The Best Entertainment Era

One month after it was screened in theaters, the popularity of The Blair Witch faded away. Just like all news events, it is impossible to occupy the public's attention all the time. is becoming a thing of the past.

After the film took another $5.21 million in its fifth weekend, its single-day output also dropped to around $1 million.

However, the cumulative North American box office of 138.9 million US dollars has also allowed The Blair Witch to move towards the 150 million US dollar mark step by step.

The box office is only the beginning of the film's revenue generation, and offline operations are still being prepared.

Disc compression and videotape production have already started. Ronan plans to launch the market during Halloween. The offline channel department has cooperated with chain stores such as Wal-Mart and Blockbuster for many years. The embassy film industry can last more than ten years. An extremely important guarantee.

Ronan is willing to spend huge sums of money to acquire Embassy Pictures at this point in time, not only because of its theatrical distribution capabilities, but also because of the well-established offline channels of Embassy Pictures.

Since the birth of videotape, film distribution has never been exclusively theatrical.

No one knows better than Ronan that in the next ten years Hollywood will usher in an era of DVD explosion. It is not an exaggeration to say that DVD has supported Hollywood companies.

Ronan took the time to talk with Garcia and offline distribution director Terry for a day. The embassy film will make a layout on DVD in advance and establish a long-term cooperative relationship with several disc pressing factories.

Compared with the traditional video tape industry, DVD and related discs are undoubtedly more promising, and video tapes will soon be fully surpassed by DVD.

The most important factors are profit and cost. Even if an ordinary DVD is produced in a place with extremely high labor costs like North America, the cost of pressing is only 50 cents, and the cost of putting it into terminal sales is only 3 to 5 dollars.

The price of genuine DVDs is generally around US$20, and the unit price of US$100 is also common for luxury sets, commemorative sets, limited editions, etc.

Another point is that the picture quality of DVDs is generally better than that of videotapes.

Hollywood is about to enter a crazy blockbuster era, and the biggest selling point of those blockbusters is special effects. It is undoubtedly very difficult to show special effects with traditional video tapes.

For The Blair Witch, there is almost no room for derivatives. In addition to video tapes and DVDs, TV broadcasting is another major source of offline income.

The Embassy Pictures also started preliminary contact with the TV station to discuss the copyright issue of the first broadcast of The Blair Witch.

There are two main ways for Hollywood movies to broadcast to TV stations. One is to directly sell out how many years of copyright to TV stations, and the other is to charge by the number of broadcasts, with the highest price for the first broadcast.

For example, for Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible, the authorization fee for the first broadcast is as high as 8 million US dollars, and the fee for each subsequent broadcast is nearly 4 million US dollars.

It can also be packaged according to the number of broadcasts. The film company uses two or three popular movies as the core, and then mixes it with some ordinary movies and bad movies that are not easy to sell. A playback authorization package is formed and sold to the TV station.

This kind of situation is very common. It can not only allow the bad movies that lose money to return funds as much as possible, but also effectively dilute the profits of popular movies.

At the time of the acquisition, due to the limited funds in Ronan's hands, he stripped off the film library of the Embassy Pictures, and was finally acquired by Lionsgate Pictures. At present, the Embassy Pictures does not have the copyright of other films. The videotape movies that did not sell the TV rights were transferred to the embassy film industry, and then formed a broadcast authorization package with The Blair Witch, and then sold to the TV station.

He is responsible for providing the plan, and the specifics will be operated by the people in the offline distribution department of the embassy film industry.

Fortunately, The Blair Witch does not involve the cast and crew or other aspects of the share. Ronan's Relativity Entertainment buys out all the copyrights at once, so there is no need to worry about someone sharing the profits, and there is no need to deliberately dilute the net profit of the film.

The offline operation is on the right track, and there are dedicated personnel responsible for all aspects of work. Ronan's energy has also been transferred to other areas. Death Comes has entered the editing stage, and Jessica Felton has also entered the crew to be in charge of this film clips.

Editing of Kingsman is by Paul Greenglass himself.

Of course, the final decision rests entirely with Ronan.

The release dates of these two films have also been confirmed. Reaper will be released in early December, and Kingsman will start painting in mid-November, all of which will be distributed by Embassy Pictures.

I'm going to do a premiere for 'Death Comes.'

In the not-too-big conference room, executives from Sandsea Entertainment and Embassy Pictures gathered together, and Ronan sat at the front of the long conference table: The embassy is responsible for making plans.

Garcia told the truth: We haven't held a premiere, we have no experience at all.

Over the past decade or so, Embassy Pictures has bought some small independent productions from overseas and released them in North America. It has never played such a high-level publicity method at the premiere.

Ronan also didn't do the premiere, worried that the first one would be messed up, so he said, Let's find an agency to take care of it.

There are many similar agencies in Hollywood that can provide a full range of services for movies, not only premieres, but even editing promotional trailers.

The most typical case in this regard is Suicide Squad released by Warner Bros. in the previous life. The essence of the film was condensed into the trailer, and the trailer caused a sensation, and the box office exploded in the first week.

Although the audience who watched the film found that the trailer was the only highlight of the film, which caused a lot of criticism, it did not prevent Suicide Squad from being a great commercial success.

Thomas, director of theatrical distribution, asked at this time: Is Kingsman still premiering?

No need. Ronan directly vetoed it: The cast of this film does not have any influence, and the premiere ceremony will not attract much attention.

The real cost of this film is only 10 million US dollars, including the director Paul Greenglass, all Hollywood actors, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for the premiere is really not worthwhile.

Ronan also said to David Villa, the publicity director: The publicity of Ace Agent must be targeted, with ethnic minorities as the main group, and the initial publicity cost should be controlled within 3 million US dollars. The focus of the publicity is Reaper. Here Comes, I’ll give you a promotional budget of $8 million.”

With the great success of The Blair Witch, the embassy film industry has a lot of trust in Ronan's ability. David Villa said: I will give you a detailed plan next week.

Ronan thought for a while, and then said, Think more about the promotion of Death is Coming, I have an idea.

All eyes in the conference room turned to Ronan.

Rumors spread on the Internet, saying that Death Comes is based on real events. What Ronan said is still not beyond the scope of viral marketing, but it is definitely more conscientious than the plan of The Blair Witch: Fabricated A plane crash...

Speaking of this, he felt that it was not appropriate. After all, the Blair Witch incident was a big deal, and using similar techniques to stimulate the sensitive nerves of the audience might backfire.

Ronan quickly had an idea and said, Robert, this job is entrusted to you. You find a way to collect some cases of accidental death after escaping disasters, especially air crashes, and hand them over to the Propaganda Department for hype.

Robert held his chin: I seem to have seen such a case in a newspaper of that year.

George Clint, who used to work in the media industry, took up the conversation: There was a case in the 1970s. The men's basketball team at the University of Evansville was killed in an air crash. Only one player did not participate in the trip because of illness, but he was in Hit and killed by a drunk driver two weeks later.

Hearing this, the people in the meeting room suddenly had a creepy feeling.

Ronan was not greatly affected, and said: Look carefully, there must be other cases.

In my previous life, I saw a post on the Internet, and it said the real Death is coming.

Ronan turned to George Clint: When will Kingsman finish post-production?

George replied, Early October at the latest.

Paul Greengrass, how concerned are you? Ronan asked his chief financial officer, Mary, what about the financial situation?

Mary looked at her notebook and said: When the North American box office share of The Blair Witch arrives, our financial situation will obviously improve, and we will have sufficient funds to complete the promotion and distribution of Reaper and Kingsman Agent.

Ronan made a decision: The funds for the promotion and distribution of these two films will still be borrowed from Relativity Entertainment by Embassy Films, and the distribution fee will be 30%, no! 40%!

The general distribution commission in North America is 30%, but for the production companies and distribution companies under the same group, even the North American distribution commission can be set to 40%.

This is a typical left-handed and right-handed game.

Originally, the profit on the left hand should be distributed to investors as dividends, but if the commission on the right hand is higher, the profit on the left hand will naturally decrease.

Is it just the box office commission? Garcia tentatively asked, Should the publicity and distribution expenses be counted separately?

Facts have proved that everyone's heart is very dark.

Ronan is considering the pros and cons, especially the possible impact on Abu Dhabi.

If it's just a non-governmental foundation, it's black. After all, the Investment Bureau is an official institution of the UAE, so he still has some concerns.

A country, even an Arab country, has great energy.

After all, Theory of Relativity is not Warner Bros. A huge company like Warner Bros. has the strength and background to dare to make a loss on Harry Potter, which has made countless money from the box office to peripherals...

Tentatively set a 40% distribution commission. Ronan didn't make a decision immediately.

It's still early before the film is released, let's see the specific situation later.