I want to be emperor

Chapter 1185 There Are Not Enough Projectors

Just when Shi Tiancheng was preparing to make his second movie, Jinling Film Company had already produced a hundred copies, which were then distributed to surrounding cities for release.

As the first commercial film in history, and a film with a storyline, the popularity of City Tour far exceeded the expectations of Jinling Film Company.

Originally, they thought they could make a small profit from this movie, or even if they didn't make much, it didn't matter, the main purpose was to test the credibility of a commercial movie.

If they can make money, even if it's just a little less, Jinling Film Company is prepared to continue on this path. Whether they shoot the films themselves or find someone like Shi Tiancheng to purchase films for distribution, it is always a good way.

However, after the film was actually released, they realized that they had underestimated the market value of commercial films...

City Journey was shown in thirteen theaters in Jinling City. It was fine in the first two days because there was not much publicity. In those days, Jinling Film Company had not yet learned how to carry out large-scale publicity.

They just put some simple performance information in the newspaper and put some posters inside the theater.

Therefore, not many people knew about it in the past few years, so although the number of viewers of the film was large, it was still within a reasonable range.

But starting from the third day, as more and more people knew about the movie, especially those who had seen it, a considerable number of them recommended it to their relatives and friends... This is not to say that the movie is good or not, but as the first commercial movie, people have never seen it before, so no matter what the plot is, they can find it novel.

Therefore, after watching it, I naturally can't help but talk about it. When my relatives and friends know about it, they will naturally ask about it. In this process, I can't help but recommend it.

Then more and more people came to watch the movie.

Although Jinling City is not an industrial city, it has a relatively large population as a political center. At the same time, the people's income is generally high. The ticket price of 300 Chufen is nothing to the residents of this city.

Many of the family members, young and old, ran over to watch.

Then Jinling Film Company discovered... that the movie was so popular that the existing theaters were overcrowded and there were not enough copies and projectors.

This is the case in Jinling City, and it is even more so in Songjiang City!

You have to know that the population of Jinling City is less than one million, but what about Songjiang City? The population of the entire city exceeds ten million.

With such a large population, even if only a very small number of people come to watch, it would still be a huge flow of people.

The fifty-plus theaters scheduled to screen the film in Songjiang City were totally insufficient. Within a few days, long queues formed outside of these theaters!

Songjiang City is not only a city with a large population, but also a developed economy. At the same time, the population is mainly composed of immigrants, which has led to the city's strong acceptance of new things and high consumption capacity.

Songjiang City is a very important market for many industries. Some even say that as long as a company takes over the Songjiang market, it will be able to do well even if other markets are gone.

  The same goes for movies!

People have seen too many stage plays and they are no longer fresh to them. It is also true that not all Cuju matches are good to watch, and there are not always good A-league matches every day.

A lot of times, people are actually very boring!

At this time, a brand new form of entertainment that had never appeared before appeared, and it was not expensive, so people naturally became interested in movies.

Over the next few days, the City Tour in Songjiang City was also very popular. Some theaters even showed it at night, with the last show scheduled to end at around 11 p.m.

Even this cannot meet the huge market demand.

Especially as the information gradually spread, more and more people came to watch this commercial feature film after learning about it.

But many people came and found that they couldn’t buy tickets at all, let alone tickets for the next show. Even tickets for other shows on the same day were very scarce.

Many people who cannot buy tickets for the current show will choose to buy tickets for the next show or even for shows at other time periods.

As a result, most of the remaining movie tickets for the day were pre-purchased.

There are too many viewers, but there are limited copies and we cannot increase the number of screenings.

This news was quickly fed back to the headquarters of Jinling Film Company.

In fact... the news was fed back very quickly. After all, this was the first time that Jinling Film Company was engaged in commercial distribution. The company's top management attached great importance to it and sent a number of staff to collect various information.

After noticing the increasing number of viewers, Jinling Film Company responded quickly.

Their subordinate film copy factory started working overnight, continuously producing film copies of the city tour. Once the copies were ready, they would send special personnel to take trains to surrounding cities, especially Songjiang City.

However, even if we start making copies quickly, it will be difficult to meet the needs of Songjiang City and several surrounding cities in a short period of time.

Because there is no projector...

The copies are not difficult to make, Jinling Film Company can do it themselves, and film is not a patented product. Several companies are producing film and have inventory, so it is not a problem to purchase film urgently and make copies.

But the projector is more difficult to deal with.

Because this thing is still a patented product, it is exclusively produced and sold by Anzhou Optical Instrument Company... It's not that they don't want to sell it to you, but they don't have that much stock.

The production of cameras and projectors of Anzhou Optical Instrument Company was not very large before this. The main customers were local newspapers. These official personnel bought cameras for documentary filming. The projectors were used for public welfare documentary broadcasts in theaters owned by local newspapers.

As for personal purchases, there are actually very few.

Under such circumstances, Anzhou Optical Instrument Company arranged production according to the orders placed by local newspapers. Their factory was also very small, with only more than a hundred people.

Things were originally pretty good. They were steadily producing and supplying newspapers to various places. Although their production and sales volume were not large, they actually made a lot of money since the unit price was very high after all.

However, now I suddenly discovered that the market demand for projectors has increased rapidly. Jinling Film Company sent people to our door and said they wanted to purchase 500 projectors at once...

  When they heard the order volume, they thought it was funny. An order of 500 units was not a small order. But the next request from Jinling Film Company made them speechless, because they wanted to buy ready-made units!

There is a tiny amount of stock... This projector is considered a high-tech product in modern times, and the order volume has been very stable in the past. Anzhou Optical Company does not have any large-scale inventory except for keeping a portion of it in a few self-operated stores and selling it to individual photography enthusiasts.

After they calculated, they could only get more than 30 units in stock.

As for the rest, there is no other way but to work overtime to produce them. However, it will definitely not be done in a short time. It will take at least one or two months. Moreover, because of working overtime to rush the goods, the cost will increase, so you have to pay extra money... Or you can just wait for me to produce them step by step, which will take a year or two.

The people at Jinling Film Company were also helpless about this. They didn't mind paying more money, but the problem was that there was no stock.

To date, City Tour has received very good responses in the more than ten cities where it has been released, and is in short supply in every city where it has been released.

They urgently purchased projectors in order to expand the release volume in these cities, especially Songjiang City, a big city with explosive box office and very strong demand.

According to preliminary statistics from Jinling Film Company, out of more than 100 copies in the early stage, Songjiang City took more than 50 copies, accounting for about 40% of the copies, but contributed 60% of the box office.

Because although city tours in other cities are also popular, they are not full until eleven or twelve at night. This is not just a question of craziness, but the nightlife in other small and medium-sized cities is a little more conservative. When it gets late, there will be no one on the streets and public carriages will stop running early.

Unlike Matsue City, some public carriage routes can operate until 11 o'clock, and there are carriages or cars for rent 24 hours a day.

In some places, the lights are on all night long, and there are still many people even at eleven or twelve o'clock.

This also led to the situation that although not many people in Songjiang City came out to play at night, there were still some.

Under such circumstances, the number of movie screenings in Songjiang City naturally increased to include more evening shows, which generally lasted until eleven or twelve o'clock at night.

In addition, because there were so many spectators, both the morning and evening shows were basically full.

In this way, the profit generated by a single copy exceeds the profit of a single copy played elsewhere.

Under such circumstances, Jinling Film Company naturally wanted to increase the copies of Songjiang City as soon as possible.

However, copies are easy to make, you can just make them yourself, but projectors are not so easy to make.

  The projectors used in the film were all projectors that were already available in the Chao Bao Theater. Nowadays, apart from the Chao Bao Theater, no other theater would have a projector to play documentaries for the audience... That would be stupid!

The theater set up by Chao Bao was originally used for various public welfare propaganda. No matter whether it was a stage play or a documentary, the ticket price was very low, and you could go in and watch it for just a few dozen cents... But most of them were very boring and full of preaching, so there were not many audiences, otherwise Jinling Film Company would not have lost so much money!

But ordinary commercial operations have to make money, so how can they let you watch it so cheaply? But if you broadcast documentaries so expensively, no one will watch them.

Therefore, in the contemporary Great Chu Empire, except for a very small number of private hobbyists or some photo studios doing similar group business that have a few projectors, all the projectors on the market are in the Chaobao theaters in various places.

With the current surge in audiences, Jinling Film Company simply cannot find more projectors. At the same time, Anzhou Optical Instrument Company said that even if you pay more, you will have to wait at least two months for delivery.

  How to do?

What else can we do? For the time being, we cannot care about Songjiang City and the surrounding cities where movies have been released. Even if there are still a lot of potential audiences and there are queues outside the theater every day, there is nothing we can do about it. We can only continue the screening at the current scale, and then gradually increase the number of films after Anzhou Optical Instrument Company starts producing projectors.

Before that, the produced copies were sent to other cities for screening.

Almost every prefecture-level city in the Great Chu Empire has a Chao Bao Theater of the local Chao Bao Press used for various public welfare publicity performances. Some of them do not have projectors for the time being, while others are equipped with projectors and also play documentaries.

What Jinling Film Company did was to send the copies to cities with projectors for screening.

As for those who don’t have a projector, they can only wait.

Jinling Film Company has already paid extra money to purchase the projectors. In view of the price increase, Anzhou Optical Instrument Company has started working overtime and has even temporarily hired some staff to carry out the production.

The first order of 500 projectors can be produced in one and a half months at most.

Because of the appearance of the movie City Journey, the staff at Jinling Film Company were very busy, but although they were busy, they were happy...

Following this trend, this year everyone will no longer have to just receive a basic salary as before, and may even get a high bonus.

After all, the commercial feature film City Journey is so popular as a pioneering work...Nowadays, whenever people hear the news, they will think about watching it unless they are too tight on money, and they have no choice but to watch this movie...because there are no other commercial feature films yet.

How much profit can a movie like this bring to Jinling Film Company in the end?

To be honest, even the top management of Jinling Film Company cannot make any predictions at the moment. After all, there is no precedent for commercial films and it is impossible to speculate based on experience...but making money, and a lot of money, is certain.

City Tour is a huge hit and is going to make huge money, and it is not just Jinling Film Company that will benefit. As the only investor and director of the film, and the only beneficiary of the film production, Shi Tiancheng is the biggest winner!

According to the distribution agreement between him and Jinling Film Company, after deducting a series of distribution costs such as copies, he and Jinling Film Company divided the box office revenue, and finally expected to obtain income equivalent to about 20% of the total box office revenue.

  This will be a very large number, not just a few thousand or tens of thousands, but perhaps even hundreds of thousands or even millions of Chu Yuan!

This will create a myth of getting rich overnight!

  With a production cost of just over a thousand Chu Yuan, it earned an estimated astonishing income of over a million Chu Yuan!

Even Shi Tiancheng himself couldn't believe this fact.

In addition to his huge wealth, Shi Tiancheng also gained huge fame that he had never imagined before... In just a few days, he was interviewed by at least a dozen newspapers.

Not only the local newspapers in Hangzhou, but also big cities like Songjiang and Jinling, and even the extremely influential newspaper Da Chu Chao Bao sent reporters to interview him, the director who pioneered commercial feature films and brought a new form of entertainment to the people!

He is not the first film director. In fact, there was already a series of documentary shooting processes before Chao Baosheri, so naturally he also became a documentary director.

However, he was the first director of a commercial film!

And it was a huge success.

  So he also became the subject of newspaper reports, and then the name Shi Tiancheng, along with the city tour, appeared in front of countless Chu people!

Friends are welcome to read the new book "Rebirth 08: Rise from Copycat Phones". Please double-check it to help catch up.

The new book mainly talks about business matters. The protagonist is a company boss, and a very realistic boss. There is no love line because there are too many women and there is no need for it.

There is no low-level pretense, because the protagonist does not go to class reunions, does not take women to bars or luxury stores, because the big boss does not need to...