I want to be emperor

Chapter 1186: National Film Cinema Climax

For the Great Chu Empire in September and October of the 54th year of Chengshun, although there were many major events, the only ones related to entertainment were commercial movies.

Shi Tiancheng's pioneering city journey, although the ending of the film was a bit frustrating for the audience, it still cannot conceal its huge success.

People spread the news by word of mouth, and newspapers often reported on it.

Many prominent people have vowed that they don’t know when the system formed by e-commerce radio stations and radios will be completed, but the commercial film business chain has already appeared and has achieved huge success. In a year or two at most, there will be countless film companies and theaters specializing in showing movies on the land of the Great Chu Empire.

In fact, in October, Shi Tiancheng had used the profits from the city tour to take over a small theater with more than 300 seats, and then after a simple renovation, it became a cinema dedicated to showing movies.

This is the first cinema in the Great Chu Empire that is dedicated to showing movies. It is not like the previous theaters that were originally prepared to stage various stage plays or other performances, and showing movies is only a temporary measure.

After Shi Tiancheng, other people also saw the huge potential market for commercial films. They started to use or acquire some theaters and then converted them into cinemas.

Compared to the scarcity of specialized movie theaters, there are actually a lot of small and medium-sized theaters... The Chu people, who used to lack entertainment options, actually loved watching various stage performances... Well, it can’t be said that they just liked it, but life didn’t give them too many options.

This social environment has also fostered a large number of fan clubs for various stage plays and other types of performance programs, including drama, traditional drama, crosstalk, puppet shows, and even talk shows that specialize in telling jokes. There are all kinds of them.

Each has its own audience.

This also led to the fact that there were theaters in almost every city and even some towns in the Great Chu Empire.

It is naturally impossible for so many theaters to make money, whether they are large theaters with their own troupes, or pure rental theaters that only provide venues and accept various performance teams to perform.

Many of these theaters were also losing money, and the owners of these theaters saw the potential of movies, so they tried to buy a projector and use it to play movies.

But unfortunately, there are no projectors available on the market today!

Anzhou Optical Instrument Company, the only projector manufacturer in the Great Chu Empire, received a huge order from Jinling Film Company at a very early stage and began to work overtime. Later, seeing that the market continued to be hot and other people inquired about ordering projectors, it quickly purchased more machinery and equipment and hired more workers.

However, building production lines and training workers also take time, and increasing production capacity requires a process.

In addition, the previous production capacity was almost monopolized by the large company Jinling Film Company, so ordinary customers could not buy projectors at all.

In order to solve the production capacity problem, Anzhou Optical Instrument Company purchased equipment and recruited more workers to expand production. At the same time, it also found several factories with corresponding production capacity to do OEM for them.

In this case, a small number of projectors can be freed up to supply other customers in the market who need projectors, and more queue orders can be accepted.

According to Anzhou Optical Instruments Company's own inference, based on the current and expected production capacity in the next few months, the existing orders alone will have to be produced until next year...

Not to mention that orders for projectors were pouring in like a tide.

Knowing the potential of commercial films, there are not just one or two bosses who want to open cinemas. In fact, there are many bosses who have seen the potential of commercial films and are willing to invest money to give it a try.

Unfortunately, most of these bosses can’t get the projectors…even if they raise the price.

In fact, the current price of projectors has more than doubled compared to the early days when the market had not yet exploded. A high-end projector powered by an electric motor and using an electric light costs more than 400 Chu Yuan, which is quite exaggerated.

Even a low-end hand-cranked projector would cost around two hundred Chu Yuan.

This price, time and again, is far beyond what a projector should cost.

But even so, those who want to open cinemas still rush to buy them with their money...

Because today's projectors are simply money printing machines...

At this point in time, the name of City Tour has spread all over the country, and even people in small cities have heard of the name of this movie. As the movie became famous, many people appeared in the market and followed Shi Tiancheng's example, shooting short films, which are usually more than ten minutes long!

Many of them were actually done privately by documentary directors and photographers in super newspapers, because they are the only ones in the world who have sufficient filming experience and skills.

So after seeing the hot market, many people also do some private work to make money after work.

You know what, I made a lot of money!

Although the quality of these short films is generally poor, there are very few commercial films available for broadcast now, and there is only one long film, "City Tour". Although the short films of more than ten to twenty minutes are of poor quality due to cost factors, they at least have stories, so they also have some audiences.

Secondly, these short films are generally not distributed on a large scale. They are often shot by individuals who make a few copies and then show them in local theaters. There is no so-called distributor link at all.

Some problems also arose during this period. For example, some people would shoot negative content, such as violence or pornography, in order to make the movie more popular and have higher ticket prices.

Then, an official from the Ministry of Rites took a child to watch a 20-minute short film with a very formal name, a normal introduction, and normal promotional posters... and then, less than five minutes into the movie, he left with a gloomy face and took the child out!

Damn, those people actually put the private things between husband and wife directly onto the canvas, and filmed the details without any restrictions. Any audience who paid money could go in and watch, even if they were just a few years old.

This cannot be tolerated!

Within a few days, the relevant cultural publishing institutions under the Ministry of Rites and Education issued a notice that all films released to the public must comply with public morals and must not be too extreme. Some intermediate content will be subject to graded management, and certain types of films will be prohibited for minors to watch. If minors want to watch some films, they must be accompanied by their parents.

  Otherwise jail awaits you!

The senior officials of the Ministry of Rites who pushed for this matter were extremely angry when they thought about their own children, who were only seven or eight years old, looking curious at the movie scenes, while the perverted audiences around them acted like perverts.

So... the chaotic situation in the film industry in the Great Chu Empire only lasted for about a month, and in fact there were not many bad negative films that were brought under supervision.

The corresponding management regulations led by the Ministry of Rites and Education directly classify this film into cultural works such as books, newspapers, and periodicals that have propaganda and guiding functions, and stipulate that all publicly released films must obtain approval and classification from the publishing department, otherwise they may not be publicly released.

Once this rule came out, the chaotic commercial short film market suddenly became much quieter. However, these changes in the outside world did not have much impact on Shi Tiancheng!

As the director and sole investor of his first commercial blockbuster, Shi Tiancheng gained fame and fortune that he had never imagined before.

And he is so busy trying to take advantage of this opportunity to create his own business empire!

He first established the Shishi Film Company. After the establishment of the film company, he began to look for people to write scripts together, and then recruited staff to start preparing for the second film.

At the same time, the scale of film screenings continued to increase, but they could only be played in Hangzhou... because Jinling Film Company had invested a huge amount of money in its distribution, and at that time Jinling Film Company had not signed an exclusive distribution agreement with Shi Tiancheng, which made it a bit embarrassing.

After negotiations between the two parties, Jinling Film made certain concessions in its interests and then obtained limited exclusive screening rights.

Shi Tiancheng was allowed to handle the local screenings in Hangzhou, while the screenings in other places were handed over to Jinling Film Company for exclusive distribution. For this, Jinling Film Company also paid a box office share of 100,000 Chu Yuan in advance!

This made Shi Tiancheng a real rich man in a short period of time and obtained a large amount of funds to develop his company.

At the same time, Jinling Film Company had not even seen the complete script of Shi Tiancheng's next movie, but had already signed an exclusive distribution agreement with Shi Tiancheng for the second movie in advance...

People are always amazingly tolerant of those who have already achieved success... Before Shi Tiancheng messes up his new movie, for example, causing Jinling Film Company to spend huge costs to make copies, promote it, and then release it across the board, and before they can't even recover their hair costs, Jinling Film Company will choose to believe in Shi Tiancheng unconditionally.

Even his new movie doesn’t even have a title yet…and the script is incomplete.

After signing the supplementary distribution agreement for City Tour, Shi Tiancheng's own Shishi Film Company took full responsibility for the distribution and screening of local films in Hangzhou.

Although Hangzhou is just a prefecture, as the provincial capital, the local urban population is actually very large, with a total population of over one million, and the movie consumption capacity is also very strong.

Even if it only has the independent distribution rights of a government, Shishi Film Company can still obtain considerable profits.

It’s just that there are too few projectors, and even though they are often full, they cannot meet the huge demand from the audience.

This is actually based on Shi Tiancheng's huge success and reputation. Anzhou Optical Instrument Company directly put Shi Tiancheng's film company's projector order in the second place and gave it priority for shipment.

After obtaining several projectors, Shishi Film Company established more than ten cinemas in Hangzhou. Of course, these venues were actually rented, and many of them were rented temporarily.

Shi Tiancheng didn't care much about these things happening outside. Money was coming in every day anyway. He couldn't even estimate how much money he could make from the city tour in the end.

Because it’s impossible to predict!

But conservatively speaking, that would be at least millions of Chu Yuan in box office dividends... at least.

As for the upper limit, it may be several million Chu Yuan.

Don't doubt it, you should know that this movie has been shown all over the world...The box office here is not the regional box office, but the global box office!

Jinling Film Company has screening channels at Chaobao Theater across the country, whether in East Asia, America, Europe, Africa, India, or West Asia. Although many of them are only laid out to the prefecture level, the number is still very large.

You know, it was impossible for Anzhou Optical Instrument Company to be supported by Jinling Film Company and orders from local newspapers.

Such a huge coverage area, and the Great Chu Empire is a huge empire with a population of 800 million. The most important thing is that the Chu people have money in their pockets and lack of entertainment options, so they are willing to spend money to watch a movie to try something new.

For such a huge empire, the box office of films released nationwide is terrifying.

As for the box office, it’s not the audience’s pockets that are affected, but the fact that there are not enough damn projectors!

Jinling Film Company even optimistically predicted that the box office of this movie might eventually reach 30 to 40 million Chu Yuan... Well, the reason why the box office was high again was that movie tickets were in short supply, and Jinling Film Company raised prices in some places with good economy and large audiences.

When Shi Tiancheng first showed this movie, the ticket price was only 300 Chufen. Jinling Film Company also charged 300 Chufen when it first released the movie.

But prices soon began to rise in different areas. For example, in the megacity of Songjiang City, movie tickets were in short supply and in short supply. It could even be said that tickets were hard to come by. Many people were willing to pay extremely high prices to buy movie tickets from other people.

When the head of the local Jinling Film Company saw this, he thought it would be better for him to make the money himself rather than letting scalpers make it, so he divided the audience seats, created an area with better viewing positions, and started selling VIP tickets... The cheapest ones cost more than one Chu Yuan, and the most expensive ones even cost two Chu Yuan.

  It’s simply a sky-high price!

But even though the price is high, there are many rich people!

Those rich people, not even the wealthy, even the high-income groups don’t care about the price of one or two Chu Yuan, and even think that movie tickets at this price are in line with their status.

You can't ask me, a manager of a big company, to watch a movie with those low-level people in a noisy hall.

Through the VIP ticket method, Jinling Film Company successfully increased the average ticket price by more than double, which also had a huge impact on the growth of total box office.

In this case, Shi Tiancheng might be able to take away three or four million Chu Yuan in dividends.

Movies are so profitable, Shi Tiancheng naturally will not give up the opportunity to continue to make money. Who knows how long the craze for commercial movies will last, but it will definitely not be too long. Once people have tasted the newness, there will probably no longer be such a nationwide craze, and by then, movie ticket prices will return to rationality.

At that time, it was impossible to make so much money from a movie.

Shi Tiancheng's goal is to strike while the iron is hot and make a second commercial film before others have reacted, or before they have reacted but are unable to make a truly second commercial feature film in a short time due to issues such as experience and technology.

  It's not a short film of about ten minutes, but a super long film that is expected to last for an hour!

And this time, Shi Tiancheng still chose the theme of urban struggle and romantic comedy... There was no other way. This type of style had been successful before, and there was no reason for him to abandon this successful style. Jinling Film Company also strongly urged him to continue shooting this kind of movie with successful examples.

In order to catch up with the progress, Shi Tiancheng brought a group of staff and invited actors to start filming a new movie even though the script was not yet finished.