Wu Jing is preparing to remake "Knife," Xie Miao takes "Defiance 2" to seize the Spring Festival, and Wang Jing's "Smiling Jianghu" has also started shooting. However, in this series of high-profile films, the first in the network platform peach factory in the form of Video on Demand launch of the blockbuster "Stop Horse Seize Knife" is particularly interesting, the film by Wu Yue as the producer, producer and starring, and for the peach factory this year's opening of the year.
The publicity campaign of "blocking the Horse and seizing the knife" is strong before its launch. Its online-on-demand price is as high as 18 yuan, and even members have to pay 9 yuan, which is almost the same as the discounted cinema blockbuster, which shows that Wu and Taochang have full confidence in the film. However, the actual situation is quite grim.
According to box office statistics, the performance of "blocking the Horse and seizing the knife" was quite disappointing on its opening day, with a box office of only 194000 yuan on its first day. Not only failed to surpass "Mr. Thousand Crane", which was released on the same day, but also lagged behind "the thug in suit", which has been released for eight days, although the two films use a member-sharing system and a pay-on-demand model of "getting in the way". But the box office gap is still significant.
Compared with the paid-on-demand works of other action stars with similar popularity, such as Xie Miao and an Zhijie, the performance of "blocking the Horse and grabbing the knife" obviously lags behind. For example, Xie Miao's "defiant" earned 658000 yuan on the first day of 2022 and earned 6.07 million of the box office during the on-demand period. the subsequent member sharing period soared to 20.12 million, and the total box office was close to 26 million. In addition, Xie Miao's "Northeast Police Story 2" and an Zhijie's "Zero pursuit" released in 2023 grossed 1.46 million and 1.9 million respectively on the first day, and the final split grossed more than 30 million and 40 million respectively. In particular, it is worth mentioning that "blocking the Horse" and "defiant" are priced at the same price, but the box office difference is more than three times, which is extremely abnormal.
"blocking the Horse and seizing the Dao" did not successfully light the flames of the revival of martial arts movies in 2024. It is reported that the film is produced, produced and starred by Wu Ying himself, and the publicity work mainly revolves around him. The production cost of the film is as high as 15 million yuan, all of which is paid out of Wu's own pocket. The Shanghai Longyi Company behind the film is Wu's own enterprise, and at the beginning of the film, it also has the qualification for theatrical release, that is, it has the green dragon logo.
However, such a large-scale online film production, in the box office, word-of-mouth and popularity and other aspects have not achieved the desired goals, where is the problem? One of the possible points is that although Wu Jing tried to follow Wu Jing's example, his actual appearance time in "blocking the Horse and seizing the knife" was less than 10 minutes, leading to the failure of audience expectations. As a graduate of the Central Academy of Drama and the national martial arts champion, Wu Ying lacks a truly representative work, although he has both literature and martial arts, which limits his appeal at the box office.
In addition, Wu Yue's works in recent years are of uneven quality, mostly concentrated in the field of online drama, such as "Fire Horse,""Angry Yellow Cattle," etc., the theme may involve anti-Japanese drama, or classic remake, the overall reputation is poor, Douban score rarely exceeds 5 points, its acting skills and action performance is difficult to be recognized.
In addition, "blocking the Horse and seizing the Dao" itself is misleading to a certain extent. Although he starred Wu Jing, his role of Yang Ye in the film died in less than 10 minutes, and the main plot focuses on the story of the two sisters of the Yang family sneaking into the Liao State to seize the sword, which is not directly related to the Yang family that the audience is familiar with. The actual hero of the film, Song Tianshuo, is a comedian who became popular with the annual Comedy Competition, while the heroine Zhang Xintong is a dancer. This marketing strategy of selling dog meat has obviously failed to meet the needs of today's audience, and has become a big failure of "blocking the horse and grabbing the knife".