Time slips into a new month, May 1st.
It's Friday.
In Los Angeles, Simon arrived at Daenerys Studios' office early in the morning. While looking through the box office reports for the past box office week, he listened to Girl A report on some of today's work schedule and important matters.
In the box office week that just passed from April 24 to April 30, Daenerys' film "The Truman Show", released during Easter week, still maintained its top position. It opened on April 10, following the first week's 37.69 million After $28.31 million in US dollars and US$28.31 million in the next week, "The Truman Show" once again earned US$17.82 million in its third week of release, bringing the cumulative box office to US$83.82 million in three weeks.
As the last film between Daenerys Entertainment and Jim Carrey, both parties have been unhappy. Daenerys was not looking forward to this film.
Now, the film's box office performance has clearly exceeded expectations.
With a cumulative box office of US$83.82 million in three weeks and current box office trends, "The Truman Show" can easily surpass 100 million in the future, becoming Daenerys Entertainment's second local film to exceed 100 million in 1998.
Even Simon himself initially expected the film's local box office to be only about $80 million.
In any case, it is a good thing after all that the box office exceeds expectations.
As for how Jim Carrey and even the other party's next family will react, it is conceivable that Simon doesn't care. It is also conceivable that the next film company that cooperates with Jim Carrey will basically make hard-earned money for a small amount of money. Daenerys Entertainment will definitely not accept this kind of cooperation.
"Deep Chill," another mainstay of the Easter schedule, has just finished its fourth week of release.
After 30.79 million in the first week, 15.31 million in the second week and 7.72 million in the third week, the box office revenue in the fourth week was 4.15 million US dollars. It was released for nearly a month and the cumulative box office was 57.97 million US dollars. There is still a box office potential of about 5 million US dollars in the future. It can be guaranteed that the film will exceed 60 million domestically, and this trend is completely expected.
Also worth mentioning is "Titanic".
It just happened to be the 20th box-office week of Big Boat's North American release. The film's single-week figures were even higher than "Deep Chill", which was only in its fourth week of release. It continued to earn 4.23 million US dollars, after breaking the 600 million threshold in its 18th week of release. , the current North American cumulative box office continues to soar to 611.39 million US dollars.
With the arrival of the summer season, "Titanic" will inevitably withdraw from the big screen at a faster pace. However, it will be able to earn at least another US$10 million in the future, pushing the North American local figure of this phenomenal super blockbuster to more than 620 million.
Unfortunately, this time "Titanic" can only rank second in North American film history. Perhaps after several re-releases in the future, it will be possible to surpass the 702 million box office data of "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" three years ago. , the world wants to catch up with the US$1.938 billion of Super Batman War. At present, it is not possible.
Moreover, groundbreaking films like Superman Vs. will be re-released in the future. No one can predict what will happen in the end.
However, on the other hand, "Batman Wars" is a revenue shared between Daenerys and Warner Bros., while "Titanic" belongs exclusively to Daenerys Entertainment, so it can also be said to be Daenerys' most successful movie. . Even if it's just the box office, "Titanic" earned more than 400 million from the 1998 release, which directly allowed Daenerys' North American box office share to easily surpass other major studios that year.
Simon picked up a pen and wrote down an impromptu comment in the blank space of the report, asking the relevant team to study the feasibility of projects such as the "Titanic" Australian set tour and the global tour of big ship props as soon as possible. Hearing something reported by Girl A, he was a little surprised. There was a pause.
The Russian side.
Yeltsin and the Russian parliament have been going back and forth for nearly two months, and after three rounds of voting, this morning local time, they finally passed the confirmation of Sergey Kiriyenko as the new prime minister.
This incident was actually expected.
The 36-year-old young prime minister with no roots and no foundation is not easy to be accepted in any aspect.
This also determines that Kiriyenko will not be able to stay in this position for too long.
In comparison, another appointment that Simon is more concerned about, the new director of the Russian Federal Security Service, has been approved long ago.
Girl A noticed her boss's pause and took the initiative to add: "Russia is currently facing very severe economic problems. At present, Russia's arrears in salary and pension arrears for civil servants alone amount to 4.5 billion rubles per month. Calculated according to Russia's official exchange rate of 6.2, it is approximately 720 million U.S. dollars. Against the background that a large amount of money continues to flee from Russia, Kiriyenko came to power. Unless extreme measures are taken to break the rules, it will be difficult to solve these problems and the problem cannot be solved. The only thing waiting for him is to step down and take extreme measures to provoke He angered a large number of vested interests and ended up stepping down."
Simon just nodded slightly, thought of something, paused, but still didn't speak.
Simon originally wanted Girl A to tell Cersei Capital to collect position data on bonds of various countries in the hedging field, because he thought that this year due to the default of Russian national bonds, another hedge fund on Wall Street called Long-term Capital Management almost suffered a loss due to data. The liquidation of positions worth hundreds of billions of dollars triggered a massive financial disaster.
However, this is too obvious.
Or just wait and see.
After all, if a crisis does occur, the federal government will foot the bill, whether it is proactive or forced. This was also the case in history.
Seeing that her boss was about to speak, Girl A stopped for a moment. After waiting for a moment, she continued without receiving instructions: "Also, boss, Miss Chen sent a piece of information about Korean online games. She said it was part of the boss's instructions. , this is it.”
Simon raised his eyes and saw Girl A gesturing to a stack of folders in front of her, nodding to show her understanding.
Last weekend, Simon asked Chen Qing to compile some information on role-playing online games for the Chinese market, but he did not expect that Na Nizi would specifically list South Korea.
Girl A glanced at the memo, continued to finish talking about some things, and finally said: "9:30 is the summer movie promotion meeting, I will remind the boss later."
"Okay, by the way, take this and show it to Nancy."
Girl A took the box office report with comments written by her boss, glanced at it, nodded, confirmed that nothing happened, and turned to leave.
Waiting for the female assistant to go out, Simon looked at his watch and saw that there were still 10 minutes until 9:30. He picked out the one sent by Chen Qing from the pile of documents at hand and opened it to read.
He quickly lifted his spirits.
Everyone's energy is limited, so their cognition must also be limited.
In Simon's memory, the strength of Korean online games started with the legendary "Legend". Until many years later, it is still a game content provider in major Asian markets including China, making huge profits through this strong industry. However, of course all this cannot happen out of thin air.
Before seeing this information, Simon's limitations on Korean online games were roughly after the millennium.
However, this is not the case.
To put it simply, South Korea’s electronic games have developed an industry trend that is very different from the world’s mainstream from the beginning.
As we all know, before the millennium, the mainstream of the world's game industry was stand-alone games.
Of course, South Korea is also the main exporter of stand-alone games in North America and Japan, such as "StarCraft", which was historically popular in South Korea. However, in terms of its own development, South Korea has focused on online games since the early 1990s. technology tree.
And it is directly biased towards massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG).
According to the information provided by Chen Qing, four years ago in 1994, when the Internet was just emerging in this time and space, a graphic MMORPG appeared in South Korea with a maximum number of simultaneous online users exceeding 10,000, called "Kingdom of Wind", and it was Western fantasy genre.
Of course, whether it is the name or the settings related to the Western Fantasy Continent in the introduction, Simon can easily feel the Japanese style in it. Without thinking, he can guess that this is inspired by some Japanese stand-alone games. However, both the game positioning and the story background are basically in line with the popular online games that became mainstream in South Korea.
Japan draws nutrients from American comic culture to develop its own comics industry, and South Korea draws nutrients from Japan's stand-alone games to develop its online game industry. They are also of the same origin.
This is beside the point.
Considering South Korea's population base and the number of Internet users in 1994, the number of people online at the same time exceeded 10,000, which is quite successful.
On the other hand, this also proves how small the local online game market in South Korea is. If it wants to develop, it must rely on export.
The information in his hand was very detailed and came with a CD. Simon inserted it into the computer and quickly found the electronic documentation of "The Kingdom of Wind". He didn't have time to open the attached client, so he just clicked on some pictures to see what would happen four years later. From a visual point of view, it is very rough, but according to the standards of four years ago, the picture quality is equivalent to that of a 32-bit game console, which is already quite outstanding.
The information also mentioned that "Kingdom of Winds" is developing the second generation. It was originally planned to have an IPO in the second half of last year, and the second generation was launched in the first half of this year. Due to the sudden economic crisis in South Korea last year, the IPO plan was aborted, and the developer's capital chain called TDSoft also Problems arose and it has been seeking financing in recent months.
Simon opened the information about the second generation of "Kingdom of Wind" in the electronic document.
Looking at the picture directly, the picture quality is already comparable to the picture quality of "Legend" in my memory.
Looking at the financial information, the planned budget for this game is 6 billion won. According to the current U.S. dollar exchange rate, which has rebounded to around 1,800, it is about 3.3 million U.S. dollars, which is equivalent to 6 times the 1 billion won development cost of the first generation of "Wind Kingdom", because The current Korean game industry is not outstanding. Even if the first generation was successful, TDSoft still failed to raise follow-up funds. Currently, most of its employees have been laid off, and the development of 70% of the projects that have been completed has almost stalled.
Just as he was about to continue watching, Girl A knocked on the door and reminded her boss that the promotion meeting for the summer movie was about to begin.
Simon directly picked up the thick printed material and rushed to the conference room next door to continue multitasking.
As we enter May, it’s almost summer time.
Not counting some non-key small films, Daenerys Entertainment will launch a total of 10 key projects this summer. Starting from May 15, in chronological order, they are "L.A. Confidential", "Rush Hour 2", "Jurassic Park 3", "The Haunting of the Morgue 2", "High School Musical", "Saving Private Ryan", "The Hangover", "The Horse Whisperer", "Heroes", "Magic Mike".
The most important one is "Jurassic Park 3", which is planned to be the end of the Dinosaur Trilogy. After this film is completed, the Jurassic series will be suspended for a few years, and the project's production budget will eventually reach 1.5 100 million US dollars, plus 70 million US dollars of promotion, if the domestic box office is less than 300 million US dollars, it will be a failure.
The project has been completely completed in early April, and the schedule is still June 5th, which is the golden date. Simon has seen the samples in advance and the current Explosive Shell is very reliable, so he has no worries about the box office.
After the most blockbuster "Jurassic Park 3", the second installment is "Rush Hour 2", "The Haunting of the Morgue 3" and "Saving Private Ryan".
These three films will also fail if the box office is less than 100 million US dollars.
Among them, "Rush Hour 2" and "Saving Private Ryan", Simon's expectation is that both will start at 200 million local dollars. The reason why "The Haunting of Morgue 3" is included in the second priority is because of last year's "The Conjuring 3: Blood Moon". "The success of "The Conjuring 3" has restored the popularity of the Conjuring movie universe. This "The Haunting of Morgue 3" is also the end of a trilogy. 150 million should be relatively easy. If you are lucky, it can ride on the popularity of last year's "The Conjuring 3: Blood Moon" , it is very promising to hit the local 200 million.
Going forward, "The Hangover" is more special.
Historically, this film set a box office record for R-rated movies. This time Simon hired the once-famous Bad Boys as the main creators. In order to promote his own Atlantic City casino, the filming location was moved from Las Vegas to In Atlantic City, the time is so many years ahead, so there are too many variables.
The production cost of the film was US$25 million, and investment in publicity and distribution also reached US$25 million, of which 15 million came from placements in Atlantic City and other parties. New World Pictures, which was responsible for distribution, only spent US$10 million. The publicity and distribution team's expectations were that the film As long as it can exceed 50 million, it will be considered a success.
Simon's personal expectation is to exceed 100 million locally. Otherwise, it would be a pity to come up with this idea in advance.
Others, "L.A. Confidential" and "The Horse Whisperer" are in the same category, both are created by veteran filmmakers, and they are also less mainstream literary and artistic films, with box office expectations of between 50 million and 100 million. between.
Then there's "High School Musical" and "Magic Mike."
These are two of the lower-cost summer films to make, with one ultimately costing $15 million and the other only costing $7 million.
The reason why it was put on the summer schedule was Simon's personal decision, because the story of "High School Musical" is more suitable for the summer, and it cannot be postponed until next year, so some work has been rushed. The latter is Simon's special expectation for the film director Steven Soderbergh.
Generally speaking, Daenerys Entertainment's film business, which has entered its strongest stage, does not require Simon to worry too much. Throughout the meeting, Simon focused more on the Korean game industry information in his hands.