A Study on Audience Participation in Suspense Movies in the Era of

Social Media: Taking "Lost in the Stars" as an Example

Ruobing Yang

College of Art, Hebei University, 071000 Hebei, China

Keywords: Social Media, Audience, "Lost in the Stars", Suspense Movies.

Abstract: In recent years, with the popularization of the Internet and the increasing activity of the film market, the use

of Internet marketing for movies has become a normalized phenomenon. The number of Chinese netizens and

the box office of movies are both showing a positive growth trend. The growth of social media has provided

more platforms for netizens to express their opinions, and the dual nature of film art has both artistic and

commercial aspects that require the assistance of the Internet. Suspense movies use suspenseful elements to

bring their topics and create a trend on social media, triggering emotional resonance among audiences. This

article will use the tool of search data to support the discussion data of the suspense movie "Lost in the Stars"

on the microblogging platform, as well as the Douyin platform. Through comprehensive analysis, it can be

seen that the suspense element is the beginning of the discussion of the movie, but the popularity of the theme

in the movie is the target of audience participation. An excellent suspense movie cannot do without audience

participation, let alone discussions on social topics, all of which need to be based on the stability of social

platforms.

1 INTRODUCTION

With the popularization of smartphones and the

advancement of mobile communication technology,

the activity level of social media is also constantly

increasing. According to The 52nd Statistical Report

on the Development of China's Internet released by

the China Internet Network Information Center

today, as of June 2023, the number of Internet users

in China has reached 1.079 billion, an increase of

11.09 million compared to December 2022, and the

Internet penetration rate has reached 76.4% (Beijing

Daily Client 2023). It can be seen that social media

has a large number of users and has gradually become

a medium for communication between people.

According to the data of Lighthouse Professional

Edition, in the 2023 Dragon Boat Festival film

schedule, the suspense film "Lost in the Stars" has

jumped to the top of the box office, and there are two

suspense films "Full River Red" and "Lost in the

Stars" in the top five annual film box office rankings.

The suspense movie itself has the attribute of being

discussed, which makes people curious to explore the

development of the plot, and social media provides a

place for people to gather and express their opinions.

This study mainly focuses on movie characters and

fans, movie box office and audience interaction,

movie plot, and social topics. Write a program in

Python to mine and analyze the text of the movie

"Lost in the Stars" on the Weibo platform. The

ultimate goal is to explore the audience engagement

triggered by the suspense movie "Lost in the Stars"

on social media and provide some reference and

guidance for the marketing direction of suspense

movies.

2 RESEARCH METHOD

In terms of research methods, this article adopts data

search and data summarization. This article conducts

data crawling on the suspense movie "Lost in the

Stars", and summarizes and organizes the searched

data into thematic keywords. Using Python to write

programs for text mining, Python is an object-

oriented, dynamic data type, and interpretive high-

level programming language. Using Python

programming for text data mining has advantages

such as fast speed and accurate mining, which can

greatly improve the efficiency of editors engaged in

academic research (Tan & Liu 2019). During the

release of "Lost in the Stars" from June 22 to August

Yang, R.

A Study on Audience Participation in Suspense Movies in the Era of Social Media: Taking "Lost in the Stars" as an Example.

DOI: 10.5220/0012817800004547

Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Data Science and Engineering (ICDSE 2024), pages 27-31

ISBN: 978-989-758-690-3

22, 2023, this article used a program to crawl data

from comments and posts on Weibo that contained

the keyword "Lost in the Stars". A total of 8097

Weibo texts, including the keyword "Lost in the

Stars", were searched and saved in the form of a table.

The complete comments from duplicate users were

manually removed, often focusing on one or more

topics, after deleting Weibo posts with low relevance,

a topic consisting of one or several keywords

ultimately resulted in a total of 7046 Weibo texts.

Therefore, after summarizing and filtering the data,

comments with username and time will be removed

before being organized. According to the word

frequency system analysis, the top 30 most frequently

appearing phrases on Weibo related to the movie

"Lost in the Stars" are as follows (see Table 1 for

details).

According to the frequency chart, high-frequency

words can be summarized into three themes: movie

characters and actor fans, movie marketing and box

office, and movie plot and social topics (see Table 2

for details).

Table 1: High frequency phrases and word frequency in the

movie "Lost in the Stars".

Phrase

Word

Frequenc

Phrase

Word

Frequenc

Lost 23494 Rend 1588

Lost in the

Stars

23263 Rush 1585

Zhu Yilong 23087 Role 1362

Film 7792

Well

Receive

1152

Box Office 5990 Ni Ni 1120

He Fei 5881 Interpret 1033

Thank 4249 Movie 1029

Roadshow 2784 Hard 952

Audience 2286 Continue 1033

Friend 2195 Prediction 886

Love 2100 Disguise 885

successful

conclusion

2037 Chen Mai 373

Big Sell 1962 Janice Man 349

Video 1918 Du Jiang 97

Meet 1774 Huang Ziqi 84

Table 2: High frequency phrases and word frequency in the

movie "Lost in the Stars".

Serial

Numbe

Summary of

Theme Words

Keyword

Topic1 Movie

Characters and

Actor Fans

Zhu Yilong, He Fei,

Role

, Ni Ni, Janice Man

Topic2 Film Marketing

and Audience

Interaction

Box office, Roadshow,

Thank, Big Sell, Video,

Inter

ret, Prediction

Topic3 Movie Plot and

Social Topics

Lost, Lost in the Stars,

Friend

, Love, Meet,

Ren

, Disguise

3 RESEARCH RESULTS

Social media has a diverse nature, and each user of

social media has a different perspective, which leads

to different interpretations and understandings of

movies. According to Table 1, through text mining of

Weibo comments on "Lost in the Stars", it was found

that the high-frequency phrases of Weibo user groups

are mainly concentrated on the actors of the movie,

the plot speculation of the movie, and the box office

marketing of the movie.

3.1 Movie Characters and Fan

Audiences

According to the high-frequency phrases in Table 1,

it can be intuitively observed that the frequency of

"Zhu Yilong" is as high as 23263 words, and the

shouting topics include # Actor Zhu Yilong: Stupid

Methods to Shape Characters, # Zhu Yilong's

Character Interpretation Ability, # Zhu Yilong Ni Ni

Ni's Explosive Power in Confrontation Lines, etc.

This indicates that role actors are one of the key

factors affecting the popularity of a movie. Stars

themselves are the highlight of a movie and the main

selling point for successful marketing. The celebrity's

inherent aura can bring the audience to the work.

Stars showcase their charm by searching for character

works that match their character images, and while

achieving their success, these character images also

attract more fan groups, making them the target

audience for film works. Simply put, fan culture

refers to using fans to resonate with people or things,

and using emotional support to drive economic and

commercial value. American scholar John Fiske

believes that fan communities are "primarily

recipients of popular culture. All audiences in popular

culture can create cultural industrial products in their

developmental social context, to obtain a sense of

ICDSE 2024 - International Conference on Data Science and Engineering

pleasure and meaning related to self-identity." (Fiske

2021).With the development of the Internet era, the

way of following celebrities is also changing, and

social media platforms have gradually become the

main platform for fans to discuss and spread. Fans

often engage in consumer behavior while fanatically

following their idols, leading to a huge fan industry

(Zhang 2022). For fans, releasing new albums,

hosting events, and concerts are the most basic

expenses for their idols. Fans will also be more

enthusiastic about following the products and

endorsements used by the celebrities. When their

idols release a movie, they not only buy tickets to

support it, but also engage in spontaneous promotion,

booking, and voting, These behaviors add heat to the

film works. So in recent years, film directors have

also chosen some popular celebrities as their main

characters when choosing actors, so that their works

can gain more attention and box office to meet greater

market demand and achieve economic benefits. But

for fans, this watching behavior has become an

emotional consumption of idols.

Table 3: Number of fans of the main actors in Douyin and

Weibo of "Lost in the Stars".

Moniker

Number of

Douyin Fans

(ten thousan

)

Number of

Weibo Fans

(ten thousan

)

Zhu Yilon

97.7 3089.9

i 81.8 2506.7

Janice Man 300.5 1064.8

Du Jian

159.8 1166.9

Huan

Ziqi 35.5 30.6

According to the data summary in Table 3, it can

be seen that the main characters in the drama are

actors Zhu Yilong, Ni Ni, and Janice Man and

Dujiang both have a huge fan base, and their movies

will naturally trigger a large number of fans follow

and discuss with fans. The film gathered the Golden

Rooster actor Zhu Yilong, the best female host

nominee Ni Ni of the Golden Rooster Award, and the

powerful actor Janice Manand Du Jiang. The strong

cast in the movie also has a certain degree of national

popularity and acting skills, which has become the

main marketing strategy of the movie "Lost in the

Stars". The lead actor Zhu Yilong not only occupies

more than 90% of the scenes in the film but also

contributes more than half of the popularity and

attention. In addition, director Chen Sicheng. The

trilogy with "Tang Dynasty characters" lays the

foundation for suspenseful IP, creating a tense

atmosphere through the constantly changing plot,

overlapping elements, fantastic audio-visual

language, and compact narrative rhythm, making the

audience feel a strong sense of watching.

3.2 Film Box Office and Audience

Interaction

In today's film industry, the distribution and

marketing of film and television inevitably rely on the

dissemination and interaction of multiple platforms

(Yin & Zhang 2023). Short video platforms, as the

main force of promotion, form a layered marketing

model in the media network. At the beginning of a

new movie's release, to attract more audiences, the

film company will use social media platforms for

promotion. "Lost in the Stars" achieved

comprehensive promotion in marketing, with a total

of 42 marketing events both online and offline.

According to the data provided by Lighthouse

Professional, the cumulative number of people who

wanted to watch "Lost in the Stars" before its release

was 687852, with a male ratio of 23.5% and a female

ratio of 76.5%. The "Lost in the Stars" account on the

Douyin platform has 1.928 million fans and 120

million likes, and the "Movie "Lost in the Stars"

account on the microblog social media platform has

196000 fans and 6.833 million reviews. Then the

cumulative number of videos played is 90.063

million. In terms of box office performance,

according to statistics from Lighthouse Professional,

"Lost in the Stars" grossed 90.3106 million yuan in

the pre-sale box office, with a cumulative box office

of 3.523 billion yuan and a total number of views of

84.854 million. She stood out in the summer movie of

2023. As a domestic suspense film in mainland film

history, "Lost in the Stars" can also be considered an

excellent film with a box office of over 3.5 billion

yuan.

Sociologist Collins' theory of the interactive ritual

chain suggests that "interaction and ritual can

continuously generate emotional energy and connect

this emotion with symbols, forming the foundation of

organizational beliefs, organizational thinking,

organizational moral norms, and organizational

culture." According to Collins' advocacy, people

share common emotions and emotional experiences

in interactive rituals (Meng 2023). According to the

data of Cat's Eye Film Professional Edition, as of 0:00

on June 30, 2023, a total of 1351 related topics of

"Lost in the Stars" have been on the hot search and

hot list on Weibo, Douyin, Kuaishou, and other social

platforms, and the cumulative duration of the list has

reached 779 hours and 35 minutes. Compared to other

movies released in June, "Love Never Ends" has 194

hot topics, and "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-

A Study on Audience Participation in Suspense Movies in the Era of Social Media: Taking "Lost in the Stars" as an Example

Verse" has a total of 100 (Jun 2023). Chen Sicheng

said in an interview with "Southern Weekend": "The

highest pursuit of all art is to appreciate both the

refined and the popular. If a film is made, it is an

extreme expression of the individual and the author,

but others cannot see it. What is the meaning of it?

Movies are something that needs to be shared with

people." (Li 2023). The phenomenon of a movie's

high box office and high popularity is undoubtedly a

recognition of its functional topic. The film "Lost in

the Stars" is actually like a mirror of social

phenomena, and viewers can find emotional

resonance and similar events encountered in real life

from its plot. The popular plot narrative and

emotional tone also promote public discussion of

such suspenseful movies and then continue to

ferment.

The development of new media social platforms

gives audience users more rights, unlike in the past

when movies were mainly promoted by promoters,

directly transmitting the content and value expressed

by movies to the audience, rather than allowing the

audience to express their thoughts and opinions

before and after watching. Nowadays, audience users

can directly express their opinions and speculations

through social media platforms. This personal power

enhances user self-awareness indirectly increases

audience participation in online society, and

constructs self-identity and social identity in topic

discussions. The movie "Lost in the Stars" utilizes the

user's participation in topics on the internet, and

through the occurrence of interactive rituals and the

reproduction of subcultural cultural capital, the

shared symbols and group morality generated by

interactive rituals strengthen the identity of viewers.

The active participation of users in online topics has

become a hot topic in the public opinion of "Lost in

the Stars". The significance of user opinions has been

reproduced, attracting more people to go to the

cinema to explore the content of the film and

expanding the dissemination scope of "Lost in the

Stars". For the audience, the official movie account is

equivalent to the "main venue" for interactive

ceremonies. This is the main discussion area and

speech venue, where the audience then conducts

interactive behaviors such as commenting and

commenting on the content published by the official

movie account. This is the interactive sharing of the

movie as a major focus of attention, and each piece of

content published by the official account can serve as

a small focus of attention and independently become

a "sub venue" for interactive ceremonies, which is a

small discussion venue for audiences with a certain

attitude (Liu & Zheng 2023).

3.3 Movie Plot and Social Topics

"Lost in the Stars "itself is a movie with suspense

elements. According to the high-frequency phrases in

Table 1, it can be seen that "disappearing" and

"disappearing her" in the movie title are the most

talked about and discussed. This is also the core of the

suspenseful elements in this movie. The movie had a

total of 21 marketing events before its release, but all

of these marketing activities avoided the suspenseful

point of the movie plot - "True Li Muzi", and the

name of Huang Zishan, who played "True Li Muzi",

was removed from the cast list. Otherwise, for a

suspenseful movie, spoilers are the most taboo thing.

During the early promotion process, there was no

presence of Huang Zishan in any short videos or

materials. It was not until the premiere roadshow of

the movie that Huang Zishan truly walked up to the

audience. This kind of promotion was known as the #

Disappearing She Without a Spoiler Version Spoiler

#, which protected the mystery of the suspenseful

movie and attracted the audience to go to the cinema

to directly find the answer.

Tragedy is the core of horror games, and life and

death have been the most common choice for

exploring suspense points in suspense-themed works

in the past. However, the meaning represented by

"suspense" is constantly changing, from the ups and

downs of the plot to the deeper themes, which can be

seen as "suspense" undergoing a return to realism

(Tan 2023). After the film "Lost in the Stars" was

released, Douyin also led the discussion of marriage

phobia, anti-gambling, love brain, and other hot

topics on Weibo. First of all, these topics are close to

daily life, which are the topics that many couples and

young people are concerned about at present. In

addition, the film itself is adapted from the real Thai

wife killing case, and the story is about He Fei's wife,

Li Muzi, who disappeared during the wedding

anniversary travel, The story of He Fei's efforts to

find a wife. In Table 1, it can also be seen that the

character phrase "He Fei" has appeared 5881 times,

and the top 6 high-frequency words are the focus of

everyone. He Fei is the protagonist in the plot and a

hot topic of discussion among the audience. At the

beginning of the movie's release, various hot topics

were created through the Weibo platform, which

resonated emotionally with users and became the key

to quickly establishing a movie brand and reputation.

Director Cui Rui believes that "filmmakers have a

special mission that is different from other industry

workers because each film has the opportunity to

ICDSE 2024 - International Conference on Data Science and Engineering

speak up for a group. Due to the constraints of their

circumstances, the edges or low status of their

identity, they cannot spread their feelings, and as

filmmakers, it is their responsibility to speak up for

them." (Cui 2023). When making "Lost in the Stars"

Director Cui Rui's first focus was on what topics the

movie was discussing, which must have a certain

positive energy that can motivate the audience, such

as caring for the other half around them, paying

attention to their needs, understanding their

difficulties, and not neglecting communication.

These positive emotional values are also what the

movie wants to convey to the audience. "Lost in the

Stars" finds the key points that resonate with the

audience's emotions through a "reversal" approach,

thereby arousing the audience's curiosity about the

plot and generating movie-watching motivation. In

the later stage, it forms emotional resonance with the

target audience through "human nature, love, and

friendship". This easy-to-understand plot and distinct

social theme create a good connection with the

audience, thereby promoting box office growth.

4 SUGGESTION

From the perspective of movie stars and fan

audiences, suspense is the core of suspense movies.

In the future development of suspense movies, when

pursuing high-visibility actors, more attention should

be paid to the shaping of movie characters, and the

strength and love of fan groups should follow the

shaping of movie characters. From the perspective of

suspense movie box office and audience interaction,

social media should provide more venues for movies,

allowing viewers to express their feelings and

thoughts after watching. This not only allows for

discussions among audiences but also allows

directors and actors to make progress in the

discussions. Finally, in terms of film plot and social

topics, suspense films should not only focus on their

film creation but also consider audience participation.

The content of the film should be connected to social

topics to trigger emotional resonance among the

audience and bring relevant heat to the film work.

And how to make good use of social media platforms

to actively promote movies is also the most important.

When suspenseful movies are discussed on social

media platforms, it is worth considering how to guide

the audience to produce the correct values with the

correct "wind vane".

5 CONCLUSION

The research result of this study is that through

audience participation analysis of the suspense movie

" Lost in the Stars ", it can be concluded that the

inclusiveness of social media provides a broad

discussion platform for suspense movies, and the plot

and theme of suspense movies also need to be in line

with social trends to trigger public discussion and

provide correct value guidance for the audience.

Thus, it can be further concluded that while films

develop and grow, they not only need to balance their

commercial value but also reflect their artistic value.

The ultimate goal of artistic works is to serve society

as inspiring and inspiring works. In future research,

more attention should be paid to the spiritual value

conveyed by film works.

REFERENCES

Beijing Daily Client, The number of internet users in

China has reached 1.079 billion, with an internet

penetration

rate of 76.4%, 2023.08.28, 2024.01.04,

https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=17754537940409166

21&wfr=spider&for=pc

C.L. Tan, Q.H. Liu. J Edit Sci 04, 407-410 (2019).

J. Fiske. Central Com Trans Press 4, 88 (2021).

H. Zhang. Mei Times 05, 129-132 (2022).

B.F. Yin, F.S. Zhang, J Fujian Open Univ 04, 93-96(2023).

D.F. Meng, China Media Sci Tech 10, 93-97 (2023).

D.T. Jun, "The Disappearing She" grossed 2.3 billion yuan

at the box office amidst criticism

, 2023.08.08, 2024.

01.04, http://baike.baidu.com/l/UL3WDa0B?bk_share

=weixin&fr=weixin#

Y.L. Li, Southern Week 7, 12 (2023).

C.L. Liu, D.F. Zheng, Film Literature 20, 32-37 (2023).

Y.J. Tan. Film Literature 10, 49-55 (2023).

R. Cui, China Film J 8, 002 (2023).

A Study on Audience Participation in Suspense Movies in the Era of Social Media: Taking "Lost in the Stars" as an Example