The Best Entertainment Era

The profitability of animated feature films is even more impressive than live-action films, especially Cars.

This animated feature film was released from North American theaters in mid-September, and the North American box office finally stopped at the figure of 285.97 million US dollars.

But as of the end of the film and before the DVD was released, the total offline revenue of Cars was close to 500 million US dollars.

In the global market, there is still a huge gap between online and offline income.

Cars, which is still showing overseas, has a cumulative global box office of 489.52 million U.S. dollars, but its total offline revenue has exceeded 1 billion U.S. dollars.

Cars has also become Relativity Entertainment's highest-grossing single film project so far in 2007.

If there is no accident, there will be no surpassers in the movies later this year.

Of course, Relativity Entertainment has also invested heavily in Cars to have such box office revenue.

In contrast, Relativity Entertainment's investment in promotion and distribution is much lower for Ratatouille and Wall-E released by Pixar Studios during the holiday season.

Especially the latter, the relatively high-cold plot content and the lack of characters that have become market-leading derivatives design, excessive investment is undoubtedly a very stupid behavior.

In the film market, classics often cannot be equated with commercial benefits.

Frankly speaking, Ronan likes the movie WALL-E very much. If he chooses according to his personal wishes, he would rather watch WALL-E ten times than watch Cars one more time.

Purely from the fan's point of view, if Wall-E is worth 9 points, Cars is at most 7 points.

The problem is that this kind of large-scale commercial project that invests hundreds of millions of dollars cannot be selected based on personal hobbies.

If it wasn't for taking over Pixar Studios, Robot Wall-E had already been established and invested a lot of money; if it wasn't for taking care of the ideas of Pixar Studios management...

Ronan might cancel the Wall-E project directly.

Fortunately, he has focused on controlling the scale of investment, and there will be no sequels to this film.

The Shahai Entertainment animation studio under the charge of Chris Leonard is developing smoothly. With the success of the Minions series and Kung Fu Panda, the scale of the animation studio is also expanding in an orderly manner. Now it has The ability to develop three or even four animated feature films at the same time.

Despicable Me 2, Crazy Primitives and How to Tame Your Dragon are animation feature film projects officially produced by Shahai Entertainment Animation Studio, and Kung Fu Panda 2 and Minions 2 are also in development preliminary work.

In addition, an animated feature film project about a singing talent show and a pet world project inspired by the toy world of Toy Story are also in early preparations.

As for Peppa Pig, one is never late every year, and Pink Pig will never grow up.

Compared with the mature Pixar Studio and Sandsea Entertainment Animation Studio, the development of Princess Animation Studio is much slower, and it is still suffering for the first animated feature film.

In mid-September, Ronan participated in a joint meeting between Princess Animation Studios and the publisher Embassy Pictures, focusing on the production and distribution of the ongoing animated feature film Frozen.

Princess Animation Studios took out a sample, as well as multiple looks of the two heroines, Anna and Elsa.

Ronan vetoed several looks on the grounds that they weren't pretty enough, especially the dresses.

In addition, he also asked the embassy film industry to do a good job in the peripheral distribution of the film.

Put Frozen on the same level as Alice in Wonderland and Beauty and the Beast.

After receiving strong support from Pixar Studios, the production speed of Princess Studios on Frozen was very fast. The theme framework of the film has been set up, but the remaining work such as rendering is extremely time-consuming.

Through the previous animated short films, these professionals from Disney Animation Studio basically reversed their thinking and made the most thorough transformation while making Frozen-not only did the princess not stay with the prince, the prince also Possibly the bad guys.

This setting is quite critical, involving the promotion and distribution of Embassy Pictures.

The setting of Frozen caters to a certain extent to the current women's equal rights movement in the United States, allowing a simple fairy tale to have a seemingly serious core.

To some extent, this is very likely to open up the adult female market for Relativity Entertainment and directly expand the consumer base of IP.

In fact, Elsa is not like a princess in the old days, with an obvious style of modern women who are calm, brave, and beautiful alone.

All of these have invisibly helped the Frozen series get rid of the childish label, and naturally have more purchasing power and derivative possibilities.

At present, the Princess Animation Studio only has this project. Ronan is already doing some text preparation for Zootopia and Princess Ocean, as well as Six Heroes, which is Big Hero 6.

This will not be put on the planning agenda until after Frozen is completed.

In the next few years, Relativity Entertainment will usher in an explosive period for animated feature films alone. Although not every animated feature film can be expected to be Cars, the total value of these projects can reach at least tens of billions of dollars level.

A huge entertainment media empire is thriving.

In September, the films of Relativity Entertainment were launched as planned. Today, the films produced by Shahai Entertainment are mainly sequels and adaptations, and the proportion of original genres has always been very low.

This time is no exception, not just a sequel, but a continuation of adaptations from other hits.

Similar to the Scary Movie series, Reaper is gone came to the second part. With Reaper is coming as the guarantee and foundation, this spoof series still has no shortage of market. The second part has nearly 25 million views in the first week in North America. Compared with the production investment of almost the same scale, the dollar income can be regarded as a very successful commercial return.

As time went on, it became more and more obvious that Hollywood was about to be turbulent.

First of all, companies that have close business relationships with financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers have begun to find it difficult to raise funds through Lehman Brothers and other aspects.

For example, several Hollywood companies such as 20th Century Fox.

As early as a few years ago, Lehman Brothers cooperated with Hollywood, and once approached Relativity Entertainment, but Ronan politely rejected the investment that Lehman Brothers seemed to be full of so-called sincerity and good intentions.

On the one hand, Relativity Entertainment was busy dealing with the aggressiveness of Paramount Pictures and the IPO of Netflix with Goldman Sachs Group, and did not have so much time and energy to entangle with Lehman Brothers.

On the other hand, Ronan remembered the not-so-good end of Lehman Brothers, so naturally he would not plunge into this quagmire.

However, Lehman Brothers also adopted a strategy of casting a wide net at that time. While in contact with Relativity Entertainment, it was also discussing cooperation with some companies including 20th Century Fox.

Lehman Brothers first provided 20th Century Fox with a loan of up to one billion U.S. dollars to establish Fox Online.

After a successful start, Twentieth Century Fox cooperated with Lehman Brothers in many places and provided huge financial support for Twentieth Century Fox. The creditors of many companies have gradually changed their identities and become real investors.

Hollywood has long cooperated with Wall Street, and Wall Street funds have also entered Hollywood through various channels.

Just like Walt Disney back then, many investment institutions on Wall Street also hold shares in 20th Century Fox. Among them, Lehman Brothers holds the largest number of shares on Wall Street because of its close cooperation with 20th Century Fox.

In addition, according to the general operation method of Wall Street, the loans issued can not only earn income through interest.

As one of the many triggers for the impending brokerage crisis, Wall Street can play with loans and bonds.

Lehman Brothers encountered some troubles in terms of funds. It was more troublesome to draw loans, and it took time. Some companies could not repay the loans temporarily, and had to go to the road of auction to realize cash, which was time-consuming and labor-intensive.

Inspired by the real estate loan bonds and insurance launched by the financial industry, they plan to package their own loan claims into bonds and sell them to third parties to raise the necessary huge cash flow.

Of course, a relatively close partner like 20th Century Fox is put at the end of the plan.

Relativity Entertainment has also received related news through multiple channels and the relationship with partners such as Goldman Sachs, and Robert Iger has also been keeping a close eye on it.

In the past, Wall Street money changed Hollywood.

Today, the changes on Wall Street are also profoundly affecting Hollywood.

The seemingly normal Wall Street, once an accident breaks out, Hollywood will inevitably change accordingly.

In addition to the financial impact, another turbulent trend in Hollywood is that the initial negotiations between the producers' union and the unions in the industry headed by the directors' union, actors' union and screenwriters' union ended in a breakdown.

The labor union proposed conditions that the Producers Union could not accept at all, and generally demanded to share nearly half of the revenue from channels such as DVD and new online media.

For the management, this condition is simply crazy.

Even Ronan, who was going to make a proper concession at the right time, didn't know what to say when he got the news.

The news that the preliminary negotiations between the producer alliance and the three major trade unions broke down was also disclosed by the media, and the conflict between labor and management became public.

The three major labor unions are closely united. In an interview, their respective chairmen claimed that if their rights and interests cannot be guaranteed, they would not rule out the possibility of a strike.

This is putting pressure on the producers union.

The contradiction between labor and capital seems to continue to expand.

It is against this background that the Producers Union convened a meeting of core members to discuss specific strategies.

This meeting is very high-end, and only the bosses or CEOs of large and medium-sized companies will participate.