On November 18th, the day after Eric flew to New York, "Home Alone" and "Back to Seventeen" officially ushered in the premiere. The opening screen of "Home Alone" was 1,000 yuan, while "Home Alone" The opening screen of "Seventeen" was 1279 yuan, more than 200 yuan more than "Home Alone". Fox didn't have any scruples about the betting agreement, so it did its best at the beginning.
At the same time, 1,395 screens of Universal Pictures' animation "Little Foot Walks the World" and 952 screens of animation "The Adventures of Oliver" distributed by Disney's Buvi International are also screened.
Three films for children were released at the same time, which made the media feel that Eric was less likely to win the bet, but Eric was not too worried. The early stages of these two animations may have a certain impact on "Home Alone" The box office is squeezed, but the staying power in the later period is definitely not comparable to "Home Alone". In the previous life, "Home Alone" had a box office of more than 10 million for 10 consecutive weeks.
After attending the two premieres, it was already past eleven o'clock in the evening when Eric and the crew returned to the hotel. In this era, there is no such advanced box office statistics system as later generations, so we can only know the box office data of "Home Alone" and "Back to Seventeen" until next week.
Back in the room, Eric took a shower and was about to go to bed when the phone rang suddenly. Aniston was the only one calling this late.
"Hi, Eric, are you asleep?" Aniston asked with a little excitement in his tone.
Eric sat on the bed, wiped his wet hair with a towel, and said, "Not yet, just finished taking a shower, Annie, did you encounter any happy things?"
"Guess it?"
Eric joked: "Oh, I see, you must be pregnant, don't worry, I will take responsibility."
"Bah, you big pervert, you know how to think about those nasty things." Aniston spat while holding the microphone: "I just watched "Home Alone", and I encountered a very interesting thing. "
Eric smiled and said, "Tell me?"
"It's like this. When I came out of the movie theater, I happened to see a five or six-year-old boy shouting loudly that he wanted to watch Kevin. The child's parents disagreed, saying that he had just watched it. As a result, the boy lay on the ground crying. Got up. Some people saw this scene and mistook the parents for human traffickers, beat up the poor young parents, and called the police, and finally several police cars came, it was really fun, haha.”
Aniston just told Eric this incident as an anecdote on the way to watch the movie, but Eric saw more meaning from it. Chatted with Aniston for a few more words, hung up the phone, Eric lay on the bed, slightly excited.
Because things still happened according to the trajectory of the previous life. The reason why "Home Alone" was able to achieve such an amazing box office in the previous life was because a large group of rambunctious children watched "Home Alone" over and over again, and competed to imitate Kevin's every move in the film, which eventually pushed the film to an astonishing box office results.
Things were indeed as Eric had guessed. On the first day the film was released, the box office of "Home Alone" and the other two animations were basically the same. On the second day, the box office of "Home Alone" directly doubled, and on the third day, the single-day box office increased significantly again, and queues had already appeared at the entrances of some popular theaters.
After all, you can watch cartoons at any time, but you can’t meet the eccentric Kevin at any time. Most children fantasize about growing up quickly and being able to do many things that they can’t do now. From the perspective of children, the movie "Home Alone" realizes what most children want to do but cannot, dare not do or cannot do in reality.
There was a trend of imitating Kevin among children in North America. A newspaper in San Francisco even reported a real "Home Alone" incident. After watching "Home Alone", a nine-year-old boy went to the While on vacation in Hawaii, I secretly locked myself in my room.
The parents with six children really didn't find out about it. After the family flew to Hawaii, they found out that the boy was missing. The boy's parents had to give up their vacation and fly back to San Francisco from Hawaii. At the same time, the boy had already messed up the house and was waiting for the arrival of the "stupid thief". Unfortunately, the parents who were really anxious were waiting.
A week later, the movie's first-week box office was finally counted. Although all the previous signs of popularity had made people psychologically prepared, the astonishing $27.55 million first-week box office of "Home Alone" still caught everyone's attention.
The box office of more than 20 million US dollars may not be comparable to the blockbusters with a box office of more than 100 million in the first week of later generations, but in this era, this achievement directly surpassed all high-grossing movies in recent years, even Spielberg's "et" No one has achieved such an amazing start, and only George Lucas’ Star Wars series can surpass “Home Alone”, but the production cost of “Star Wars” is more than a hundred times that of “Home Alone” !
At the same time, "Back to Seventeen" also won the second place with a good score of 13.12 million. Competing with "Home Alone", "Little Foot Walks the World" and "The Adventures of Oliver" only received 7.12 million and 3.98 million box office respectively, far below the expectations of the two major film companies. Undoubtedly, the box office of the two animations was severely suppressed by "Home Alone". Executives from Universal and Disney lamented the box office of "Home Alone" and envied Columbia's good luck.
Columbia is really lucky, but Columbia President Blunt Cohen, who saw the box office in the first week, was not in a good mood at all, and even couldn't hold back the teacup in his hand several times.
According to the box office data of the first week, Columbia has re-evaluated and concluded that the North American box office of "Home Alone" must be more than 200 million U.S. dollars, and may even exceed 300 million U.S. dollars. Blunt Cohen felt extremely remorseful. If he had insisted on buying out the copyright of "Home Alone" instead of signing a nonsense gambling agreement, then this year Columbia would have made hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from this movie.
Now, according to the VAM agreement, if "Home Alone" has a box office of 300 million U.S. dollars, Columbia will pay 120 million U.S. dollars in dividends to Eric, and it can only get 45 million U.S. dollars. Subtracting the distribution costs, Columbia may earn by itself. Just a fraction of Eric's $120 million.
Blunt Cohen has repeatedly thought of tearing up the agreement. However, the content of the gambling agreement is now known throughout the United States. If the agreement is torn up rashly, it will be difficult for Columbia to win the lawsuit, and it will become the laughing stock of the United States. He will definitely be swept out as a scapegoat.
"No, we must find a way to recover the loss, we must..." Blunt Cohen was muttering to himself, when the assistant knocked on the door and came in: "Mr. Cohen, everyone is here, we can start the meeting."
Blunt Cohen rubbed his temples, got up and walked to the conference room.
After sitting down in his seat, Blunt Cohen directly asked Lester Reed, who was in charge of the "Home Alone" project: "Lester, how is the data analysis going?"
Lester Reed was supposed to return by flight with the crew of "Home Alone" late this night, but an emergency call from the headquarters made him return to Los Angeles half a day earlier than the others. When he came to the Columbia headquarters and learned that "Home Alone" had box office in its first week, Lester instinctively felt something was wrong.
Guilty glanced at Brant Cohen, who was expressionless. It was Brant Cohen who made the decision to accept the gambling agreement, but he was the first to respond to the agreement at the original meeting. According to Brant Cohen's self-willed personality, nine out of ten he would blame himself.
"Mr. Cohen, according to the analysis of the data department, according to the VAM agreement, we can only get a share of about 50 million US dollars at most, and the peak share is about 225 million US dollars. This is the data curve."
Brant Cohen took the analysis file, glanced at the red parabola representing Columbia's profit, and the rising green curve representing Eric's share, and his temple couldn't help but twitch again.
boom-
Another teacup was dropped on the mahogany floor by Brant Cohen, making a muffled sound, and everyone else in the meeting room was slightly shocked, lowering their heads subconsciously and becoming silent.
Under normal circumstances, the box office share of 50 million US dollars has already made many film company executives wake up from their dreams. After all, even the six giants, in this era, the annual box office profit is only about 100 million or 200 million in the best case. .
But compared with Eric's possible profit of more than 100 million US dollars, all the excitement that Brant Cohen should have disappeared in an instant.
"Then, you are responsible for signing the gambling agreement, what should we do now?" Blunt Cohen glanced around the crowd coldly, and finally his eyes fell on Lester Reed.