I'll tell you the reason in one sentence: if everyone follows the example of Lost in Russia, and the video website spends a lot of money to show it online for free, how do you choose the survival of the fittest in the market?
For example, if you shoot The Wandering Earth, if the video website thinks your film is promising, it will spend 2 billion yuan to buy it for online screening. Scary enough, huh? But in fact, if The Wandering Earth is shown in the cinema, the box office performance can reach an astonishing 4.6 billion, which is actually equivalent to your disguised loss of 2.6 billion in this online screening.
As for me, I made Tiny Times, and the video website thought my film had a general prospect, so I bought it for 500 million yuan. In fact, it was a big bad film. If I go to the cinema, the box office performance is only 480 million, which is equivalent to earning 20 million in disguise.
Do you understand? Lost in this mode of Russia, the screen-brushing behavior actually violates the market logic of "survival of the fittest" in disguise, which directly leads to bad money expelling good money-those good films that could have made a lot of money will inevitably earn a lot less, while bad films can generally be guaranteed through drought and flood.