In previous years during the Spring Festival, the most discussed topic was "Which movie to watch during the Spring Festival". This year there is an additional question: "Which theater to watch it at?"
On the morning of February 17, the first day of the Lunar New Year, many viewers who walked into the theater discovered that before the movie started, there was a special New Year's "Easter egg" on the screen – Guo Fan, Wu Jing, Andy Lau, and Shen Teng were sitting together, appearing as a civilized viewing reminder.
This is the official New Year greeting video released by "The Wandering Earth". At the end of the video, it is officially announced that "The Wandering Earth 3" will be released on New Year's Day in 2027. It is understood that Wanda Cinema has released a poster for the film during the Spring Festival. The picture shows the character played by Shen Teng wearing a uniform, holding a gun and wearing glasses, with a frightened expression. Some viewers said, "I didn't expect to see Shen Teng's appearance in "The Wandering Earth 3" exposed for the first time while watching a movie!"
Exclusive content of next year's blockbusters is revealed before the main film, attracting citizens to watch movies in theaters in an unprecedented way. The reporter learned that the "Wandering Earth 3" film was exclusively launched in theaters instead of streaming media. It is no longer a short video that can be scratched off at will, but has become a ceremony unique to the theater, that is, using the screen to present content that belongs to the screen.
In this regard, Wanda Film Chairman Chen Zhixi revealed that the New Year charity patch of "The Wandering Earth 3" stems from the theater's deep understanding of content creation and accurate grasp of audience psychology. That is, it injects theater thinking at the content planning stage to truly connect the content end and the projection end.
In addition to exclusive films, theaters are also using other methods to broaden the audience’s content experience in the theater. In fact, before "The Wandering Earth 3", "Tang Detective 1900" launched New Year's greeting eggs and New Year's charity short films on the big screen during the Spring Festival last year, including Wang Hedi, Liu Haoran and Qu Chuxiao.
In addition, during the Spring Festival, some movie theaters launched the Pinkie Pie Popcorn "Pain Bucket" co-branded with My Little Pony, and the "Bear Ticket Checker" in collaboration with "Bear Bears".
Use content thinking as a channel, and then use the power of channels to feed back content. This is the core logic of injecting new value into theaters.
Take "The Wandering Earth 3" as an example. According to statistics, on the first day of the Lunar New Year alone, this New Year charity poster was played on more than 710 directly-operated cinemas and more than 6,000 screens across the country. It is expected that the cumulative number of moviegoers during the Spring Festival will exceed 23 million.
According to industry insiders, theaters with good box office numbers gather users who watch movies most frequently and have the strongest willingness to spend. This is also the resource that film studios most want to compete for. And cinemas are achieving precise empowerment through exclusive content and channels.
"The composition of the Spring Festival audience is different from that of the daily schedule. To accurately reach this group, we need the dual precision of time windows and screen scenes." Analysts pointed out that for a large-scale IP like "The Wandering Earth 3", this patch is equivalent to locking in tens of millions of high-value viewers in advance one year before the movie is released. "This Spring Festival, the group of people reached by the movie theater scene will most likely go to the theater again next year for this movie."
