After its opening weekend of 27.11 million dollars, Scream 3's final first-week box office reached 37.13 million dollars.
Calculating it down, the film's four weekdays accounted for only 27 percent of the entire week's box office. With Halloween drawing ever closer, this once again confirmed the fact that this horror film finale lacked staying power.
A new week arrived, and it was also the weekend spanning Halloween. North American theaters once again had three new films releasing.
Industry insiders predicted that under the impact of the three new films, Scream 3's second-week box office drop would likely reach 50 percent. This sequel's North American total box office might therefore stop between 80 million and 90 million dollars.
Of course, although it fell short of the first two films' box office performance, Scream 3 exceeding 80 million dollars was still a level that most horror films could hardly hope to reach.
After Halloween, time entered November of 1991.
The Scream series had already wrapped up, and the replacement project The Ring entered the production stage. Daenerys Entertainment's film distribution focus for November also began shifting toward the year's two major end-of-year periods.
Among the four films in this year-end period, the most important one was naturally Toy Story.
In Simon's memory, the 1995 Toy Story not only claimed the North American box office championship for that year but also stepped on Warner's nineties Batman series third installment, Batman Forever.
However, this time, if Toy Story still maintained the box office level from Simon's memory, surpassing this summer's Batman: The Dark Knight was definitely impossible.
After nearly six months of screening, Batman: The Dark Knight officially withdrew from North American theaters a week before Scream 3's release at the end of October, with a cumulative North American total of 373.91 million dollars.
At the same time, over the past half year, Batman: The Dark Knight's overseas box office had also reached 460 million dollars. It was expected that after the various overseas markets fully opened up by year-end, it could bring in another 50 million to 70 million dollars or so. The film's global total box office was therefore expected to reach 900 million dollars.
In this era, a blockbuster breaking through 300 million dollars globally was already enough to satisfy the studios.
Although Batman: The Dark Knight's global box office could not reach the first film's 960 million dollars of Batman Begins, such box office results, plus the income from videocassettes, television broadcasts, toys, merchandise, and other channels brought by the film, still supported a very large portion of the film businesses for both Time Warner and Daenerys.
Looking back over the past few years, Hollywood could not help but discover that the increasingly closely connected Daenerys and Time Warner were gradually leading other Hollywood film companies in movie operations.
Not to mention anything else, just this one year alone, besides Batman: The Dark Knight, several blockbuster films that Daenerys Entertainment cooperated on externally during the summer period, Terminator 2, The Fugitive, and A Few Good Men, all squeezed into the top ten of the year-end list.
Not only that, Daenerys Entertainment itself had independently produced two box office hits exceeding 100 million dollars: Dumb and Dumber early in the year and The Silence of the Lambs at the end of the summer period.
On the Time Warner side, besides Batman: The Dark Knight, Warner Bros. had also collaborated with Daenerys on the successful The Fugitive and had itself produced another hit project, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
Just the seven films mentioned above had already occupied seven positions in the top ten of the 1991 box office chart up to early November.
If distinguished by distributor, of the seven films, three belonged to Warner Bros., which naturally also meant substantial profits behind the projects.
Although Daenerys Entertainment's independently distributed films were only Dumb and Dumber and The Silence of the Lambs, and their box office rankings were both quite far back, no one could ignore that of these seven films, actually only one, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, had no association with Daenerys Entertainment at all.
The other six were either wholly invested projects by Daenerys Entertainment or co-production films with Daenerys Entertainment.
In the original timeline, probably only Disney at its peak after 2000 could reach this level.
After successively acquiring Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, Disney, relying on its three core brands of 3D animated films, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the Star Wars series, perhaps plus live-action adaptations of traditional fairy tales, would have its produced films occupy nearly half the share of the North American annual box office chart every year.
Relying on this kind of super strong content advantage, Disney's market value at its peak once approached 200 billion dollars, which was almost the sum of the market values of Time Warner, Fox, and Paramount in that era.
Through his prophetic advantage, Simon had achieved an accomplishment comparable to Disney at its peak. If it were only this, however, such an advantage would be difficult to maintain long-term.
Pixar was a very important layout item in Simon's plan.
In fact, over the recent few years, Simon had unknowingly laid the foundation for replicating Disney's film business.
Pixar was already a studio under Daenerys Entertainment. Marvel Entertainment was also more completely controlled by Simon than in his memory. Simon had even poached DC's core trinity.
In addition, the IPs Simon had gathered according to his prophetic advantage, such as the Tolkien series, Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, The Bourne Identity, Men in Black, and so on, were likewise treasures waiting to be developed.
Although there was no Star Wars series, just the resources he held in hand were enough to let Daenerys Entertainment dominate Hollywood for the next twenty years.
In the traditional Hollywood film industry, everyone was gambling. No one knew a film's box office prospects in advance. Therefore, many times, the films ranking high on the box office charts would basically have shares from all the major studios.
Now, Daenerys Entertainment was breaking this pattern, achieving in advance the feat that Disney only managed many years later in Simon's memory: occupying a large share of the box office charts every year.
The upcoming Toy Story did not aim for Batman series-level box office. As long as it could reach the box office level from Simon's memory, Daenerys Entertainment's layout in 3D animated films would count as initially completed.
In the original timeline, because of Toy Story's big success, Pixar's valuation went from 50 million dollars before the film's release to directly rushing to 1 billion dollars in market value after its IPO, a full twenty times increase.
However, at that time Pixar had signed only a 'contract manufacturing' agreement. The main profits of the Toy Story series were still taken by Disney.
This time, Pixar was already a complete whole for Daenerys Entertainment.
The Toy Story in his memory not only meant nearly 300 million dollars in global box office but also, according to Disney's subsequent statistics, just the first two Toy Story films brought in 9 billion dollars in merchandise revenue, averaging 4.5 billion dollars per film.
Therefore, as long as Toy Story could achieve the same success as in the original timeline, as a part of Daenerys Entertainment, the market value increase this animation studio would bring to the Daenerys Entertainment Group itself would absolutely not be limited to just 1 billion dollars.
As the head of Daenerys Entertainment's consumer products department, Nancy Brill had proposed very early on preparing film merchandise plans starting from the project approval stage.
Toy Story was naturally the same.
For this 3D animated film set to release on November 22, Daenerys Entertainment not only made a 20 million dollar marketing and distribution budget but also spared no effort in its advance layout for project merchandise products.
It was estimated that before the film's release, the distribution scale of Toy Story's merchandise toy products would reach 200 million dollars.
It could be said that this was likewise a gamble.
Including the film's 35 million dollar production budget, just the project's total production and marketing costs reached 55 million dollars. If the project failed, the potential losses brought to Daenerys Entertainment would be even more than that.
Daenerys Entertainment relied on the brand and reputation it had built through operations in recent years to let the peripheral manufacturers cooperating with the company complete this large-scale merchandise distribution in advance.
If Toy Story's box office failed, a large group of peripheral manufacturers might all encounter losses.
Once reputation was broken, rebuilding it naturally would become very difficult.
Of course, if the plan succeeded, the gains would also be extremely substantial.
The stage when audiences had the strongest desire to purchase peripheral products was often the few weeks right after a movie was just released. Completing distribution in advance naturally allowed them to earn a fortune during the film's hottest period right after opening.
Daenerys Cinemas.
The time was already November 15.
Scream 3, which opened on October 25, had just finished its third week of screening yesterday.
After its opening week of 37.13 million dollars, this youth horror film's second-week box office drop indeed reached 53 percent, with only 17.56 million dollars in its second week.
From November 8 to November 14 during its third week of screening, Scream 3's box office drop narrowed to 32 percent, earning another 11.93 million dollars.
After three weeks since opening, Scream 3's cumulative box office reached 66.62 million dollars.
Based on the third week's box office data already approaching 12 million dollars, this movie was expected to harvest another 20 million dollars or so in the following weeks. Its North American total box office would be around 80 million to 90 million dollars as predicted.
Inside the office loft on the second floor of the cinema complex.
Simon and the Marvel Animation team had just finished watching the Spider-Man 2D animated film that was greenlit last year.
Because it was not planned for theatrical release, this animated film's production specifications were naturally much lower than big-screen 2D animation, and its production budget was only 12 million dollars.
However, Simon was still very satisfied with this 91-minute completed animated film.
After watching the sample reel together with Marvel senior executives like Stan Lee who had come from the East Coast, as well as executives like Nancy Brill, and discussing the film's marketing and distribution strategy, the time had already reached noon.
This animated film telling the origin story of Spider-Man was planned to be released during next year's Easter period.
After watching the sample with Simon, Nancy Brill agreed that Blockbuster would directly purchase the first batch of 300,000 videocassette boxes. If sales performed well, they would naturally add more quickly.
Although they could not buy the entire Blockbuster, firmly controlling this largest video chain company in North America, or even the world, brought inestimable advantages to Daenerys Entertainment's film business.
It should be known that the sales scale of the North American video industry was fully twice the total domestic North American box office revenue.
Blockbuster's market share within this peripheral industry that was twice the box office revenue had already exceeded 30 percent and was expected to challenge for 50 percent market share next.
Therefore, possessing such a strong retail channel, it was not strange at all that in the past two years, Daenerys Entertainment's produced films had videocassette sales results clearly surpassing other studios' films at the same box office level.
To avoid subsidiaries relying on parent company resources and becoming complacent without progress, Simon actually did not like this kind of 'internal digestion' very much.
Providing equivalent channel resources to each studio's films based on the film's own quality was the long-term plan.
However, since it was an affiliate of Daenerys Entertainment, resource tilting was fundamentally unavoidable.
Simon had privately visited some Blockbuster chain stores in Los Angeles. On the most prominent positions on the store shelves, films produced by Daenerys Entertainment clearly accounted for a very large proportion.
Fortunately, in recent years, the films produced by Daenerys Entertainment itself, whether artistic award-chasing movies or commercialized blockbusters, had sufficiently excellent quality. Therefore this resource tilting had not caused much negative impact.
Otherwise, if the most eye-catching shelves in a video chain were all filled with bad films, while the movies consumers wanted were 'hidden' elsewhere, the result would be simply unimaginable.
He had mentioned this matter to Nancy Brill. The petite female executive indicated that she had good judgment on this and later specially prepared an explanatory written document. After Simon looked at the statistical data produced by Daenerys Analytics, which was still affiliated with Daenerys Entertainment, he no longer worried about this issue.
After everyone had lunch together in the restaurant on the second floor of the cinema, Simon came with Nancy to the consumer products department office area inside the third office loft.
"These are the final finalized batch of toys for Toy Story, a total of 37 types. Starting this weekend, these toys will begin distribution to North American retail channels. Boss, do you think there's anything that still needs to be supplemented?"
Inside a conference room in the office area, as Nancy explained, Simon stepped forward and began playing with the pile of Toy Story peripherals that filled the conference table.
He naturally already knew about the related plans.
The 200 million dollars worth of toys about to be distributed were still only part of the Toy Story merchandise plan.
Daenerys Entertainment had also signed letters of intent with merchants such as McDonald's. As long as Toy Story could achieve good box office success, companies like McDonald's would also follow up by launching corresponding brand authorized products.
After playing with them for a while and chatting with Nancy about some details, Simon finally smiled and said: "At least, even if Toy Story does not become a big hit, these toys should still be liked by children."
Nancy Brill was also holding a Buzz Lightyear figure and playing with it as she replied: "Yeah, otherwise those merchants wouldn't be too likely to take this kind of risk. However, Boss, your thinking this way actually makes me a bit worried."
Simon smiled, pointed at the pile of toys on the conference table and said: "Pack all of these up. I'll take them back to keep for my son."
When Simon suddenly brought this up, Nancy also revealed a smile and said: "You named your son Melbourne?"
"Yeah, how does it feel?"
"It's far inferior to Daenerys, Melisandre, Ygritte, and Cersei."
"It's a boy."
Nancy asked curiously: "What if it's a girl?"
"Seattle."
Nancy was puzzled: "Hmm?"
Simon said: "If it's a girl, she'll be called Seattle."
"Will there be one called Los Angeles in the future?"
Simon shook his head and said: "Los Angeles counts as two words, and I don't like that name."
Nancy rolled her eyes and said: "When your children grow up and discover their names are so special, they will definitely be very grateful to you as their dad."
"Of course, and you are mistaken. When Melbourne grows up, he will definitely discover a large pile of 'companions' named Melbourne around him."
"Why?"
"Because this is the name that Simon Westeros gave to his child. There is no one else in this world who can become Simon Westeros. They often expect their own children to have the same good fortune as Simon Westeros's offspring. Therefore, the name Melbourne will definitely become popular."
Nancy tilted her head to the side and said: "Boss, you really are too arrogant."
"You don't actually think that in your heart. Also, the way you tilt your head looks very nice."
Nancy immediately straightened her neck, her expression carrying some small vigilance.
Simon smiled and said: "Relax, that was a genuine compliment just now and did not mean to flirt with you. I never flirt with women who do not have the intention of getting close to me."
"Boss, you should go work."
"Of course," Simon nodded, then pointed at the toys on the desktop again and said: "Don't forget to pack them."
Staring as Simon turned and left the conference room, Nancy could not help but pat her chest and murmur in a low voice: Dangerous guy.
She suddenly remembered there was still something she had not discussed with her boss.
It was about Blockbuster. Back then Simon had talked about Blockbuster's network transformation.
With the rapid climb in the scale of American internet users, Nancy, who originally felt Simon's idea was not very realistic, now also thought they could begin making some preparations for it.
Well, this matter was not urgent.
Moreover, she also had sufficient authority to arrange it herself without needing to discuss everything with him.
Simon's attitude of delegating power had always been something that made her very satisfied.