*This article does not contain spoilers for “Love Dead”, so you can read it with confidence.
How long can the story of “users pay me, I go to make a good movie”?
When the first season of “Love Death + Robots” (hereinafter referred to as “Love Death”) aired in March 2019, “Netflix” was still unknown to many domestic audiences ‘s website.
The popularity trend of Chinese search engines intuitively shows the process of Netflix’s recognition in China – from the first and second seasons of “Love Dead”, “Squid Game”, and then “Battle of the Two Cities”, each search peak overlaps Author of a hit Netflix release.
“Love Dead” is an opportunity for many people to know about Netflix, and the time of its production also happens to be one of the starting points for this website to reach a new peak.
In the ten years from 2010 to 2020, Netflix’s stock price has risen from $7 to nearly $400, which is one of the most representative technology stocks in the streaming media era.
In the two years after that, due to the impact of the epidemic, people’s time at home increased, making Netflix one of the companies that benefited from this global event, and its market value continued to soar – “Squid Game” became popular at the end of last year. Globally, Netflix’s stock price was close to $700 at one point, ranking 20th in the S&P 500.
However, after that, the situation took a sharp turn for the worse. Since the end of last year, Netflix’s stock has been depreciating all the way, falling below $200 in just half a year, returning to the level of 2017.
On May 20, 2022, Netflix closed at $186.35. The company’s market value has evaporated by nearly 70% compared to the beginning of the year, but the decline is still in sight. The day “520” has become a new “Valentine’s Day” in China because of its Chinese homophony, and it just so happens that on the night of this day, the third season of “Love, Death and Robots” was officially launched on Netflix.
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In the past four or five years, Netflix, which has plenty of money on hand, once acted as a “capital white knight” in the film and television industry – it will shoot the films that other companies dare not make, and it will invest in the projects that other companies are unwilling to invest. Provided creative funds for many artists.
Especially at a time when the Japanese animation industry is lacking in creativity and sluggish, Netflix broke the long-standing “production committee” system of joint ventures between many companies, and rounded up the production funds of many animation projects, making some commercial returns unpredictable but with Items with unique styles come out. Although these animations eventually received mixed reviews, it did not prevent Netflix from being regarded as the “savior of Japanese animation” for a time.
It’s hard to imagine if there is no investment from Netflix, works like “Alien Beasts” and “Devil Man CryBaby” will have a chance to be completed.
The birth of “Love Death Machine” is one of the fruits of this round of sowing. The two creators, David Fincher and Tim Miller, spent nearly a decade looking for investors for the project, and finally received an olive branch from Netflix. Blur, an animation effects company founded by Tim Miller
As the core of the succession, Studio has invited the world’s top animation artists to create freely with the theme of “love, death and robots”.
This kind of “plattery-style” animation series is not new in form. The movie “Cosmic Tricks” in the 1980s was jointly produced by a number of animation companies with the theme of “evil collection”. Here’s a short clip of a different style. Some of these unrestrained fantasy stories are adapted from novels and comics, and a few are new originals, and what they have in common is that they are all full of yellow and violent elements. David Fincher and Tim Miller were also influenced by this short film collection and wanted to organize their own “proposition composition conference”.
“Cosmic Wonders”
The Japanese animation industry also has a similar tradition. From time to time, animators will gather together to create some short film compilations. In pursuit of freedom of expression, such works rarely consider marketability, and are more explicit in narrative or visual expression, usually only popular among small groups of people, and very few can have an impact on the outside world.
Most of you have seen the “big pendulum” dance popular in short videos, and its source comes from “ME!ME!ME!”, one of the short films included in the “Japan Animation (People) Exhibition”
But the repercussions of “Love Dead” apparently far exceeded expectations for an “experimental animation compilation”, especially in China.
Mainland China is one of the few areas that Netflix has not covered. However, “Love Dead” has received more than 400,000 reviews on Douban, far exceeding the number of overseas film and television review sites, and still maintains a high score of 9.2.
In fact, when the domestic media was introducing Love Dead with “Netflix’s latest hit drama”, some overseas counterparts were surprised at why this work was recognized by so many Chinese audiences. The first season of “Love Dead” itself includes “I wish you a good harvest” adapted from the work of Chinese writer Liu Yukun, and the short film “The Witness” also contains Chinese elements, all of which are considered to be one of the reasons why “Love Dead” is popular in China . Combined with the domestic sales of The Wandering Earth in the same year, this phenomenon is seen as a sign of the rise of sci-fi works in China.
Although both contain oriental backgrounds, “Good Harvest” and “The Witness” present very different content
However, judging from the comments of domestic netizens, the first thing that attracts audiences to the film is undoubtedly the visual impact. These short films look like the most advanced game CG at the moment, but they have a complete narrative and intriguing stories, and will not have the name of a game appearing at the end of the credits after the audience’s appetite. Not to mention the freshness brought by the adrenaline-stimulating yellow storm element.
And the one-time release of 18 episodes of different styles of short films is also a rare and enjoyable experience for domestic audiences who have been suffering from “weekly broadcast” or “daily update” conventions for a long time.
In the relevant comment area, many people ranked the 18 episodes of short films in order of their favorites, and some even attached a comment to each episode. Compared with ordinary popular TV dramas, discussions on the Internet around “Love Dead” are more like social topics such as constellations or MBTI personality tests. People express themselves and look for similarities according to their likes and dislikes in different episodes.
For many Chinese audiences, “Love Dead” is indeed the first time they come into contact with such a collection of sci-fi short films with a Cult style, and it has become a benchmark for such films in everyone’s mind. After that, animations, sci-fi dramas and even game CGs are all It is often compared to it.
As a result, the first to be stuck by this evaluation standard is the follow-up episode of “Love Dead” itself.
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With the rave reviews of the first season, “Love Dead” quickly ushered in the news of Netflix’s renewal for a second season, but then came a long wait of 26 months.
During this period, due to the impact of the first year of the new crown epidemic, offline theaters and theaters were severely affected, which was originally considered to be beneficial to Netflix, which mainly focuses on family viewing. But the fact is that the number of new subscribers of Netflix has fallen into a bottleneck after only half a year of explosion, and the growth is far less than expected.
This is usually attributed to the fact that due to the sluggish theater market, the “home streaming” track was instantly “rolled up”. Apple, Disney, Amazon, and HBO have all increased their investment in online film and television content. Online broadcasting rights are also faced with being re-divided by various platforms.
In this way, the so-called “content moat” that Netflix has accumulated before is in jeopardy, and the production of new content is also affected by the epidemic and it is difficult to produce. If it hadn’t been for “Abandoned Soldier” in the second half of 2020, it would have been difficult for Netflix to achieve its goal of exceeding 200 million subscribers in this year.
“Abandoned Soldier” also has a lot of popularity in China, and is known as a new benchmark for “big heroine cool drama”
In the first half of 2021, due to the delay in the lack of new blockbuster drama series, the growth of Netflix’s paying users has once again fallen into a situation that is neither embarrassing nor embarrassing, and new stimulation is urgently needed to open up the situation – this time It was the second season of “Love Dead” that was pushed to the front.
To say that the most obvious difference between the second season of “Love Dead” and two years ago is that the number of episodes has been directly cut by more than half, leaving only 8 episodes. The main creative members also hinted in the interview that the reduction in the number of episodes is a helpless move for the decline in production capacity, and it is not the original complete second season, which is full of the meaning of rushing ducks to the shelves.
The second season of “Love Dead” basically continued the production team of the first season, and there is not necessarily any shrinkage in the performance of the picture. But this time, the reputation of this compilation on the Chinese Internet is enough to describe it as “falling from the altar”. Not only did the number of comments on Douban drop sharply, but the score also dropped to 6.8 points.
More criticism than the dissatisfaction caused by the reduction in “quantity” is the decline in the “quality” of the series. Many viewers think that the second season is not original enough, lacks innovation, loses diversity, and leaves nothing but beautiful pictures.
But in fact, similar criticism existed when the first season of “Love Dead” aired: some viewers who were originally sci-fi fans, after watching these short films, felt that they were just some bad ideas wrapped in beautiful animation. , and the three-word propositional composition of “love, death, robot” limits the imagination. Not to mention that most of the works are adapted from ready-made novels many years ago, but they are just picking up people’s teeth, and they are not new at all.
For example, “Zima Lan” in the first season was adapted from a short story by Alastair Reynolds. This episode was widely praised at the time, but most readers who have read the original will recommend new audiences to watch it. Looking at the original work, I think that the ideological dimension contained in the original text is broader than that of the animated short film.
Like many adaptations in the “Love Dead” series, “Qima Lan” enriches the visual performance of the story, but simplifies a lot of text settings and dialogue content
It’s just that the audience who first came into contact with science fiction works through the popularity of “Love Dead Machine” didn’t care about these opinions, even if it was an adaptation, it was still new to them. However, after only two years, the shortcomings of “flaws that do not hide the good” became the failure of “continuation of the dog’s tail” and were criticized. After all, even if they are not compared with other science fiction works in the past, some of the ideas in the second season also have the first season. The visual sense, the form of expression may not be more novel and avant-garde than before.
This phenomenon has been described as “the first sci-fi drama for young people”, that is, the audience regards the sci-fi drama they first come into contact with as the standard, and feels that it is difficult for a latecomer to surpass this work, but they do not realize this. The work itself is also the result of the accumulation of previous creativity for a long time – of course, this situation does not only happen among the audience of “Love Dead”.
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The word-of-mouth of the second season of “Love Dead” has not only encountered Waterloo in China. On Rotten Tomatoes, the audience rating of the second season of “Love Dead” is only 59%, which is far lower than the 80% of the first season.
But on the other hand, on IMDb, the average single-episode score (7.0) of the second season is not so obvious compared with the first season (7.3), the difference is that one-third of the episodes in the first season are The number is as high as 8 points or more, and there is only one episode in the second season.
This may be what the audience said “always feel that there is something missing in the second season” – what is less is the episode that can break the overall sense of good or bad, and poke the hearts of specific audiences through bold attempts.
And this is also considered to be a reflection of Netflix’s overall strategy from a bold leap a few years ago to a conservative reflection.
For many years, Netflix, as a film and television producer and investor, has been advertised as “giving creators freedom”. In short, it is the local tyrant’s style of “only giving money and not interfering”. Obviously, it is everyone’s ideal sponsor. On the other hand, Netflix has always advocated “customer-specific content”, that is, mining audiences’ preferences through big data, and investing in the production of exclusive content for users.
But this also brings an obvious contradiction – do the creators’ aesthetics and the audience’s preferences really coincide?
Not long ago, the director of “Ultraman Mobile” Kenji Kamiyama said in an interview that although Netflix had previously renewed the second season of this animation and did not interfere with the content production, according to the user feedback collected by the previous work, just give Enough production budget for six episodes and requested three new armor sets to appear in the show. The production team made a lot of compromises for this, and could only give up the original comics, and the final story was naturally not as expressive as the original script.
Production IG was born in Kamiyama Kenji, who is keen to produce Japanese-style full 3D animations. Almost only Netflix is willing to invest in and support his attempts.
Many people think that the mediocrity of the second season of “Love Dead” is the result of this “big data-oriented production” – the success of the first season with no precedent to learn from, and the attempt to make a difference between the audience’s preferences The second season of “Take the Greatest Common Divisor” quickly sparked aesthetic fatigue.
Something similar happened with Black Mirror and House of Cards, where audiences found themselves choked up by Netflix as soon as they showed a love for something.
If the wind comment of “Love Dead Machine” is also “one season is not as good as one season”, it may prove that “big data is not enough to reflect the true aesthetics of human beings”. But if the third season regains recognition, it will be a success or failure of big data – that is the question before us now.
After the third season of “Love Dead” was released on May 20, it received almost one-sided praise. The freshness of this season on Rotten Tomatoes is still maintained at 100%, and the audience’s praise rate is as high as 90%; and most of the reviews it has received in China are “return of the gods” – of course, there are still many people who feel that it is not comparable Season one.
Just like the second season, there are still only 9 episodes of “Love Dead” on the shelves this year, and the two seasons add up to one episode less than the first season, but few people question the sincerity of this season’s production. This is largely because David Fincher, one of the main planners, finally ended up directing a short film this season – “Bad Journey”, which is also currently on IMDb. The highest rated short film in the series.
This film also has a creative team from China participating in it
This time the finale is the animation “Guibaro” directed by Alberto Mirgo, who also directed “The Witness” in the first season. Just between these two works, Alberto relied on another film with the same picture style, “The Love of All”.
Windshield Wiper) won this year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.
According to Alberto’s point of view revealed in the interview, they are all discussions of love relationships
Netflix used a still from “Gibbarro” as the cover of this season, and Blur Studio also displayed it in the most prominent position on its official website, obviously with high hopes. Facts have proved that this short drama has indeed become the most topical film of this season. People discuss the pictures, plots and metaphors of “Gibaro”. Some people think that this is the most shocking episode of the whole series. Some people also think that it is just a “Western Liao Zhai”, which is a mystical “Western Liao Zhai”. The two sides are arguing about this, and the topic of the entire season’s episodes on the Internet has spiraled upwards – if “Love Dead” is really data-oriented production. Episodes, this is probably the best proof that the audience is being grasped by big data.
“Guiballo” has become a network MEME to a certain extent
However, the creators who participated in “Love Dead” obviously do not support this view.
David Fincher mentioned in an interview that “Bad Journey” was one of the earliest concept ideas that accompanied the birth of “Love Dead”, but for various reasons it did not officially debut until the third season. And the concept artist who participated in “Exactly the pulsating pulse of that machine” also tweeted that he was already busy with the short film as early as 2019.
Coincidentally, an animated video will be popular on YouTube in 2021. Thousands of 3D artists will make video clips with the theme of “people moving forward in different environments”. The best 100 of them are spliced into a montage MV. . There are many scenes with similar artistic conception in “Just the Pulse of That Machine”. After watching the film, many people came to the comment area of the YouTube video and recommended others to watch this season’s episodes. “Love Dead”.
The broadcast of the third season of “Love Dead” also made the comment area of this film lively again
All of these seem to indicate that the realization of ideas and concepts is not as distinct as the public imagines, and the order in which they are presented is sometimes just a coincidence of multiple factors.
If the production order of some of the films in the “Love Dead” series is reversed, if the second and third seasons are not broadcast separately, will the same content attract different responses? Will the series of wind reviews change from “starting at the peak” to “stable climb”?
Although none of these assumptions can be verified in reality, it is clear that it is not only the quality of these films that will fluctuate repeatedly, but also the attitudes and expectations of audiences towards these films.
4
Equally difficult to verify is what impact original content like “Love Dead” can have on Netflix’s stock price.
On the first working day after the broadcast of the third season, Netflix’s stock price also stopped the downward trend and ushered in a rare rebound, but this level of volatility can be regarded as a normal market adjustment. The pros and cons of a season of “Love Dead” are far from enough to shake the situation Netflix faces, just like no matter how popular these homemade dramas are in China, it cannot change the reality that Netflix cannot fully enter the Chinese market.
The growth of Netflix’s paying users in the global market is close to saturation. The withdrawal from the Russian market due to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine has also caused it to lose a large number of existing users. The volatile stock price repeatedly questioned the so-called “Users pay me, and I will make good movies. “How long can the story be told?
When the first season of “Love Dead” came out, many people expected that some of the short films would become new seeds, such as being expanded into more complete films or episodes. But in the past three years, such a development has never come, and “Love Dead Machine” does not seem to have any impact on the real world, just as the real world has undergone earth-shaking changes in the past three years, but there is almost no discussion in these ” Technology, Death and Love” left traces in the film.
This may be why in the eyes of many people, “Love Dead” is still more and more empty and boring.
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