Simon returned to Los Angeles on Friday, April 21, North America.

Sunday is Easter, and the 2000 North American Easter schedule has already started a week before.

The three main brands under Daenerys Entertainment, which are affiliated to Blockbuster, will release a total of 7 films in the three weeks before and after this Easter schedule, the main feature is "Blair Witch 2", which is released on April 14th the week before Easter.

The former "Blair Witch" series did not win by quality, but the quality of the film was very rough, and it relied entirely on alternative marketing accidents to trigger an event effect. Therefore, although the original sequel was not completely failed, it was not lukewarm, and it did not have the strong vitality of another "Ghost Record" series.

Of course this time is different.

When planning this project, Simon considered the issue of sequels at the beginning, and it was very simple to make a series, and the first song must be excellent enough.

The "Ghost Record" series in this time and space was placed before the "Witch Blair" series, and it lost its initiative. It was placed in the first part of "Witch Blair", which was placed two years ago in the unpopular schedule in February. It still achieved a very impressive success. With a cost of only $1 million, it won an astonishing box office of $307 million worldwide. However, this shows the excellent quality of the film itself.

The first song has been a good result, and the sequel was planned for two years. The first "Grand Girl" Amy Aker was invited to return to participate. At the same time, the first film photographer Oliver Wood was the first film, ensuring a consistent image style. Even though Paul Greengrass withdrew because of the preparation for "Spy Shadows", under the control of the pair of partners Lena Kane and Annika Seitel, the sequel still received a very enthusiastic response.

The premiere was held on April 12, and the word of mouth was lifted. The comprehensive media score of "Blair Witch 2" reached 7.7 points. Even the review film of "Variety Show" which only gave 6.5 points, barely surpassed the passing grade, repeated the routine of the first film to a considerable extent. It lacked innovation, but it failed to stop the fans' enthusiasm for this movie.

After all, to put it bluntly, the audience often likes the thriller and horror series, which is the same as the lineage, and more straightforward, is the unchanging routine.

If there is too much change, the audience may not necessarily like it.

Finally, from April 14 to April 20, "The Witch Blair 2" won a box office of US$43.51 million in the first week of the first week of the first film from April 14 to April 20, up 21% from the first week of 35.73 million.

Not only that, even though the cost of this sequel was directly increased to 10 times the first song, and the publicity and distribution expenses reached 15 million. It was only the first week's results, but Daenerys Entertainment directly regained all its investment and entered the profit cycle.

The Easter week is about to enter the week. According to the first day of April 21, the next week's "Blair 2" is expected to fall within 30%, with a net decline of approximately 30%. The local box office in North America is expected to hit a high of 150 million US dollars better than the first one. As for the box office feedback from Shanghai, this sequel can at least guarantee a global box office of US$300 million that is the same as the first one.

The third part therefore went directly into preparation.

However, Simon also decided to slow down this time, and the third part will be released at least three years later, to brew a little bit of emotion, and to avoid the overproliferation of sequel movies.

Just like this year.

Even though Simon has been paying attention to it again and again, the list of confirmed movies in 2000, starting with "Blair Witch 2", followed by "Youth Song and Dance 2", "Magic Mike 2", "Hurricane Rescue 2", "Lord of the Rings 2", and "Charlie's Angels 2", which made Simon privately sigh that it was a very 'two year.

In addition to "Blair Witch 2", there is also a film that once existed in history. Ang Lee's "Half with the Devil" which tells the story of the American Civil War, was released on the same day as "Blair Witch 2".

The former "Histor with the Devil" ended in failure, but the film itself is not too bad, of course, not too good. The key is that Universal Pictures, which produced the movie at that time, was in the midst of another turmoil of being re-sold, resulting in a complete failure of publicity and promotion.

This time, it is basically brand new, and the promotion and distribution of the film has also been replaced by Gaomen Pictures, a subsidiary of Daenerys Entertainment, which focuses on the field of art films.

The new version of "Historing with the Devil" neither invited Little Little Little Little Little Little Little Little star companion Toby Maguire as she once did. Instead, she is a second-tier young actor with good potential. If you talk about familiar faces, it is Robert Downey, who was put on the crew to train at the time by Simon.

Ang Lee also followed Simon's original requirements well and made considerable choices on the plot of the film, avoiding the plot being scattered by too much content to be displayed, but instead focused more shots on the main line of the hero Jack's growth in the war.

The final film was frankly enough, but it failed to meet the Oscar level, so it only started to participate in some second-tier film exhibitions in the second half of last year and won some small awards. It was pretty good but it was going to be Easter at the same time as "The Witch Blair 2".

It premiered in New York a week in advance. The media score of "Riding with the Devil" was 7.2, which is definitely not high among literary and artistic films, not to mention that it has not reached the level of "Blair Witch 2". Of course, the standards for critics in the two types of films are not the same, and the media will always be stricter for literary and artistic films.

In the end, the production cost of $35 million was $1,762, and the box office in the first week was $8.13 million, and the museums were more than $4,500.

Tremlining results.

The local box office is expected to be between 20 million and 25 million US dollars.

Compared with "Blair Witch 2", it is of course a failure, but at least globally, this movie is expected to get a box office that is comparable to the production cost. In addition, Daenerys Entertainment's strong subsequent channel distribution capabilities, it will not be difficult to recover costs and achieve profitability in the future.

Of course, this is just a book, and if you consider the time cost, you will definitely lose.

In the new box office week, on April 21, Daenerys released three new films at once, all of which were original films that have never been in history.

Among them, in addition to two medium-cost commercial films, there is also a very interesting documentary, from China, originally named "The Falling Martial Arts". It was filmed by director Xu, who once went to Hollywood to communicate. It was originally a seven-episode long documentary, edited into a 120-minute movie version.

Since we arrived in the United States, Western audiences would definitely not be able to understand it when using the original name, so they changed to a new name, "Oime A-wave ut pants", which imitated the naming style of "The Past of America".

For Chinese people, martial arts and kung fu are actually two concepts. In other words, martial arts includes kung fu, but of course, it is definitely not just kung fu, but also various kung fu cultures that have been extended. In addition to showing various kung fu that will or have disappeared in China, the original seven-episode documentary also has the entire martial arts culture.

Considering that foreigners are not very interested in all-round martial arts culture, although the 120-minute edited version involves martial arts culture, it mainly displays various kung fu. Of course, in order to avoid becoming a pure display of the arts of the sky bridge, the seemingly marginal martial arts culture runs through the whole process, which is considered to be a layer of connotation for the documentary.

Connotation is very important.

The shooting of the full documentary only cost less than 5 million yuan. Gaomen Pictures and Jinshu signed a share agreement with zero guarantee. The promised total investment in production and promotion is US$3 million, and the premiere is no less than 500 screens. In the future, all channels including videotapes and other channels will be excluding the cost of US$3 million, and the two parties have 30% of the accounts, Gaomen Pictures accounts for 70%.

There is no premiere, it is mainly promoted through online channels, and finally it was determined that the number of screens opened was 513.

On the day of its release, the documentary's reputation was lifted and it received an outstanding media score of 8.1. "Hollywood Reporter" also wrote a special press release, praising "Kung Fu Past" for showing the real Chinese Kung Fu culture in a very shocking way.

Shocking, this word is correct.

In the documentary, such as a heavy stone tablet buzzing with one palm, there are many unique skills. Not to mention foreigners, the Chinese will definitely be shocked to see it. After all, most Chinese people have rarely seen real kung fu masters in this era. Entering the new century, various fake "masters" have continuously destroyed the Chinese people's belief in Chinese kung fu.

The project from China focuses on Zhou Xingxing's basically completed "Kung Fu", which is expected to be the August schedule at the end of the summer season. This "The Falling Martial Arts" is a side dish, and success or failure has nothing to do with the overall situation.

However, the results are pretty good.

On the first day of its release, the film won a box office of US$870,000. Moreover, the online platform, which is the main base for publicity and promotion, also showed a trend of word-of-mouth spread, which means that Saturday's single-day peak is likely to earn more than one million, and a box office of more than 4 million will not be a problem in a full 7-day week.

This is almost over 10,000 yuan per museum.

The Gaomen Film Team followed up in time and decided to add about 200 yuan to the next week, and appropriately add publicity efforts. For example, on Saturday, in addition to a special soft article press release on the homepage of the Igret Portal, the label of "Kung Fu Past" also topped the popular list of film and television on the Faebook social networking website.

In short, it is just a beginning, and it is basically certain that the box office of this documentary exceeded $10 million in North America. If it can go through a good long-term trend, it may be able to make 15 million.

Of course, it cannot be compared with last year's "Mount Everest", but for most other movies from China that have not been splashed, as a documentary, it is already quite good to achieve such results in North America. The news was sent back to China on the weekend, and Jinshu started to operate. The young director Xu directly received an interview invitation from CCTV, and the first movie he had been preparing for was not hindered.

In addition to the movie, Simon returned to North America and was also concerned about another thing, the launch of the i-wave x-10.

As of Saturday, April 22, since the pre-sale was launched last Saturday, after the i-wave x-10 hit a small miracle of over one million on the first day of pre-sale, it finally won 3.79 million units in one week, and achieved sales of US$1.1 billion in seven days.

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Not only that, according to this trend, the break-even line of i-wave x-10 in the first year of launching, not to mention breaking through 10 million units, even if it is 20 million, it seems that it is not a problem at the moment.

Tinkobaier initially expected that the pre-sale of the i-wave x-10 in the first week could exceed 500,000 units. After all, a lot of publicity and promotion were carried out in the early stage, and there would always be a good start. Unexpectedly, the real sales were close to 8 times the expected one. If it were other manufacturers, it would inevitably be a mess. After all, too large orders mean that manufacturers may not be able to deliver products to users for a long time.

Tinkobaier did not have such concerns.

Not to mention the 1 million units were stocked in advance, the main purpose was to ensure the demand for pre-sales and distribution in the first week of sales. Over the years, Tinkobaier has built a fairly complete global supply system with the accumulation of experience of several popular products.

With the release of the previous pre-sale data on the first day, the decision was made here, and component manufacturers scattered in North America, Japan, China and other parts of the world immediately started to drive full power. OEM factories located in Suzhou, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other places in China also made rapid adjustments. The workers rotated 24 hours a day, directly tripling the original production capacity of 500,000 units per week. As long as there is a demand here, 1.5 million units per week is not a problem.

However, due to the consideration that the i-wave x-10 is a new product, after the initial pre-sale output was properly met, Tinkobaier's management plans to reduce the production capacity to 500,000 units every week to provide limited supply to the market.

It is not mainly for hunger marketing. Of course, there will definitely be similar effects, but it is mainly to limit the user scale so that when this brand new electronic product has various foreseeable flaws, the negative impact will be minimized.

In any case, the day before Easter, the i-wave x-10 was officially launched. In addition to the orders sent by online shopping users, the first batch of 500,000 machines sold in major physical stores across the United States were also wiped out, so that the scalper phenomenon soon appeared again.

For example, on the eBay platform, on Saturday night, the i-wave x-10 was already hyped to more than $1,000.

This is just hardware.

In terms of software, not to mention the sales of game software that cannot be counted in a short period of time through physical channels, the official i-wave x game mall was opened in advance in the early morning of April 22. By 24 o'clock that day, sales had easily exceeded US$700 million. Among them, the number of VIP members who can play a large number of classic games in the past reached 370,000 at 8 o'clock that night, and it is still growing rapidly.

In addition, among the sales of more than 700 million US dollars, 15 new games, including "Lord of the Rings", "Soul Conjuring: Blood Night", "Spider-Man", and "Dune 3D", which were launched simultaneously last week, directly accounted for nearly 500 million US dollars in share. It has to be admitted that it once again proves the 28th law of the entertainment industry.
Chapter completed!