Hollywood Hunter

Simon returned to Los Angeles on Friday, April 21st in North America.

Sunday is Easter, and the North American Easter schedule for 2000 had already started the previous week.

Daenerys Entertainment's three main labels and New Line Pictures, a subsidiary of Blockbuster, will release a total of seven films in three weeks before and after this Easter schedule. April 14, the week before the festival.

In the past "The Blair Witch" series, because the first song did not win by quality, but the quality of the film was very rough, it completely relied on alternative marketing to accidentally trigger an event effect. Therefore, although the sequel of the original version was not a complete failure, it was also a failure. It's tepid, and it doesn't have the strong vitality of another "Ghost Story" series.

This time is of course different.

When planning this project, Simon considered the sequel from the very beginning, but to make a series, it is very simple, the first part must be good enough.

The "Ghost Story" series of this time and space was placed before the "Blair Witch" series, and lost its opportunity. Two years ago, it was placed in the first part of "The Blair Witch", which was in the unpopular schedule in February, and still achieved great success. A dazzling success, with a meager cost of 1 million US dollars, it has won an astonishing box office of 307 million US dollars worldwide. This alone shows the excellent quality of the film itself.

The outstanding performance of the first part was the foundation, and the sequel was planned for two years. Amy Acker, the "root girl" of the first part, was also invited to return to participate in the performance. At the same time, the photographer of the first part, Oliver Wood, took the shot again, ensuring that The same image style, even if Paul Greengrass quit because of the preparation of "The Bourne", under the control of Lena Kane and Annika Settle, the sequel still received a very enthusiastic response .

The previous premiere ceremony was held on April 12, and the word-of-mouth ban was lifted. The comprehensive media score of "The Blair Witch 2" reached 7.7 points. Even though the "Variety" magazine's review film, which only gave 6.5 points and barely exceeded the pass, repeated the routine of the first film to a considerable extent, lacking innovation, but it did not stop fans' enthusiasm for this film.

After all, to put it bluntly, what audiences tend to value in horror and horror series is the same continuity, and more bluntly, the same routine.

If the change is too big, the audience may not like it.

In the end, in the first week of its opening from April 14th to April 20th, with a large-scale opening screen of 3186 pieces, "The Blair Witch 2" won a box office of 43.51 million US dollars in one fell swoop, which is higher than the first week's score of 35.73 million US dollars. up 21%.

Not only that, even if the cost of this sequel has directly increased to 10 million US dollars compared to the first one, and the publicity expenditure has reached 15 million, it is only the first week of results, and Daenerys Entertainment has directly recovered all the investment and returned it. Enter the profit cycle.

Then enter the week of Easter. According to the forecast of the first day of results on April 21, the next week's decline is expected to be controlled within 30%. The North American domestic box office is expected to hit 1.5 million yuan, which is even better than the first film's 136 million yuan. Counting the box office feedback from overseas, this sequel can at least guarantee the same global box office volume of 300 million US dollars as the first one.

The third part therefore went directly into preparation.

However, Simon also decided to slow down this time, and release the third part at least 3 years later, brewing up his feelings a little bit, and still avoiding too many sequel movies.

Just like this year.

Even though Simon has paid attention repeatedly, the list of confirmed movies in 2000 starts with "Blair Witch 2", followed by "High School Musical 2", "Magic Mike 2", "Hurricane Rescue 2", "Lord of the Rings 2" , "Charlie's Angels 2" and a series of sequels, which made Simon feel privately that it was really a "two" year.

In addition to "The Blair Witch 2", there is another film that once existed in history, "Ride with the Devil", which tells the story of the American Civil War period by Ang Lee, and "The Blair Witch 2" was released on the same day.

The previous "Ride with the Devil" ended in failure, but the film itself is not too bad, of course, it is not too good, the key is that Universal Pictures, which produced this film at the time, was in the turmoil of another change of hands , resulting in a complete failure of the announcement.

This time, they are basically brand new, and the announcement of the film has also been replaced by Daenerys Entertainment's Gaomen Films, which focuses on the field of literary films.

The new version of "Riding with the Devil" neither invited Li Zi, nor let Xiao Li Zi's "star partner" Tobey Maguire participate in the role as before, but a second-tier young actor with good potential. If it is a familiar face, it is Robert Downey Jr. who was put on the crew by Simon to practice.

Ang Lee also followed Simon's original request very well, and made a considerable choice in the plot of the film, avoiding too much content that he wanted to show and causing the plot to be scattered. Instead, he focused more shots on the growth of the hero Jack in the war. this main line.

The final film, frankly speaking, did not reach the Oscar level, so it only participated in some second-tier film festivals from the second half of last year, won some small awards, and put it in this one, which is not bad but also at the same time as "The Blair Witch 2". Easter.

The premiere was held in New York a week earlier, and the comprehensive media score of "Ride with the Devil" was 7.2 points, which is definitely not high among literary films, not to mention that it has not yet reached the level of "The Blair Witch 2". Of course, the criteria used by film critics are not the same for the two types of films. For literary films, the media will always be stricter.

In the end, with a production cost of 35 million U.S. dollars, 1,762 opening screens, and a box office of 8.13 million U.S. dollars in the first week, the museum

Both are over $4,500.

A tepid grade.

It's expected to make $20 million to $25 million domestically.

Compared with "The Blair Witch 2", it is of course a failure. However, at least globally, this movie is definitely expected to get a box office equivalent to the production cost. Coupled with Daenerys Entertainment's strong follow-up channel distribution capabilities, Next, it is not difficult to recover costs and achieve profitability.

Of course, this is just the book, and if you consider the time cost, it will definitely be a loss.

In a new box office week, on April 21, Daenerys launched three new films at once, all of which were original films that had never been seen in history.

Among them, in addition to two medium-budget commercial films, there is also an interesting documentary from China, originally called "The Lost Martial Arts", which was filmed by the director Xu who once went to Hollywood to communicate. It was originally a seven-episode feature film The documentary was edited into a 120-minute movie version.

Now that it is in the United States, Western audiences will not be able to understand the original name, so it changed to a new name, "Kung Fu Past" (oime\u0026nbs kungfu), imitating the naming style of "Once Upon a Time in America".

For the Chinese, Wulin and Kungfu are actually two concepts. In other words, Wulin includes Kungfu, but of course it is definitely not just Kungfu, but also all kinds of Kungfu culture extended from it. The original seven-episode documentary, in addition to showing various kung fu that is about to or has disappeared in China, also shows the entire martial arts culture.

Considering that foreigners will not be too interested in all-round martial arts culture, the 120-minute edited version, although it involves martial arts culture, is mainly a display of various kung fu. Of course, in order to avoid being reduced to a pure show like Tianqiao performing arts, the seemingly marginal martial arts culture runs through the whole thing, which can be regarded as adding a layer of connotation to the documentary.

Connotation is important.

The filming of the complete documentary only cost less than 5 million RMB. Gaomen Pictures and Jinshu signed a sharing agreement with zero guarantee. The total investment in production and publicity is promised to be 3 million US dollars, and the premiere will not be less than 500 screens, follow-up including all channels such as video tapes, excluding the cost of 3 million U.S. dollars, the two parties will split the bill between 30 and 70, and Gaomen Films will account for 70%.

There is no premiere ceremony, and it is mainly promoted through online channels, and the number of opening screens is finally determined to be 513.

On the day of its release, the word-of-mouth ban on this documentary was lifted, and it received an excellent media score of 8.1 overall. The "Hollywood Reporter" also wrote a special release, praising "Kung Fu Past" for showing the real world in a very shocking way. Chinese Kung Fu Culture.

Shock, that's the right word.

In documentaries, stunts such as hitting a thick stone tablet with a palm can be found everywhere. Not to mention foreigners, Chinese people must be shocked when they see it. After all, most people in this era have indeed rarely seen the real kung fu master. Entering the new century, all kinds of fake "masters" are constantly destroying people's belief in Chinese Kung Fu.

For projects from China, this year's focus is Zhou Xingxing's "Kung Fu", which has been basically completed. It is expected to be released in August at the end of the summer.

However, it turned out not bad.

On the first day of its release, the film earned a box office of 870,000 US dollars. Moreover, the word-of-mouth spread trend appeared on the online platform as the main position for publicity and distribution, which means that the single-day peak on Saturday is likely to earn more than one million dollars, and the whole week is 7 days. , It is not a problem for the box office to reach more than 4 million.

This is close to breaking the 10,000 mark for the museum.

The Gaomen Films team followed up in time and decided to add about 200 more screens in the next week, and appropriately increase the publicity. On social networking sites, the tag "Kung Fu Past" has also been on the hot list of film and television.

In short, this is just the beginning. It is basically confirmed that this documentary will break through the box office of 10 million US dollars in North America. If it can take a good long-term, it may reach 15 million.

Of course, it cannot be compared with last year's "Mount Everest", but for most other films from China that have not been splashed, as a documentary, it is already quite outstanding to be able to achieve such a result in North America. The news spread back to China over the weekend, and Jinshu began to operate. The young director Xu directly received an interview invitation from CCTV, and there was no obstacle to the first film he had been preparing for.

In addition to movies, when Simon returned to North America, he was also concerned about another matter, the launch of the ibox-10.

As of Saturday, April 22nd, starting from the pre-sale last Saturday, ibox-10 achieved a small miracle of over one million pre-sales on the first day, and finally won 3.79 million orders in a full week. Achieved sales of $1.1 billion.

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Not only that, according to this trend, ibox-10 will not break through the break-even line of 10 million units in the first year of its launch, even 20 million units, from the current point of view, is not a problem.

Tinkber originally expected that the pre-sale of ibox-10 would exceed 500,000 units in the first week. After all, a lot of announcements were made in the early stage, and there must be a good start. Unexpectedly, the actual sales were close to 8 times the expected amount. If it is another manufacturer, it is inevitable that they will be in a hurry. After all, too large an order means that the manufacturer may not be able to deliver the product for a long time.

The product is delivered to the user.

Tinkber has no such worries.

Not to mention that 1 million units were stocked in advance, mainly to ensure the distribution demand for pre-sales and the first week of sales. After so many years, Tinkber has built a fairly complete global supply system.

With the release of the pre-sale data on the previous first day, a decision was made here. The component manufacturers scattered in North America, Japan, China and other parts of the world immediately went full steam ahead, and the foundries in Suzhou, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other places in China also quickly Adjustments were made, and the workers rotated around the clock, which directly tripled the original production capacity of 500,000 units per week. As long as there is demand here, 1.5 million units per week is not a problem.

However, due to the consideration that ibox-10 is a new product, after the initial batch of pre-sale production is properly satisfied, the management of Tinkobel plans to reduce the production capacity to 500,000 units per week, and supply limited quantities to the market .

It is not mainly for hunger marketing. Of course, there will definitely be a similar effect, but the main purpose is to limit the number of users so that when this new electronic product has various foreseeable flaws, the negative impact will be minimized.

In any case, the day before Easter, the ibox-10 officially went on sale. In addition to the online shopping user orders that were sent out one after another, the first batch of 500,000 machines that were distributed in major physical stores across the United States was also swept away. The phenomenon of scalpers will soon appear again.

For example, on the eBay platform, ibox-10 has been fired to more than 1,000 US dollars on Saturday night.

And that's just hardware.

In terms of software, not to mention the game software sales that cannot be counted in a short period of time through physical channels, but the official ibox game mall, which opened early in the early morning of April 22, and by 24 o'clock in the morning of the same day, the sales had easily exceeded 700 million Among them, the $19.99 VIP membership in January, which can play a large number of classic games in the past, the number of activations reached 370,000 at eight o'clock that night, and it is still growing rapidly.

In addition, among the sales of more than 700 million US dollars, 15 new games including "The Lord of the Rings", "The Conjuring: Blood Night", "Spider-Man" and "Dune 3D", which were launched simultaneously last week, directly accounted for nearly 500 million US dollars. It has to be admitted that it once again proves the 28th law of the entertainment industry.

Even though everyone knows that whether it is a movie or a game, a rich copyright library is essential, just like a mansion cannot be just a few beams, but the head content is still the one that contributes most of the profits. Just as the beams and columns bear most of the weight of the building, Tinkobel's operation team, which monitors relevant data at all times, plans to make some necessary adjustments accordingly.