Simon returns to Los Angeles on Friday, April 21st in North America.
Sunday is Easter, and the 2000 North American Easter schedule has started the week before.
Daenerys Entertainment's three major labels and New Line Cinema, which is affiliated with Blockbuster, will release a total of 7 movies in the three weeks before and after this Easter period, the main one is "Blair Witch 2", and the release date is Resurrection April 14th, a week before the holiday.
In the past "Blair Witch" series, because the first film did not win with quality, but the quality of the film was very rough, it relied entirely on alternative marketing to accidentally trigger an incident effect. Therefore, the original sequel, although not a complete failure, still failed. It is tepid and does not have the strong vitality of another "Ghost Chronicles" series.
This time is certainly different.
When planning this project, Simon had considered the issue of sequels from the beginning. If he wanted to make a series, it was very simple. The first part had to be good enough.
The "Ghost Chronicles" series in this time and space was placed before the "Blair Witch" series and lost its lead. Two years ago, the first part of "Blair Witch" was placed in the unpopular schedule in February and still achieved great success. It was a brilliant success, with a low cost of US$1 million, and a staggering global box office of US$307 million. This alone shows the excellent quality of the film itself.
Based on the brilliant results of the first part, the sequel has been planned for two years. Amy Acker, the 'root girl' from the first part, was invited to return to participate. At the same time, the cinematographer of the first part, Oliver Wood, once again took the shot, ensuring that The image style is consistent. Even though Paul Greengrass withdrew due to preparations for "The Bourne Supremacy", under the control of the duo of Lena Kane and Annika Seitel, the sequel still received a very enthusiastic response. .
The previous premiere was held on April 12, and the word-of-mouth ban was lifted. The comprehensive media score of "Blair Witch 2" reached 7.7 points. Even though "Variety" magazine only gave it a score of 6.5 and barely passed the pass mark, the film repeated the routines of the first film to a considerable extent and lacked innovation, but it did not stop the fans' enthusiasm for the film.
After all, to put it bluntly, what audiences tend to look for in horror-thriller series is the continuity, or more straightforwardly, the unchanging routines.
If the changes are too big, the audience may not like it.
Finally, in the first week from April 14 to April 20, with a large-scale opening of 3,186 screens, "Blair Witch 2" earned a box office of 43.51 million U.S. dollars in one fell swoop, which was higher than the 35.73 million first-week performance of the first film. 21%.
Not only that, even though the cost of this sequel was directly increased to 10 times the first film to 10 million U.S. dollars, and the publicity expenditure reached 15 million, the results in the first week still directly allowed Daenerys Entertainment to recover all the investment and Enter the profit cycle.
Then enters the week of Easter. According to the first-day performance forecast on April 21, the decline in the next week is expected to be controlled within 30%. The North American box office of "Blair Witch 2" is expected to hit 1.5, which is better than the 136 million of the first part. With a high of US$100 million, taking into account the box office feedback from overseas, this sequel can at least guarantee a global box office volume of US$300 million, which is the same as the first film.
The third part therefore went directly into preparation.
However, Simon also decided to take it slow this time and release the third part at least three years later to allow for a little bit of emotional development, and still to avoid too many sequel movies.
Like this year.
Even though Simon has repeatedly noticed, the list of confirmed movies for 2000 starts with "Blair Witch 2" and will be followed by "High School Musical 2", "Magic Mike 2", "Taken 2", and "Lord of the Rings 2" , "Charlie's Angels 2" and a series of sequels, which made Simon privately lament that it was a very 'two' year.
In addition to "Blair Witches 2", there is another film that once existed in history, Ang Lee's "Ride with the Devil", which tells the story of the American Civil War, and "Blair Witches 2" were released on the same day.
The previous "Ride with the Devil" ended in failure, but the film itself was not too bad. Of course, it was not too good either. The key was that Universal Pictures, which produced the film at the time, was in the midst of another turmoil of being changed hands. , resulting in a complete failure of propaganda.
This time, everything is basically new, and the film's announcement has been replaced by Daenerys Entertainment's Gaomen Films, which specializes in the field of literary films.
The new version of "Ride with the Devil" neither invited Leonardo DiCaprio, nor did it involve Leonardo DiCaprio's "star partner" Tobey Maguire as before, but a second-tier young actor with good potential, and then, If we are talking about a familiar face, it is Robert Downey Jr. who was originally sent to the set by Simon to gain experience.
Ang Lee also followed Simon's original request very well and made considerable choices in the plot of the film to avoid too much content that would cause the plot to be scattered. Instead, more scenes focused on the growth of the male protagonist Jack during the war. This main line.
The final film, frankly speaking, failed to reach Oscar standards, so it only participated in some second-tier film festivals since the second half of last year and won some minor awards. It is not bad in this regard, but it has to be in the same period as "Blair Witch 2" Easter.
Premiering in New York a week ahead of schedule, "Ride with the Devil" received a comprehensive media score of 7.2, which is certainly not high for a more literary film, not to mention that it has not yet reached the level of "Blair Witch 2". Of course, the two types of films have different standards for film critics to judge. For literary and artistic films, the media will always be more strict.
In the end, with a production cost of 35 million US dollars, 1,762 opening screens, the box office in the first week was 8.13 million US dollars, and the average theater revenue exceeded 4,500 US dollars.
Tepid results.
The local box office is expected to be between US$20 million and US$25 million.
Compared with "Blair Witch 2", it is certainly 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 a book. If you consider the time cost, you will definitely still lose money.
In a new box office week, April 21, Daenerys launched three new films at once, all of which were original films that had never been seen before in history.
Among them, in addition to two medium-cost commercial films, there is also an interesting documentary from China, originally called "The Lost Martial Arts". It was shot by Director Xu who once went to Hollywood for exchanges. It was originally a seven-episode feature film. The documentary was edited into a 120-minute film version.
Now that we have arrived in the United States, Western audiences will definitely not be able to understand it if we use the original name, so we changed it to a new name, "Once Upon a Time About Kungfu", to imitate the naming style of "Once Upon a Time About Us."
For the Chinese, martial arts and kung fu are actually two concepts. In other words, martial arts includes kung fu, but of course it is definitely not just kung fu, but also various kung fu cultures that extend from it. The original seven-episode documentary not only shows various kung fu that are about to disappear or have already disappeared in China, but also the entire martial arts culture.
Considering that foreigners are not very interested in all-round martial arts culture, the 120-minute edited version, although it touches on martial arts culture, is mainly a display of various kung fu. Of course, in order to avoid being reduced to a pure show like a flyover, the seemingly fringe martial arts culture is integrated throughout, which can be regarded as wrapping a layer of connotation into the documentary.
Connotation is important.
The filming of the entire documentary only cost less than 5 million yuan. Gaomen Pictures and Jinshu signed a sharing agreement with zero guarantee. The company promised a total investment of 3 million US dollars in production and promotion, and the premiere will not be less than 3 million yuan. 500 screens, followed by all channels including video tapes, excluding the cost of US$3 million, will be split 30-70 between the two parties, with Gaomen Pictures accounting for 70%.
There was no premiere, and the film was mainly promoted through online channels. The number of opening screens was finally determined to be 513.
On the day of its release, the documentary was released in word-of-mouth and received an excellent overall media score of 8.1. The Hollywood Reporter also wrote a special press release, praising "Once Upon a Time" for showing real life in a very shocking way. Chinese kung fu culture.
Shocking is the right word.
Documentaries are full of stunts such as making a heavy stone tablet buzz with one palm. Not to mention foreigners, the Chinese themselves will definitely be shocked when they see it. After all, most Chinese people in this era have rarely seen real people. Kung Fu master. Entering the new century, various fake 'masters' are constantly destroying people's belief in Chinese Kung Fu.
For projects from China, the focus this year 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 season. "The Lost Martial Arts" is a piece of cake, and its success or failure has nothing to do with the overall situation.
However, the results were not too bad.
On the first day of release, the film earned a box office of US$870,000. Moreover, word-of-mouth spread on the Internet platform, which is the main promotion position, which means that the single-day peak on Saturday is likely to exceed one million, seven days a week. , it will not be a problem to reach a box office of more than 4 million.
This is close to the average number of museums exceeding 10,000.
The Gaomen Pictures team followed up in time and decided to add about 200 more screens the next week, and to increase publicity appropriately. For example, on Saturday, in addition to a special press release appearing on the homepage of the Ygrit portal, Facebook On social networking sites, the tag "Once Upon a Time in Kung Fu" has also appeared on the popular list in the film and television categories.
In short, it is just a beginning. It is basically certain that this documentary will have no problem breaking through 10 million U.S. dollars at the box office in North America. If it can go on a good long-term basis, it may even hit 15 million U.S. dollars.
Of course it cannot be compared with last year's "Everest", but for most other films from China that failed to make a splash, as a documentary, it is already quite outstanding to achieve such results in North America. The news spread back to China over the weekend, and Jinshu started operations. The young director Xu directly received an interview invitation from CCTV, and there was no obstacle to the first movie he had been preparing.
In addition to movies, Simon returned to North America and was also concerned about another thing, the launch of iBox-10.
As of Saturday, April 22, since pre-sales began last Saturday, iBox-10 achieved a small miracle of exceeding one million in pre-sales on the first day. In the entire week, it finally received 3.79 million orders. Within seven days, it has Achieved sales of $1.1 billion.
Not only that, according to this trend, even if iBox-10 exceeds the break-even line of 10 million units in the first year of its launch, even 20 million units, it seems that it is not a problem at the moment.
Tinkerber originally expected that the pre-sales of iBox-10 would exceed 500,000 units in the first week. After all, a lot of publicity was carried out 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 were other manufacturers, they would inevitably be in a hurry. After all, such a huge order means that manufacturers may not be able to deliver products to users for a long time.
Tinkerbeier has no such worries.
Not to mention stocking 1 million units in advance, the main purpose is to ensure the demand for pre-sales and distribution in the first week of sales. Over the years, Tinker Bayer has built a fairly complete global network through the accumulation of experience in several consecutive popular products. supply system.
With the release of the pre-sale data on the first day, a decision was made here. Component manufacturers scattered around the world such as North America, Japan, and China immediately went into full gear. Foundries in Suzhou, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other places in China also quickly Adjustments were made and workers were 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, considering that iBox-10 is a new product, after the initial pre-sale output is fully satisfied, Tinker Bayer management 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, it will definitely have similar effects. However, it is mainly to limit the scale of users so that when this new electronic product has various foreseeable flaws, the negative impact can be minimized.
In any case, the day before Easter, iBox-10 was officially launched for sale. In addition to the orders sent to online shopping users, the first batch of 500,000 machines sold in major physical stores across the United States were also swept away, so that very soon The scalper phenomenon is about to appear again.
For example, on the eBay platform, iBox-10 was sold for more than $1,000 on Saturday night.
This is just hardware.
In terms of software, not to mention the sales of game software that cannot be counted in a short period of time through physical channels, but the officially launched iBox game mall opened in advance in the early morning of April 22. By 24 o'clock in the morning that day, sales had easily exceeded 700 million. US dollars, including a $19.99 January VIP membership that can play a large number of classic games from the past. The number of activations reached 370,000 at 8 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" were simultaneously launched last week, directly accounting for nearly 500 million US dollars. I have to admit that this share once again proves the 80/20 rule of the entertainment industry.
Even though everyone knows that whether it is a movie or a game, a rich copyright library is indispensable, just like a mansion cannot be just a few beams. However, the top 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, Tinkerbeier's operations team, which monitors relevant data at all times, also plans to make some necessary adjustments.