Hollywood Road

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"Accident?"

Sitting on his high-back chair, Murphy looked at Kara Firth, seeming to be very concerned about this matter. Anyway, "City of Chaos" is the film he directed, "Could it be that China Film Group will default on the debt again?" Has the film’s share of the income been paid?”

Frankly speaking, China Film Group’s reputation in Hollywood is really not that good. It has done things like arrears and split accounts more than once and a half times. The problem is that Hollywood movies really want to make a difference in the market there. A hurdle that cannot be passed.

The reality of the market is here, and there are hundreds of millions of potential consumers over there. It is impossible for Hollywood companies to give up, and sometimes they can only make a certain degree of compromise.

Of course, the second WTO negotiation between China and the United States is imminent, and the cultural industry led by movies is an important part of the negotiation.

Murphy thought that China Film Group was going to renege on the debt again. Anyway, it was not once or twice. Unexpectedly, Kara Firth shook his head directly, "No, it's more serious than this."

"Huh?" Murphy was puzzled, "Is it more serious?"

He seemed to think of something, but he didn't have a clear idea for a while.

""City of Chaos" got a box office of about 121 million RMB there this time, and achieved the best box office results of a film you can show there."

Carla Firth picked up the water glass, took another sip, sighed, and said, "However, according to our investigation, this box office figure should increase by about 10 million to 15 million RMB."

"It turns out that "City of Chaos" did so well at the box office over there." Murphy didn't have any hope, so he didn't care about it. "It's much better than I expected."

Kara Firth shrugged, "It would have been better if some hadn't been stolen."

Hearing this, Murphy's vague thoughts just now became clear in an instant, "You mean "City of Chaos" was stolen at the box office over there?"

Murphy is no stranger to stealing box office, even in North America where the regulations are strict, it will not be completely eradicated, but it is relatively rare, and the market on the other side of the Pacific Ocean has just started, he vaguely remembers that the news about box office stealing once happened in his life. When I was on the other side of the ocean, it was exposed by the media many times, and the production and distribution company of the victim party bombarded the 'black heart' theaters.

Murphy frowned slightly, "Is there any definite evidence?"

No one would be happy with this kind of thing.

"No..." Kara Firth shook his head, "The other party did a better job than simply exchanging tickets secretly. We found some clues, but we couldn't get definite evidence. After all, we are outsiders. If China Film The group does not exert its strength, and there is no good way."

Murphy nodded, vaguely remembering that many Hollywood movies have suffered in this regard, and it seems that China Film Group has not taken any effective measures.

Carla Firth added, "At present, I have asked people from the Far East Branch to contact China Film Group, and James is also contacting people from the US WTO negotiating team to put pressure on the other party as much as possible."

She stood up, "Always think about the future."

Twentieth Century Fox is not doing a one-size-fits-all business over there, and it will certainly not sit back and watch this situation continue to happen.

After Kara Firth left, Murphy sat here and recalled what he remembered. The stolen box office would definitely affect his box office dividend as a director, but there seemed to be no good way.

The best way is for the six major Hollywood companies to unite and put pressure on the old American WTO negotiating team.

But he clearly remembered that it seemed that in the next few years, box office stealing would still emerge endlessly across the Pacific Ocean.

Stealing box office refers to the behavior of movie theaters concealing the number of movie audiences. It is a common phenomenon of "stealing" in the film industry. Damage to film producers, distributors, etc.

Murphy's mentor once gave a very simple and clear example to these students.

A typical box office steal is to let people take the ticket of movie A to go to movie B, so that the box office of movie B will be counted as movie A. Then there is the handwritten ticket, as long as it is not typed by the computer, it will not be entered into the ticketing system. After the person takes the ticket and leaves, he will secretly issue a ticket for movie A. Another high-end point is to modify the data of the ticketing system, but his instructor is only I heard that the technical content is too high, and it is basically impossible to realize it.

Now audiences are smarter, and the box office is not so easy to steal. People who give people tickets to movie A to go to movie B basically know that this is stealing the box office. The rest is the issue of reporting or not.

These are the most basic means of stealing the box office.

Like a mold that grows in the dark, "stealing the box office" not only brings great harm to the film and the film studio, but what's even more frightening is that it quietly corrodes the industry.

Generally speaking, the industry on the other side of the ocean can be divided into three parts: producers, distributors, and theaters. The three parties generally have a clear agreement on the proportion of sharing, but business can never escape a profit, and box office stealing comes from this. The three parties have a strong profit-seeking psychology.

In order to obtain their own interests, theaters have adopted various means to reduce the actual box office, and the invisible box office that has been hidden can be enjoyed exclusively by the theaters without having to share the bill with the filmmakers.

When it comes to the means of compressing the actual box office of movies, theaters can be described as painstaking. The more basic methods include handwritten tickets, admission without tickets, and admission with invalid tickets. These types of movie tickets are not included in the actual box office of the movie, but the theaters actually collect the movie ticket money from the audience.

This simple method of monopolizing the box office has always been favored by theaters, but unfortunately, the risk factor is very high, because the on-site review and supervision of the film crew is not easy to avoid.

With the strengthening of the supervision of the film studios, the practice of theater chains is also constantly "innovating", and the number of "bundled packages" has appeared.

For example, if the theater chain and the film studio agree on a minimum selling price of 30 yuan, on this premise, if the theater chain’s single movie ticket price is 40 yuan, then the 40 yuan must be shared with the film studio; but if Bundle the movie ticket + popcorn + drink, and increase the price to 50 yuan, of which 20 yuan is counted as the price of popcorn + drink, and the remaining 30 yuan that reaches the minimum ticket price is the movie ticket price, then The theater chain only needs to share the 30 yuan with the film party, and the 20 yuan for popcorn + drinks can be included in the personal income of the theater.

The actions of theater chains are far more than bundled packages. The theater chain’s dual system of bookkeeping and reimbursement can be described as another strategic upgrade to steal the box office. The theater chain’s reimbursement system is connected to the national box office monitoring system. primary source of information.

The other box office system, the accounting system, was set up by theaters without permission. The power of this system is that it can also go out to buy movie tickets, but the box office is privately swallowed by the theaters themselves.

In this way, the film studio seems to be a simple little sheep deliberately murdered by the theaters, but things are never that simple. It is not uncommon for a certain film studio and theater to steal the box office of another movie with the same schedule.

Filmmakers + theaters, in the words of the other side of the Pacific, "unity" is strength

Indeed, cooperation means win-win! If there are two highly popular movie A and low popular movie B released at the same time, movie A promises to give the theater 10% of the box office revenue, while B is willing to donate 20% of the box office revenue, the theater will undoubtedly be more generous. Lean toward B movies because of the higher cuts. In order to attract more audiences to watch B movies, the basic approach of the theater chain is to raise the ticket price of A movie and lower the ticket price of B movie at the same time.

But if this fails, the theater chain will choose the ingenious method of changing the post, and cooperate with the B movie studio to steal the box office of the A movie. The specific method is to make an agreement with the audience to sell the movie tickets of the movie B to the audience at a low price of the B movie, but it is the A movie that the audience wants to watch.

In this way, the audience pays a low price to see their favorite movies, and the theater gets a high share. The B movie producer has a good box office record, but the A movie producer always feels that something is wrong.

In addition to stealing, shifting and moving, it is more of a disguised form of stealing the box office. For example, the film studio also came up with a series of methods such as increasing the number of films to get rebates and booking tickets to lure profit-seeking theaters to cooperate with them.

Compared with the previous ones, in the film market on the other side of the Pacific, this kind of "disguised" box office stealing is not uncommon. As long as you have a little understanding of the film industry, you can see too much.

For example, the box office champions from the box office of the ghost field.

There is another kind of stealing the box office, which is a hard task and target that everyone knows but has no choice but to press down from above.

A typical color movie that Murphy once watched. During its release, this obviously old-fashioned and outdated movie actually defeated many popular commercial movies in one fell swoop. To nearly 25% of the national box office...

According to the gossip that Murphy saw at the time, for the film, the red-headed documents of the seven major yamen clearly demanded that "the distributor should give the maximum benefit."

On the evening of the second day of its release, a task table even appeared on the Internet, which fully displayed the quota and indicators for the film's screening and box office that each theater chain needs to achieve, and the Chinese theater chain has the highest task amount. , up to 40 million; Wanda Cinemas, according to the requirements in the table, should reach 38 million; the third place is the Southern Cinemas, with a task amount of 30 million...

Some people even broke the news that in order to complete the task, some theaters issued all the movie tickets for the whole day for movies of that color.

Of course, no one will admit to this kind of thing, and no one will pursue it. The routine inside is too deep.

For any market, stealing the box office is a huge stumbling block on its way forward.

In an emerging film market, there are always some things that people can't understand. Stealing the box office is not a strange thing. Murphy has seen even more strange things.