Detective Conan： The Ghost of Baker Street was re-released after 21 years. ＂Conan is still good-looking＂？

　　[Global Times Special Reporter]
Dong Ming] For China "conan fan", waiting for an annual theatrical version of Detective Conan has become a "habitual action". On April 4th this year, another Conan was shown in China Cinema, but this time it was not the latest theatrical version in 2023, but the 2002 Detective Conan: The Dead of Baker Street. In addition to lamenting that Conan can finally get a movie ticket, fans are also feeling that Conan’s creation seems to be "not as good as it used to be".

　　"Conan’s theatrical masterpiece"

　　With the full recovery of the China film market, the majority of "second-yuan lovers" have also ushered in a wave of surprises in the last two months: Makoto Shinkai’s "Journey to the Bell Bud" was released on March 24, and the box office has exceeded 550 million yuan; Then there was the movie version of Slam Dunk Master on April 20th, which rekindled the passion of countless "post-80s" and "post-90s", both of which are expected to challenge the box office record of Japanese movies released in China.

　　Between Journey to the Bell Bud and Slam Dunk Master, apart from The Story of the Ping Family: The King of Dogs, which was scheduled for April 7th, there was a surprise release of Conan’s theatrical version. However, this film is not Detective Conan: The Fish Shadow of Black Iron (released in Japan on April 14th) in 2023, but The Dead of Baker Street, which was released more than 20 years ago and is still regarded as the masterpiece of Conan’s theatrical version.

　　As Conan’s sixth theatrical version, The Dead of Baker Street directed by Kenji Kodama is still out of date today because of its compact plot, profound conception, sincere emotion and accurate prediction. The Ghost of Baker Street tells that Conan and others attended a high-tech game conference called Cocoon, and 50 children of Japanese political and business celebrities accessed the virtual world through devices, but they encountered an unexpected crisis.

　　During the event, the game developer died of murder, and the game was also taken over by the artificial intelligence "Noah’s Ark". In the end, only Conan and his party survived in the scene of "London in the 19th century". Unless the key clues to solve the case are found, all players will die.

　　The two main lines of the film "Looking for Jack the Ripper" and "The Mystery of Genius Teenager’s Suicide" are intertwined. On the one hand, the film allows Conan to imitate Sherlock Holmes in the streets of London in the 19th century, on the other hand, it criticizes the class solidification and the malpractice of Japanese society, and the plot reaches its climax in revealing Jack the Ripper’s identity and blood.

　　The Dead in Baker Street is not only a story in one go, but also the brief appearance of Sherlock Holmes and Professor moriarty, the interaction between Conan and his son, Xiaolan’s self-sacrifice and other details are touching. See "The Dead of Baker Street" 20 years later. The ideas of DNA exploration, artificial intelligence, digital life, VR equipment and metauniverse in the film have now come true, and people can’t help but admire the foresight of the main creation.

　　After more than 1000 episodes, the plot was filled with water.

　　Since the first theatrical version of Time to Detonate the Skyscraper landed on the big screen in 1997, Conan series has almost maintained an average annual "high yield", including last year’s "Halloween Bride", and now there are 25 theatrical versions to meet the audience. The plot, characters and cartoons in the theatrical version are independent and continuous, and sometimes linked with the animation in the TV version.

　　The Bride of Halloween is a continuation of the 2004 special "Shocking the 12 Million Hostages of the Metropolitan Police Department", which earned 9.48 billion yen at the box office in Japan, surpassing the 9.37 billion yen of Boxing of the Qing Dynasty, ranking first in all Conan theatrical editions. "Halloween Bride" also earned 200 million yuan at the box office in China, with a douban score of 7.3, slightly reversing the previous criticism of fans that "the theatrical version only has major scene special effects, no plot and no reasoning".

　　In the eyes of many post-90s and post-00s, compared with the early years, Conan is "ugly" today, especially the TV version after more than 1,000 episodes, whose painting style is more and more conservative and younger, "not scary at all, and even the scene of the victim’s" dying unsatisfied "is gone". Moreover, with more and more people appearing on the scene, the gap between the pros and cons is getting bigger and bigger. G?sh? Aoyama and other masters are not eager to promote the main plot, but arrange many daily cases unrelated to the main line, which makes many Conan fans worry.

　　What makes fans unbearable is that the quality of these daily cases is worrying. Compared with the works more than ten years ago, both the modus operandi and the reasoning ability have dropped significantly. A lot of water flooding in the plot often leads to the collapse of the characters in Conan’s world. Detectives such as Conan and Hattori have many CP’s, and villains of black organizations such as Gin "catch the mole" every day, and there will be a situation that "villains are forcibly washed away because of their high popularity", which makes many "Conan watching the audience grow up" unable to help but vomit.

　　Box office is inversely proportional to word of mouth.

　　Corresponding to the decline in the level of comics and TV editions, Conan’s theatrical edition is becoming more and more "Hollywood blockbuster", and the producers have invested more budget and resources to make the box office one higher than the other. Although the early Conan theatrical version gained high reputation by virtue of the reasoning bridge, the box office was not ideal. The box office of the first theatrical version "Time to Detonate Skyscraper" was only 1.1 billion yen. Although the reputation of "The Dead of Baker Street" was high, the box office in Japan was only 3.4 billion yen.

　　In 2011, 15 Minutes of Silence, directed by Kōbun Shizuno, began to obviously highlight the action arrangement and explosion scenes, and weakened the reasoning elements. The content arrangement became more and more Hollywood, and the box office also rose. In 2016, the box office of Nightmare in Pure Black was 6.3 billion yen, and in 2017, Tang Hong’s Love Song was 6.8 billion yen. After 2018, the theatrical editions such as Zero Executor, Boxing of No Green and Halloween Bride jumped to 9 billion yen.

　　The price of the theater box office rising all the way is the decline of word of mouth. In 2021, the plot of "Crimson Bullet" was stiff and far-fetched, and a large number of explosions were piled up in the film. The douban score was only 5.6. In addition, in recent years, the theater version of the "sniper rifle hits the moving super-high-speed train from 800 miles away", "skateboarding chasing the car" and "football kicking the satellite" is even more confusing to the audience, and the scores of the other two best-selling "Zero Executor" and "Boxing of Winning the Blue" are only 5.7 and 5.8.

　　Most Japanese fans were exposed to Conan animation through TV and CD-ROM in the early days. After the theatrical version was introduced to China, people began to watch it on the big screen. The box office in China also climbed from 9.37 million yuan in "The Dark Tracker" to 216 million yuan in "The Crimson Bullet", and the box office attraction when China and China were released simultaneously should not be underestimated.

　　As for the latest release of The Dead on Baker Street, the Lighthouse Professional Edition predicts that the box office in China will be between 40 million yuan and 70 million yuan. The film still relies more on the emotional support of fans, and proves that Conan is still good-looking through the "late movie ticket".

　　Author: Dong Ming