In 1986, New Arts City reached the top of the annual box office rankings in Hong Kong with the co-production of "A Better Tomorrow" with the original Youlian Film Company.
"A Better Tomorrow" not only won the box office championship in Hong Kong in 1986, but also broke the historical box office record of Hong Kong movies. It also increased the original box office record by five million to 41 million Hong Kong dollars.
At the same time, on the list of the top ten box office movies in Hong Kong in 1986, there are also three films produced by New Art City: "The Best Partner: Saving the Chapo from a Thousand Miles Away", "Dao Ma Dan" and "Happy Ghost Collision", ranked respectively.
In third, seventh and tenth place.
For a time, Xinyi City was in the limelight.
However, by 1987, the box office performance of films produced by New Art City declined.
At least judging from the list, the best ranking of their film last year was only "Prison", which ranked third.
It seems that this is all Sun Dahai's fault. In his previous life, "Prison" ranked second in the box office that year, second only to Jackie Chan's "Brothers of the Dragon and Tigers."
However, now, they are blocked by Sun Dahai, a reborn person who has entered the Hong Kong film industry.
"Autumn Fairy Tale" produced by Youlian has a box office of 35 million. It only lost to "Brothers and Dragons" by a slight disadvantage of HK$500,000 and became the runner-up in the annual box office list. "Prison"
Had to settle for third place.
You know, in the previous life, "Autumn Fairy Tale" had an excellent reputation, but its box office revenue was only 25 million, ranking fifth in the year.
In this world, Sun Dahai not only ensured that the original crew participated in the filming, but also increased his support. He took the initiative to increase the filming cost of 3 million Hong Kong dollars reported by Zhang Wanting to 5 million Hong Kong dollars, almost doubling it.
This made director Zhang Wanting richer during the filming process, allowing her to craft each shot more carefully, and the overall effect was greatly improved.
Therefore, the final film of "Autumn Fairy Tale" is more exciting than the previous version.
This also made the film unexpectedly gain the favor of the Venice International Film Festival jury. Not only was it invited to enter the main competition unit, it also won the "Golden Lion Award" for Best Film and the "Silver Lion Award" for Best Director in one fell swoop, creating a
It is the highest achievement of Hong Kong literary and artistic films.
As the first literary film in Hong Kong to win the World A-level Film Festival Award, "Autumn Fairy Tale" was not only a hit in Europe and Southeast Asia, but also greatly improved its box office performance in Hong Kong.
Therefore, the box office performance of "Autumn Fairy Tale" last year was 10 million higher than in the previous life, directly putting "Prison Story" behind itself.
"A Better Tomorrow 2", co-produced by New Arts City and Youlian, ranked sixth on the annual box office list with a box office of HK$22 million.
This is a typical sequel movie, and achieving such box office results was basically expected by everyone, and it can be considered a normal performance.
In fact, if "A Better Tomorrow 2" can be released one or two years later, the box office performance will definitely be better than it is now.
Hollywood's sequel movies are basically pushed out at a rate of one every three to five years, which has been proven to be a very reasonable arrangement.
It’s just that people in New Art City couldn’t help it when they saw that there were a large number of follow-up works coming out to make money.
Under their strong request, "A Better Tomorrow 2" was hastily launched, and the sequel was released only a year after the first film was released.
This approach seems to be grabbing hot money, but the damage it will cause to movie fans and the subsequent box office potential of the entire series is difficult to estimate.
However, Sun Dahai has never been very interested in filming "A Better Tomorrow 2"? He doesn't care too much about box office or anything like that.
As for the so-called third film "A Better Tomorrow: Sunset Song" (prequel)? Even if he were killed, he wouldn't participate in the filming? It's too destructive to his character.
In 1987, the two films "A Chinese Ghost Story" and "The Legend of Wesley", which New Arts City had high hopes for, gained good reputations, but their box office performance was mediocre. The final rankings fell to fifteenth and sixteenth.
name.
In fact, the previous Xinyi City was established in 1980 and only had a short lifespan of eleven years. Its peak period was from 1982 to 1986.
During this period, New Art City produced a large number of popular masterpieces, and also owned some big IPs such as the "Best Partner" series, the "Happy Ghost" series, and the "A Better Tomorrow" series that was snatched away by Sun Dahai in this generation.
The emergence of New Art City has brought a breath of fresh air to the Hong Kong film industry, which has become dull without Bruce Lee.
However, due to the serious imbalance in the internal equity distribution in the early days of the company's establishment, this paved the way for Xinyi City's future internal strife.
Since last year, Xinyi City's internal conflicts have basically become public and can no longer be suppressed.
Several leaders seem to be inseparable from each other, and they all want to use the company's resources to plan for their own future.
It was too late for them to hold each other back. The situation when the company was first established was no longer the same as when the company was first established and everyone worked together to create and conquer the world as a team.
Therefore, the good results achieved by New Art City in 1986 became their last glory.
This was a major turning point in the development history of New Art City. From then on, New Art City's performance was like that of Xiao Erhei during the New Year, and it became worse every year.
That's too far.
Huang Baiming decided to do the project "Eight Star Announcement" last year.
The plot of "Eight Star Announcement" is actually very simple, it is a family light comedy of the family type.
Huang Baiming wants to seize the opportunity of family reunion during the Spring Festival, focusing on happy endings, and relying on the participation or guest appearances of many stars to gain popularity and boost the box office.
This project relied more on Huang Baiming's personal relationship with Xinyi City, and there was not much difficulty in filming.
It's just that Xinyi City's internal confidence in such a project is not very strong. It may be that some people are unwilling to divert the company's resources to Huang Baiming's project. Anyway, the actual support the company finally decided to give Huang Baiming was not very much.
The good old man Huang Baiming was also helpless about this.
It happened that he met Sun Dahai when he was attending the premiere of "The Last Emperor" in Xiangjiang. After the two talked for a while, not only did Youlian Company become one of the investors of "Eight Star Announcement", Huang Baiming also promised to use
In his personal capacity, he helped Youlian Brokerage Company prepare for the new project "Alang's Story".
Youlian Brokerage Company is a company mainly engaged in brokerage business. Although it has a full set of film and television production qualifications, equipment and technical personnel, it is not a pure film production company.
With the current staff composition of Youlian Company, we can complete two to three self-produced films every year and participate in three to five projects of other film and television companies. This kind of workload is quite appropriate.
If there are more projects, Youlian Company will need to equip more professional and technical personnel, which will not be worth the gain.