The Fantasy Entertainment Empire

It is normal for Netflix to refuse to continue to increase its stake in "Lord of the Mysteries". No content platform is a philanthropist.

Everyone comes out to make money. If a drama becomes popular, then needless to say, all kinds of resources will be spent, as long as it is profitable, you can do whatever you want; It is difficult to ask others to continue to invest more resources.

Of course Li Zhen understands this truth, but it always makes people feel aggrieved when things happen to him.

Unwilling to give up, he asked, "Is there no turning point?"

Brand, who was standing opposite him, also shook his head, and said, "Boss, I'm afraid there is no turning point... I contacted their people this afternoon, and their attitude was very clear, and there was a word in the middle ..."

"What words?"

"They said, 'It's a good thing you didn't accept a buyout at the time'..."

"..." Although what he said was true, and might not even contain any malicious intentions, it felt uncomfortable no matter how he heard it.

Brand observed his boss's face, and then asked another question: "How is the performance of this "Lord of the Mysteries" in China?"

"Not bad." What Li Zhen said was true.

He has received the news of this work from China. Although it is not particularly detailed, it can be seen that the results are indeed good.

On this point, he can also give some analysis from his heart.

The quality of the work can be excluded first. The quality of "Lord of the Mysteries" must be very good, and it is the same in North America and mainland China.

The key lies in the different market conditions in the two places.

The V signboard has a strong domestic appeal. When Dimension Entertainment releases a new work, sometimes it doesn't even need to invest too much resources to promote it. A large number of viewers and fans will act as tap water and help promote it in various places.

In terms of subject matter, traditional Chinese themes are very prone to acclimatization in places such as North America and Europe, and it is a very serious acclimatization, which may even directly lead to the sudden death of the work.

But on the contrary, due to the weakness of the domestic cultural market in the past many years, it has led to the entry of Western-themed things. Although Chinese audiences may have a certain cultural barrier to Western-themed stories, they are much more comfortable compared to the extremely harsh living environment of Eastern culture in the West.

In other words, the steampunk described in "Lord of the Mysteries" and the Victorian British style embodied in "Lord of the Mysteries" are much more acceptable to domestic audiences than expected.

The combination of the two allowed "Lord of the Mysteries" to achieve good results during the two or three days of its domestic launch, even better than expected.

Judging from the domestic reports, the operation department of the 'Dimension Platform' even believes that the drama "Lord of the Mysteries" may even be able to recover all the costs and even generate a lot of money just relying on the mainland market. profit.

Looking at these things, Li Zhen felt even more depressed - if "Lord of the Mysteries" did not do well in China, then he still has a lot to say, such as "Lord of the Mysteries" is not suitable for the audience, works I have a problem or something.

But now, this drama should obviously achieve better results in North America, but the county seems to be unsatisfactory, and instead became popular in China.

Doesn't it seem that the North American side of the dimension he controls is incompetent?

Of course, the headquarters didn't question him, but he didn't give any comfort either.

Although he was not scolded, Li Zhen was quite self-aware. He felt that the attitude from the headquarters was a scrutiny. You'd better keep working hard and make achievements, otherwise...

He didn't say it clearly, but he felt that was probably what it meant.

If he doesn't do well this time, there may be some problems with his career prospects. No matter what line of work, you don't like losers too much.

He cheered up a little bit, and he said: "Mr. Brand, although Netflix rejected our request, we still need to continue to arrange related promotion work on our side. For the specific implementation documents, I hope If you can take it out as soon as possible, we will discuss it together."

"Okay." Brand said, "But I generally have some ideas."

He paused, and continued to introduce: "In addition to the targeted publicity we talked about this morning, I also noticed that the word-of-mouth of our drama should not be bad. Now the content of the ten episodes is only released. After watching the first episode, the general comments said that the pace is a bit slow, and there are more world settings at the beginning, which is not exciting enough. There are many such comments. But even so, many viewers who watched it gave us good reviews. .”

"I have also watched the last few episodes of this show. After the first episode was a bit bland, the story behind it is still very exciting. There are suspenseful reasoning parts, and the story advances layer by layer. Interesting, slowly revealing the plot, coupled with the battle-related design is also very good, I think the potential of this drama must be more than just that."

Li Zhen put his hands on his chin, obviously thinking about what Brand said.

Brand said: "My suggestion is, wait until next week, or even next week, the serialization of "Lord of the Mysteries" will be supported by three episodes, and the whole world will be reflected in a relatively complete way, and the story will advance to a more complete stage." When there are attractive places, we should increase our publicity investment, and it is best to use word-of-mouth marketing..."

The things narrated in the mouth seemed a bit messy, but Li Zhen understood the general meaning.

After thinking for a while, he also thought it was feasible, so he said: "Okay, give me a report as soon as possible, and let's take a look at this idea."

He wasn't sure it would work, but at least Brand gave him a more feasible plan.

...

By the second week or so after "Lord of the Mysteries" was launched, as Brand said, the word-of-mouth and performance of this work had increased to a relatively large extent.

The improvement in performance is mainly due to two reasons.

One is that money was spent, and the targeted publicity budget thrown down by Dimension North America has produced certain effects; the other is that after the content of the second episode of the work entered, the attractiveness of the whole plot began to show slowly, allowing the audience to You can start to appreciate the charm of this work.

At the same time, it is also because of this that the reputation of the "Lord of the Mysteries" series has risen.

Compared with the two, the improvement of word-of-mouth is more obvious. Although the results have also increased, and the increase rate is not small, but because the base is not large, the absolute value does not seem so obvious.

But the rise in word-of-mouth is more obvious.

And this is very helpful for the word-of-mouth marketing strategy that Dimension North America will adopt next.

Under the auspices of Brand, the company's resources began to be poured in batches, and funds were invested in places such as ins and must-death; a certain amount of advertisements were placed in some media; Some short film excerpts, and super hot...

Using various methods, the direct impact is that the results of "Lord of the Mysteries" have begun to rise significantly.

After the third week of the launch, after the third episode was broadcast, seeing the word-of-mouth continue to rise, Brand immediately made a decisive decision and spent most of the resources on hand.

Great results.

Seeing the soaring grades, Netflix has also made moves.

They restarted the promotion of "Lord of the Mysteries", and gave them various treatments.

Seeing the rise of the data curve, Li Zhen was determined-he was brought back to life!

...

Fan Zhe was also very happy to receive the good news from North America.

"Lord of the Mysteries" can make money, so this matter is gone.

This work has performed well domestically. Although due to the subject matter, it is unlikely that it will reach the point where it is almost a national drama like "The Master of Martial Arts", but with its super high production level, it is not a big problem to crush the works of the same period in the domestic market.

On the "Dimension Platform", the pricing of "Lord of the Mysteries" also adopts a boutique strategy, and the unit price is relatively high. Six yuan an episode is not cheap.

At the beginning, there were still many people in the company who had some objections to this pricing strategy, thinking that in this way, the price of 60 yuan for the complete works would keep many viewers out of the threshold of watching.

But the final market shows that the problem is not big, and the way of high-quality content and high pricing can still attract a large number of viewers.

In fact, the largest user group of "Lord of the Mysteries" has relatively good income, relatively good education, and people who can accept the story theme and selling points of this work. And this group of people is precisely the group that is not sensitive to price.

After crossing the payment threshold, the gap between how much a show sells for an episode is of little significance to this group of people. What they value more is the quality of works/services, and they will be willing to pay a higher price as long as the quality passes the standard.

In the past, this part of the user group was relatively small. After all, China is still a developing country. In addition to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, there are vast areas that are not very developed, and there are even hundreds of millions of people who are relatively poor compared to urban residents.

However, with the continuous development of the national economy in these years, the economic living standards of the people are also rising. Coupled with the fact that the copyright protection system has gradually become more robust, ordinary people have become more and more accepting of paying for content...

These series of factors all represent the spring breeze of cultural creators, which seems to have already blown.

It is reflected in the work "Lord of the Mysteries", which has sold more than five million sets in the three weeks since its launch.

All in all, within three weeks, the revenue created by "Lord of the Mysteries" reached almost 300 million RMB.

Judging from this trend, it is estimated that when all the content of "Lord of the Mysteries" is updated, the investment cost of the work can be almost recovered only from the content distribution on the "Dimension Platform" in the domestic mainland market .

On the North American side, after the performance of "Lord of the Mysteries" skyrocketed, the converted income was quite considerable.

Counting the markets in other regions of the world... Dimension Entertainment has fought another successful battle.

The most important thing is that the entire copyright of this work, except for the novel, is in Dimension Entertainment's own hands.

This means that they can play around with the copyright of this work.

Now, Dimension Entertainment has strong development capabilities in peripheral markets. They have very good cooperation with various merchants and can launch many high-quality peripheral products.

Even the arrangement of some stage plays...

When these things are also effective, the value of the IP of the entire work is developed to a deeper level, and the source of profit becomes more diversified.

And the evaluation of the work is quite high.

At present, the reputation of "Lord of the Mysteries" is quite excellent in major domestic evaluation media. For example, Douban, with a score of 9.4, can be called a drama.

"It's hard to imagine that there is a company in China that can create such a perfect story with this theme."

"I am a fan of the novel "Lord of the Mysteries". I have been looking forward to whether this novel can be put on the screen. But the expectation is the expectation, and I also know that this possibility is unlikely. "The Lord of the Mysteries" It is doomed that no domestic film and television company will take a fancy to it; it is even more impossible to count on foreign film and television companies to buy a Chinese-produced story with a foreign background. Originally, my greatest hope was to be able to Seeing animation works, I am already satisfied. But Dimension Entertainment gave me a huge surprise! The quality is super high, even watching American dramas, I have never felt this way before, I kneel down to Dimension's father!"

...

The serialization time of "Lord of Mysteries" is ten weeks, and the frequency of one episode is updated every week.

By the time all the works have been updated, the time has moved from mid-April to almost July.

Entering the summer vacation, it is time for major cultural industry companies to start to show their talents.

This summer, Dimension Entertainment released a new work of "Hunter's Notes", which maintains the quality of the previous one, and it can be regarded as a successor to "Lord of the Mysteries". At the same time, during this period, they also have a movie released .

"Rune Wars", this LOL series of movies with Lux as the protagonist.

This film, among the three films in the LOL series so far, has the lowest investment cost, and the box office performance is also the bottom.

But that doesn't mean it's a failure.

The so-called 'bottom' still depends on who you compare with.

Similarly for the LOL series, the production standards of other films are indeed higher, and it is normal that they are not compared. But in fact, this "Rune Wars" still has a box office of 2.6 billion in the mainland, and it has a box office of over 100 million US dollars in North America. The global box office has exceeded 500 million US dollars, compared with about 70 million US dollars. In terms of investment costs, it must be a profitable business.