As the Westeros system successively completed the financing transactions of Ygritte Company and the acquisition of Christie's, time also entered May 1993.
The summer season is approaching, and many of this summer's blockbuster films have begun their final promotional stages.
Daenerys Entertainment's summer hit should theoretically be "Superman," but according to the original agreement, the film's distribution rights were handled by Warner Bros. Pictures.
Several other movies, "Sleepless in Seattle" is a cooperation project with Disney, "Gannet" is a cooperation project with Warner Bros., and only "Sugar-coated Trap" starring Keanu Reeves is Daenerys. The film company is responsible for distribution itself. In addition, during the four-month summer holiday, Daenerys Entertainment's other two labels, New World Pictures and High Gate Pictures, will also release their own films in the summer holiday.
While paying attention to the upcoming summer season, after this period of operation, the formal transformation of Daenerys Entertainment’s record business into Daenerys Records Group (DMG) has been initially completed. In fact, it is mainly the name. There is no internal information about the record group. Too big an adjustment.
On the other hand, Jive Records president Barry Weiss, who has created teenage pop singers such as Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears, successfully jumped ship to join Daenerys Records Group at the invitation of Daenerys Entertainment.
After the reorganization of the record business, Richard Palmes, the former president of Universal Music Group, changed his position to CEO of Daenerys Records Group, responsible for overseeing the overall situation of DMG.
After years of development, large record groups are now basically composed of many record subsidiaries.
The original Universal Music Group seems to be one company, but in fact it has seven record subsidiaries that are still active, such as Geffen Records where Guns N' Roses is, Decca Records where Cher is, and Futurist who specializes in death rock. Records and more. There are countless sub-labels that were once active and fell into taking advantage of the termination of contracts or the demise of their artists.
The position Simon gave Barry Weiss was the president of Infinity Records, a record subsidiary of DMG. Although the position was equivalent to that of Jive Records, a subsidiary of RCA Records, the resources and authority he could call upon far exceeded that of Jive. record.
Infinity Records will next focus on creating teenage pop singers, and the parent company DMG will do its best to ensure the promotion and promotion of the singers signed by this subsidiary.
Simon can actually give Barry Weiss a higher position. However, for the huge DMG, a position that is too high will only cause Barry Weiss to get involved in unnecessary administrative affairs. Handing over a subsidiary of Infinite Records to the other party will allow Barry Weiss to focus more on the field of youth pop.
The initial adjustments to the record business have been completed, and Barry Weiss has successfully joined the company. The next step is to find a signed singer.
Compared with Hollywood, which has a clear hierarchy of actors and actresses, the music industry is roughly divided into two types of singers, one is already famous and the other is not famous.
This is not to say that there are no talent distinctions among singers, but the competition in this industry is far more intense than in Hollywood. Before actors become famous, they can still hang out at the bottom and wait for opportunities. For singers, it is impossible to have many movies. TV dramas ask you to play a small role. If you are not signed to a record company and have not become famous, then you are nothing.
However, compared to the acting industry, which still requires talent and skills, the threshold for singing is much lower for most people.
This also leads to the fact that the number of young people who dream of becoming singers is not much less than the number of unknown actors who live at the bottom of Hollywood.
Therefore, many record companies receive a large number of self-recommended audition tapes from potential singers almost every day.
However, the larger the record company, the more cautious the signed singers will be, because once the signed singer fails to succeed after spending a lot of resources, the person in charge is likely to lose his job.
Now that the development goals of Infinite Records were determined and Barry Weiss joined the company, Simon began to personally participate in the search for suitable teenage pop star seeds.
In fact, I want to find some singers who are more familiar in my memory.
Among the large list of candidate singers, Simon did find the group he wanted: the Backstreet Boys.
The Backstreet Boys are a group recently formed by five young people in Orlando, Florida. After learning from the media that DMG was selecting teenage singers, they submitted their audition tape to Infinite Records and were picked by Simon at a glance.
However, there are still some problems with this matter.
Although the five members of the group all have good singing skills and talents, two of them are still underage, and the youngest, Nick Carter, is only 13 years old.
Now that Simon has taken a liking to the name 'Backstreet Boys', the rest of the problem is, of course, solved by Barry Weiss.
You have to become famous as early as possible, and there are no rules in the music industry that prohibit minors from entering the industry. However, since they want to create a teenage boy group mainly for middle and high school students, the 13-year-old Shota, who has just reached junior high school age, is naturally not suitable.
The solution is actually very simple, remove the two minors from the combination and find two more young people as substitutes.
Several young people did not have high expectations when they submitted their audition tapes, but they were overjoyed when they were suddenly selected. They even accepted Infinite Records' invitation to substitute.
Therefore, the two parties quickly finalized a 10-year contract.
Barry Weiss also obtained the permanent copyright of the group name "Backstreet Boys" through the contract. In the future, whether a member quits or the group disbands, the name "Backstreet Boys" will belong to Infinity Records, and Infinity Records can The group will be re-elected on the basis of this name, and the departing team members will also be prohibited from conducting any commercial activities using the name 'Backstreet Boys'.
In fact, for Simon, Backstreet Boys was more of an exercise for Infinite Records, in order to sum up a set of operating procedures for quickly mass-copying teenage pop singers.
Building a portfolio from scratch is never easy and expensive.
In order to show the importance he attaches to Unlimited Records, Simon not only gave Barry Weiss one year to operate the "Backstreet Boys" project, with DMG's resources at his disposal, but also planned to meet with Barry Weiss at least every week in the future. Meet once to understand the other person's work progress and give your own suggestions based on the information in your memory.
In addition, Infinite Records has also begun to identify other potential teenage singer seeds.
Compared with the backstreet boy group that has already been formed, Simon hopes to be like South Korea's mass cultivation of pop singers in the past, starting from the age of fourteen or fifteen to sign and cultivate pop singer seeds. Singers who have received professional training from vocals to body, after the launch There is no doubt that the chance of becoming famous is much higher than that of the grass-roots team from the bottom, and even the career life span will be longer.
Making this decision, Simon's eyes naturally fell on Disney's famous Mickey Mouse Club.
The 'big name' here is actually for Simon, a latecomer.
Mickey Mouse Clubhouse is a youth variety show on the Disney Channel, featuring singing, dancing, and skits.
For Disney, the ratings of this show are very average. In Simon's memory, this show may have been suspended in the past two years due to low ratings.
However, among the members of the Mickey Mouse Club, in the following years, famous actors or singers such as Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, and Ryan Gosling emerged one after another. .
While running the Backstreet Boys, under Simon's instruction, Barry Weiss also began to quietly pay attention to the group of teenagers in the Mickey Mouse Club.
Britney Spears is only 12 or 13 years old, and DMG has no intention of supporting them for five or six years, so it is not suitable for them to sign a contract at the moment. Among them, those who are more in line with their age, such as Keri Russell, who is 17 years old this year, although she has a very good appearance and figure, compared with Britney, Christina and others, the gap in singing skills is very obvious. The 17-year-old Age also lacks plasticity, so we can only give up.
Simon has actually considered creating a group of young singers through music elective programs. Doing so will not only provide Daenerys TV with a new hit reality show, but also provide the record company with some outstanding singer seeds.
After careful consideration, I gave up.
At this stage, Daenerys TV's reality shows are still Simon's original "Who Will Be a Millionaire" and several others. These shows still have good vitality for the time being. The most important thing is that before acquiring a public television network, Simon does not plan to launch any more phenomenal reality shows. These will still be left to his own television network in the future.
In my busy schedule, the time came to May 14th unknowingly.
It's a Friday.
The biggest summer movie "Superman" will be released on June 4. In order to avoid this blockbuster, the summer movie officially starts today.
On this day, a total of three movies were released in North American theaters: Fox's "The Condor 2", Columbia Pictures' "My Genius Family" and New World Pictures' "The Legend of Bruce Lee."
However, on this day, what most media in North America are paying most attention to is that "Jurassic Park", which was released on Christmas last year, has officially been released in North American theaters.
After five months of screening, the cumulative North American box office of "Jurassic Park" finally reached 356.71 million US dollars.
At the same time, the screening of "Jurassic Park" in overseas markets has basically ended. Among them, Japan alone has received a box office equivalent to 120 million U.S. dollars. The other three countries, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, have also achieved box office figures of Forty to fifty million dollars.
After the statistics of the following weekend, Jurassic Park's overseas box office also reached 573.11 million U.S. dollars, and it is expected that there will be about 50 million U.S. dollars in subsequent overseas revenue.
Therefore, as of mid-May, "Jurassic Park" has been canceled in North America. The global box office of this dinosaur science fiction blockbuster has reached 929.82 million U.S. dollars. In the next few months, it will be completely canceled worldwide. This phenomenon-level blockbuster Bombshell's global box office total will be around $980 million.
Even though there are still some regrets that it cannot break through the US$1 billion mark, the global box office of US$980 million is enough to surpass the global record of US$960 million of "Batman Begins" and advance to the top position in global film history.
With a global box office of US$980 million, excluding all production and promotion budgets and shares from Spielberg and other main creators, Daenerys Entertainment still earns US$200 million in revenue.
Moreover, the box office is only a part of the profit contributed by "Jurassic Park".
The bulk of this project's revenue, peripheral products, has accumulated sales of US$1.3 billion in recent months, contributing nearly US$200 million in profit. It is expected that by the end of "Jurassic Park 2", the sales of peripheral products for this movie will be expected to increase. to $2 billion.
In addition, including future video and TV broadcasts, and even the revenue from Universal Studios' "Jurassic Park" theme park, this movie alone will bring a net profit of no less than 1 billion US dollars to Daenerys Entertainment. profit.
As "Jurassic Park" was released in North America, while overseas countries were discussing the invasion of Hollywood, the North American media also noticed the slow development progress of the sequel to this series.
Spielberg's "Schindler's List" has been completed and has begun returning to Hollywood for post-production.
However, in recent interviews, Spielberg's answers to questions about the sequel to "Jurassic Park" have been ambiguous, and the responses given by Daenerys Entertainment executives in interviews have also been unclear, which has left many people confused. Everyone smelled something different in it.
According to Spielberg's original contract with Universal, the veteran movie star happened to owe Daenerys Entertainment a film contract after "Schindler's List".
However, the two parties apparently have differences over the sequel to "Jurassic Park".
The most likely possibility is undoubtedly a conflict of interests.
Daenerys Entertainment expects to earn $1 billion from the "Jurassic Park" project, and Spielberg's salary, including base salary and shares, is about $45 million.
For Hollywood filmmakers, the figure of $45 million is definitely a sky-high price.
But Spielberg is obviously not satisfied with the salary figure he gets.
If he follows previous sharing strategies, such as the 20% net profit sharing across all channels when cooperating with Colombia, the salary he can receive will be at least US$200 million.
Daenerys Entertainment initially seemed to have a very guaranteed plan to draw a share directly from the box office. With the film's box office success, this share plan that other Hollywood filmmakers can only covet, in Spielberg It seems even a bit like a trap.
This psychological state is easy to understand.
However, since the contract was originally signed, it is naturally impossible to change it at this time.
However, if you want him to continue directing the sequel to "Jurassic Park", Daenerys Entertainment must offer a sincere enough price.
In the past, Spielberg took a crazy $250 million for the first "Jurassic Park", but his salary for the second film was significantly reduced to $70 million. This time, the first film only earned $45 million, and Spielberg clearly hopes to get a higher return through the sequel to compensate for his potential losses on the first film.
Moreover, according to a certain mentality that has been formed by top Hollywood filmmakers for a long time, in Spielberg's view, Daenerys Entertainment should not rashly replace him and let others direct this series. .