Compared with the lively Golden Globe Awards in Hollywood in January, Eric is most concerned about the Sundance Film Festival, which has been booming in recent years. 一?Reading
David Fincher's debut film "The Seven Deadly Sins" made its first public appearance at the Sundance Film Festival, kicking off the film's promotional work ahead of Easter.
Brad Pitt is still playing the role of Agent Mueller in "X-Files". The actor selected by the crew is Matthew McConaughey, who has begun to emerge in recent years. Eric doesn't like this one too much. Actors always feel that his appearance is too frivolous, but this image just fits the youthful, irritable and irritable character of David Smith, the actor of "Seven Deadly Sins", so he finally decided on it. Except for Matthew McKenna and Diane Kruger, who was stuffed into the crew by Eric, the other two supporting actors, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Spacey, have not changed.
Compared with those killer movies that slashed all the way to the end and even made the audience feel aesthetically tired, the exquisite and shocking crime plot setting of "Seven Deadly Sins" pushed this movie theme to an unprecedented height. The impatient, calm, or crazy characters of the three male characters also left a deep impression on the media and film critics. After the film was launched at the Sundance Film Festival, it immediately aroused strong responses.
"... Most serial crime movies almost always show a Sherlock Holmes-like character to solve everything in the end. The plot setting of "Seven Deadly Sins", which allows criminals to show up and continue to complete crazy actions, is undoubtedly subversive. The ending of the film is shocking, and the gloomy city that always rains also gives a gothic dark religious atmosphere, which echoes the religious theme of the 'seven deadly sins'."
"...Compared to the messy and mediocre "Alien 3", "Seven Deadly Sins" is undoubtedly a reborn work of director David Fincher."
“…Kevin Spacey, in his brief time on the screen, brings to life a genius, cold and deranged trans-slayer reminiscent of Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs Matthew McConaughey and Morgan Freeman also gave very good performances. Also, while many criticize the Victoria's Secret supermodel's frequent influx of Hollywood, Diane Kruger's But the performance has also reached the pass line, we can't ask for more from this group of beautiful babies with delicate faces and devil figures, can't we?"
Although there is no shortage of critical voices in any film, the praise of "Seven Deadly Sins" has far outweighed the negative comments in the media, and the topic of movies has quickly spread from Christmas to the whole of North America.
Although the Sundance Film Festival aims to support independent films, after years of development, it has also begun to compromise with several major Hollywood filmmakers in order to survive better.
Among the as many as 17 jury awards for the best feature films, more than one-third of the films are from the top seven or their subsidiaries. Under the operation of the network, it successfully won the jury award, which made a good start for the promotion of the film.
As January passed, the atmosphere of the holidays gradually disappeared, and people's lives gradually entered a normal state. The film market also fell into the deserted period of spring. The total box office of Hollywood week dropped from the highest of 170 million US dollars in the New Year's period to about 60 million. Correspondingly, entering February, the spring season of TV dramas begins to come.
"Seven Deadly Sins" started with a good start at the Sundance Film Festival, and brought another action movie "Red Fan District" from New Line to start the promotion of the Easter schedule in April. At the same time, abc TV network, ae TV network, Disney Channel, ESPN and other major TV stations have also begun to launch new spring programs one after another.
Among them, apart from ESPN, which has just signed a US$9 billion broadcast rights contract with the National Football League, it is the Lifetime TV station under the ae TV network, which specializes in urban elite fashion women.
Before the winter break last year, the last episodes of the two reality shows "America's Next Top Model" and "Project Runway" that caused great repercussions on Lifetime TV both achieved more than 6 million viewers. "America's Next Top Model" The final number of viewers in the first season of "The Contest" reached 6.8 million, and the ratings were once close to 4.0. Compared with most cable TV channels, this result is simply amazing.
With the phenomenal viewing trend brought about by the two reality shows, Lifetime TV subscribers soared, from just over 3,000 in early 1995 to the current 76 million. Lifetime TV has also begun to prepare for the inevitable price increase in the one-year broadcast rights contract.
According to industry expectations, as long as the programs launched by Lifetime TV in spring can reach the average level of last autumn, Lifetime TV will be able to increase the average subscription fee of users to more than 25 cents during the negotiation of the new contract.
For this alone, Lifetime TV station will get more than 200 million US dollars in subscription revenue from cable TV operators every year. This figure has exceeded the industry's overall valuation of Lifetime TV station at less than 150 million US dollars a year ago. With the popularity of Lifetime programs, the TV station’s advertising revenue, as well as the syndicated distribution of popular programs and DVD sales, the income will far exceed the pure subscription share. Wall Street media industry analysts have even estimated the valuation of Lifetime TV station raised to $1.1 billion. want to read a book
Although the viewers of Lifetime TV will not pay too much attention to these industry data, their interest in the gathering of the two flagship reality shows of Lifetime TV has not diminished in the slightest.
Although the second season of "America's Next Top Model" will be aired in early March, the TV station's new drama "Lust and the City" will also have to wait until the end of February.
But with the arrival of New York Fashion Week, according to the original rules, the first season of "Project Runway" did not end completely, but the finals were placed in New York Fashion Week.
After the winter break, the final three players who stand out from the fierce elimination will present their final works at the much-anticipated Bryant Park in Manhattan.
In order to gather more attention, before the final broadcast, "Project Runway" specially made two special episodes, which were aired two weeks before and after New York Fashion Week, because all the popular reality show contestants in the episodes were broadcast at the same time. Returning, although there are no previous competitions, and more is just a review of last year's program and interviews with players, the two special programs still achieved more than 500 viewership ratings, which once again showed the media and the industry. "Proud Son" is very popular.
Although Linda sent an invitation to Eric, hoping that he could appear as a special guest on the final episode of "Project Runway", Eric had to return to Los Angeles in a hurry after the AOL IPO.
The preliminary budget of "Casino Royale 007" has been released, and the worldwide scouting of the film and the audition work of some important supporting roles have started at the same time, all of which are inseparable from Eric's participation.
At the same time, Firefly, MGM and Fox have also started negotiations on the establishment of paid cable stations.
In the original time and space, hbo almost monopolized more than 90% of the market share of paid cable TV stations, and its annual profit was even close to 2 billion US dollars at its peak. Even after more than ten years, this kind of profit scale would still be able to squeeze into the top 500 companies in the world. up. As for the other major media companies, although they have tried many times to catch up with hbo's market position, because hbo has formed a market monopoly structure early on, coupled with its own excellent operation methods, its market position has always been as stable as Mount Tai.
In my memory, 20th Century Fox even launched a tender offer to the entire Time Warner Group in order to obtain an HBO, but of course it failed.
However, at this time, the entire US cable TV market, after long-term brewing since the 1980s, is just in the early stages of outbreak. Although hbo is already small and has a small scale, it is far from as dazzling as it was later, which also gave other paid cable companies a lot of money. Opportunity to come from behind.
In the early morning of the new week, Eric rushed to Playa Vista and had breakfast with Katzenberg in the cafe in the film studio, discussing the recent work progress by the way.
"We have roughly selected several targets, and the most suitable one is a premium cable station under Telecom. This TV station currently has about 1.5 million subscribers and mainly plays early old movies. Although the number of subscriptions is small, But with a telecommunication user base of 40 million, as long as it can provide enough high-quality film and television resources, the growth of subscribers will be very rapid."
Katzenberg reported on the paid cable TV station, took a sip of coffee, and continued: "However, Telecom is unwilling to let go of this TV station. They hope to keep 20% of the shares. I think that if If we finally decide to acquire this TV station, we should be able to reduce the shareholding ratio of Telecom to 10%, after all, without our content support, it is impossible for Telecom’s paid cable station to grow.”
Telecom, Comcast, and Time Warner are the three giants of traditional cable TV operators in this era. In addition, there are more small and medium-sized cable TV operators and emerging satellite TV operators in North America. Even News Corp. All have cable TV operations, but the business scope is mainly concentrated in Europe and Australia.
In the early 1980s, due to anti-monopoly considerations, these cable TV operators were not allowed to own TV stations, but as media regulation became more and more open, this restriction was gradually broken. After Barry Diller left Fox, the qvc TV shopping channel he operated was a TV station jointly invested by Telecom and Comcast.
After the new century, the largest cable TV operator in the United States has changed from long-distance communication to Comcast. Eric is not very clear about the reasons, but it can be roughly guessed that long-distance communication was either established after the Internet wave burst. , went bankrupt like many high-tech companies, or was merged. If it is the latter, the merger should obviously be Comcast.
"Try to fight for it. It's best to push it down to 10%. At the same time, we should also lean towards remote communication to get more channel resources in advance," Eric said after thinking about it.
He never thought of monopolizing the TV station from the very beginning, and maintaining a shareholding relationship with the operator can also allow the other party to provide more resources and convenience for the expansion of the TV station. In addition, Katzenberg suggested that Fox be excluded from the collaborators In addition, Eric did not adopt this suggestion. If it's just North America, of course there is no need to bring Fox, after all, Firefly and MGM can already provide enough programs for TV stations.
But taking a longer-term view, the international media channel resources in the hands of News Corporation can help this paid cable station to go overseas more easily, just like the Disney Channel in the hands of Firefly, because of the good relationship between Firefly and Fox, in In the past two years, with the channel resources of Sky Media, it has successfully entered the TV market in Europe and Australia.
And at the end of last year, with the popularity of "America's Next Top Model" and "Project Runway", Firefly has also begun to cooperate with News Corporation to transfer the lifetime TV station to overseas markets. News Corporation's TV station in Australia has even bought it. won the production copyright of the Australian version of "Supermodel Contest". ,
Even ignoring the relationship between Eric and Elizabeth and bringing Fox into this cooperation, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
After discussing the issue of paid cable stations, the two finished their breakfast slowly, and Eric handed Katzenberg a prepared document, saying: "This is some information about imax that I asked Kelly to collect recently. And 3D film and television technology information, you can take it back and have a look, and you can also copy a few copies for Frank and the others."
Katzenberg was a little unfamiliar with the concept of imax, but he knew 3D technology. He took the materials and pressed them at hand, and said, "Eric, are you going to make a 3D movie?"
Eric shook his head and said: "I don't have any plans yet, you can read the information first, according to Firefly's future production strategy, what we are going to do is the high-quality route of large-scale production, most of these special effects-based films They all pay great attention to the visual experience. As you can imagine, if we can popularize 3D movie technology to these movies, we can not only improve the competitiveness of the movie itself, but also raise movie ticket prices to a certain extent on the basis of 2D. In 2019, although the size of movie audiences has been growing and the world movie market is also expanding, there will always be a day of saturation. At that time, 3D movie technology may become a very important entry point for us to maintain continuous performance growth. Oh, The same is true for imax technology, I don’t know if there is an imax screening hall in Los Angeles, you can look for it and experience it first.”
Katzenberg listened carefully, nodded solemnly, and said, "I will read the information as soon as possible, and at the same time ask the Strategic Planning Department to come up with an assessment." (To be continued.)