Under Boss Huang's design, the core themes of "The Wandering Earth" were largely aligned with American films, emphasizing that there are no absolute heroes and that most endeavors are accomplished by the collective. The masses are presented as the central focus of the entire movie.
This, for a film, is actually a very difficult undertaking. Because once the focus of a movie shifts to the collective populace, it inevitably leads to a significant reduction in the protagonist's screen time, and it can even become difficult to know how to write the script.
Simultaneously, if too many characters appear in a film, the audience's minds can become quite muddled. Fortunately, "The Wandering Earth" in its previous life already provided some good ideas on how to present this.
The approach taken was one of saturated rescue missions. The protagonist and his team, after enduring immense hardship and finally nearing victory, would be met with an unavoidable crisis and suffer defeat.
Then, through communications from others, they would learn that the problem had already been solved. This was because twenty teams were simultaneously undertaking a mission, and if even one succeeded, all twenty teams would be considered successful.
Of course, there would ultimately be other powerful crises that the protagonist's team would have to resolve. However, throughout the film, it would be conveyed to the audience through various channels that more crises were being resolved by others.
These characteristics were particularly evident in the first installment of "The Wandering Earth." Although the protagonist was the designer and planner of the entire "Wandering Earth" project, apart from continuously collecting data, calculating, and theoretically planning, everything else was actually completed by other supporting characters for him.
Someone collected data for him, at the cost of sacrificing themselves in the place closest to the sun.
Someone was responsible for protecting him and eliminating assassination attempts by the spaceship faction, also at the cost of their own lives.
And still others continuously provided him with spiritual and psychological comfort, telling him that everything he was doing was for humanity, allowing him to persevere in his execution.
What he ultimately accomplished himself was standing at the United Nations headquarters, in front of a global live broadcast, introducing Earth's desperate future and the detailed plan of his "Wandering Earth" project.
Ultimately, the United World Government gave all of humanity an opportunity for a collective vote: to flee with Earth, or to build 100 large spacecraft for escape.
The former would require humanity to escape for 1500 years, as humans would be bringing their own planet, directly traveling to the nearest star system.
However, the latter would take tens of thousands of years, as the nearest star system with a similar spatial environment to Earth was tens of thousands of light-years away.
In the end, humanity chose to leave with their Earth, and this was the absolute climax and conclusion of the first film.
It is worth noting that here, Da Liu also redesigned a birth control plan. Because from the commencement of constructing the planetary engines to the cessation of Earth's rotation, there was a period of 150 years.
The underground cities beneath the planetary engines could only accommodate a limited population, and the various food resources hoarded by humanity were also limited. Therefore, humanity could only carry a population not exceeding one billion into the era of the Wandering Earth. By the time of the long voyage era, the total population might even be reduced to no more than ten million.
So, how to transform the current global population of 7 billion into one billion became a major challenge. Thus, the United World Government issued the birth permit plan. Firstly, an individual was only permitted to have one child. Any violation would result in a direct sentence of thirty years of reformatory labor, to be spent constructing planetary engines.
In addition, they actively encouraged non-marriage and childlessness, because after giving birth, these children would have to live in an era of future resource scarcity, unseen sunlight, and daily threats of death.
Therefore, they encouraged all humans not to have children, and to enjoy life themselves while they were alive.
However, on the other hand, they vigorously encouraged high-intelligence individuals to have children, as humanity needed these children, who were innately gifted, to work for the future of humanity.
The first film revolved around this birth control plan and the spaceship faction's plan, with disputes, intense struggles, and choices arising from these conflicts.
In summary, Boss Huang poured a great deal of effort and many of his personal ideas into the film "The Wandering Earth."
Of course, in reality, when too many things are injected into a film, the box office performance is invariably not as strong.
Therefore, although "The Wandering Earth" Part 1 was widely acclaimed upon its release, with almost all countries' media and film critics, except for Americans, giving it very high marks, the box office struggled to recover. In the entire American market, the total box office only amounted to a little over 400 million US dollars.
While this box office figure might seem very high, when compared to the total production cost of over 8 billion US dollars for the entire nine-part "Wandering Earth" series, it was undoubtedly a complete loss.
Fortunately, the domestic Chinese market was very supportive, ultimately generating a box office of 5.9 billion RMB. Coupled with the box office from various countries worldwide, although it still fell short of the production cost, it at least did not result in a significant loss.
Huang He was not particularly surprised by this outcome, as he had predicted it immediately after watching the first film. After all, the core themes of this film were contrary to the currently popular superhero movies. When audiences had already become accustomed to watching superhero movies, the difficulty in accepting "The Wandering Earth" naturally increased.
However, Boss Huang's determination to strongly promote "The Wandering Earth" remained unchanged. Therefore, one month after the film's theatrical release, "The Wandering Earth 1" was directly made available on global online platforms.
Under normal circumstances, a film's theatrical run could last around six months. For example, in the United States, a film would generally be released for six months before being taken down.
In China, this period was usually around three months. Thus, its release being taken down after just one month was considered incredibly unbelievable by many industry insiders, indicating a clear lack of interest in continuing to earn money.
However, it must be said that even if it were re-released for another two or five months after its initial month of screening, the cumulative box office might not exceed 20% of the initial earnings. Therefore, Huang He simply chose to forgo this portion of the box office and directly put it online.
Although it was still a paid service, the fee was only five yuan, or 1 US dollar. Furthermore, viewers with membership viewing passes from major platforms could watch it for free.
While this caused considerable dissatisfaction among some audiences who had purchased tickets, it also successfully piqued the curiosity of more viewers. After all, this was a film whose promotional costs alone exceeded 100 million US dollars. It represented nearly 10 years of dedicated effort by Jiangnan Film and Television, and the world's richest man had personally made a rare appearance to promote it, even playing a supporting role in the film: a boastful member of the spaceship faction who declared, "I am rich," only to be stabbed to death.
Therefore, under this widespread online promotion, the number of viewers for "The Wandering Earth" began to increase rapidly. Simultaneously, more analytical reviews emerged, continuously dissecting the various themes and profound meanings conveyed within the film. This finally led to a higher level of acceptance and recognition for the film among audiences, laying the groundwork for the release of the second film in the latter half of the year.
Consequently, when the second film was released, "The Wandering Earth 2" successfully achieved a turnaround. The North American box office for the second installment surpassed 900 million US dollars, more than doubling its predecessor, thus successfully entering the threshold for Jiangnan Film and Television's blockbuster films.
Indeed, after nearly 20 years of cultivation, Jiangnan Film and Television had released over three hundred films globally.
These included both small-scale but exquisitely crafted films, such as "Paranormal Activity" and "The Man from Earth," but more renowned were their high-budget, special-effects-heavy blockbusters.
Furthermore, they boasted two extremely famous cinematic universes: the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Misty Cinematic Universe.
The former had currently released a total of 68 films, of which 60 were individual hero films, and 8 were ensemble "Avengers" super-team films.
The Misty Cinematic Universe, while not as overwhelming in number, had reached 36 films.
Among these, 9 were direct sequels to "Misty Journey," depicting the main storyline with Li Qiang as the protagonist.
Following that were the "Re-Mysterious" trilogy, starring Fu Shan, and the "Great Emperor" trilogy, starring Qing Di.
In addition to these supporting characters, many films were established within the cultivation system of "Misty Journey" but had no direct relation to the original story, such as Xianxia films like "Sword Immortal," "Zhu Xian," and "This Sword Immortal is Clearly Very Strong But Too Cautious."
These series of major productions essentially monopolized the global film box office charts. Apart from a mere two films managing to break into the top ranks, 8 out of the top 10 spots were occupied by Jiangnan Film and Television's productions.
Within the top 100, a staggering seventy-two films were from Jiangnan Film and Television, and Jiangnan Film and Television had successfully raised the standard for entering the global film box office top 100 from 120 million US dollars in 2001 to the current level of 900 million US dollars.
Therefore, 900 million US dollars had become the benchmark achievement for what netizens referred to as a "Jiangnan blockbuster." If a film failed to meet this benchmark, it was practically embarrassing.
"The Wandering Earth 2" had, by a narrow margin, met this standard. Furthermore, with the success of "The Wandering Earth," several film critics astutely pointed out that Jiangnan Group was on the verge of establishing an entirely new cinematic universe centered around "The Wandering Earth."
This would give Jiangnan Group an incredibly formidable presence with a total of three cinematic universes, leaving virtually no room for other film companies to compete.
Of course, the entirety of 2022 was not all good news. For example, the Chinese national football team, once again living up to expectations, failed to qualify: they were eliminated from the World Cup qualifying rounds and once again successfully missed the World Cup. However, at this time, the five Chinese youth football teams had already begun to write their own legends.