Made in Hollywood

The summer break is over and Duke is still on vacation, but instead of leaving North America, he often travels to Lucasfilm in San Francisco to discuss plans and scripts for the new "Star Wars" with a group of screenwriters. ︾,

As said in the past, what Duke asked for was not innovation and creativity, but the most secure plan. For such an extremely successful series of films as "Star Wars," the so-called innovation brought risks far more than conservative.

In addition, Duke also accompanied Scarlett Johansson on a trip to Tennessee. Scarlett plans to invest in the Sovereign Chain Theater Company here, which is one reason Duke cares about ticket prices.

The current Sovereign Cinema Company is far behind AMG and Emperor Entertainment, but it is the representative of high-end cinema chains in North America.

Older North American audiences may still remember the scenes of some movie theaters owned by Sovereign Entertainment in the past, with slimy theater floors, narrow and crowded theater seats, and poor-sized screens.

But all of the Sovereign Entertainment Cinemas that Duke saw in Duke disappeared, replaced by a variety of advanced screens, brand-new audio-visual screening quality, luxurious seats that can be reserved online, and even inclusion points. Meal service in the cinema.

The Sovereign Entertainment Cinemas line has refurbished more than 600 screens and related equipment in its 50 theaters two years ago. The simple method of replacing fixed seatback seats with adjustable seatback seats has significantly increased The box office income of related theaters.

At the same time, according to the plan of Sovereign Entertainment Cinemas, the company will also plan to refurbish more than 2,000 movie screens and related equipment in the next two years.

This is also one of the reasons for Junhao's external financing.

I accompanied Scarlett around in Junhao. Duke did not oppose her investment plan. In the next few decades, theaters will still be the foundation of the film industry, such as the old theaters of Junhao. , As long as it is operated properly. This investment is quite cost-effective.

Sovereign Entertainment is not only refurbishing existing theaters, but also opening new theaters. Duke and Scarlett also went to their newly opened theaters. These theaters all provide Sovereign Entertainment’s latest "Sovereign High-end Cinema Experience" service.

This new high-end service includes the latest super-large imax movie screen, newly upgraded cinema lighting equipment, newly upgraded Dolby Atmos 3D surround sound, real-time online seat selection, and priority to provide movie theater purchase rights for the most prosperous theaters.

Of course, all these upgrade services mean higher movie ticket prices.

In these luxurious high-end cinemas, Sovereign Entertainment Cinemas has also begun to try out a limited edition black anodized rigid film ticket. After purchasing this ticket, the audience can watch any movie in their theater without limit of the number of times and time on the day.

At the same time, Sovereign Entertainment Cinemas will also update its membership points system, and further strengthen the related derivative services of returning points after members purchase tickets and watch movies. The new membership points system will be introduced from many movie theaters in Knoxville, Tennessee. After the implementation, it was introduced to the theaters owned by Sovereign Entertainment across the United States.

In addition, as the key point of the cinema’s profitability, Sovereign is still making a big fuss about its sales. The cinemas of the cinema all provide in-theatre bars, leather adjustable chair-back seats, and in-theatre catering services provided by waiters anytime... …

It is precisely because of this that Sovereign Entertainment Cinemas has gradually become a "diamond-level" high-end theater in the North American market in recent years.

originally. Duke intends to accompany Scarlett to visit more theaters here and participate in investment negotiations between the two parties, but the new news from Warner Bros. forced him to return to Los Angeles early.

Fortunately, Tina Fei also came with her. With her veteran assisting Scarlett in the negotiation, Duke was also relieved enough.

The reason Duke hurried back to Los Angeles was because his film was involved in a storm in the market across the Pacific Ocean.

It seems that "The Dark Knight Rises" can't calm down at all, a few days ago. The "box office stealing" scandal broke out in the market on the opposite side of the Pacific, and the "Dark Knight Rise", which sold nearly 1.6 billion RMB, was passively involved. Part of the box office was moved to the box office of other movies.

"Duke, you know the Chinese market better."

In the Warner Bros. conference room, Doug Walter frowned and said, "Do you think there is a better solution?"

"No..." Duke shook his head. "That's not our place."

He thought for a moment and said to Jamie Johnson. "When you leave tomorrow, take my letter of protest. Also, report this to mpaa, and they will put pressure on the opposite side through diplomatic channels to prevent this from happening again in our movie. ."

Worked in related industries across the Pacific Ocean. Duke is very clear that box office stealing is not an exception at all.

"Stealing" the box office of Hollywood movies and replacing them with some domestically produced movies is a common method.

Jamie Johnson wanted to fly to the other side to resolve the incident and made a serious protest on behalf of Warner and Duke. He couldn't help sighing, "This market is really big, but it's also very chaotic."

"Don't forget, they are just getting started." Duke walked by and patted him lightly. "We have also gone through this stage."

This is something that happened on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. They actually don't have much options. Unless the opposite side introduces clear and targeted legal measures, similar things will still happen.

And Duke knew better than the two Warner executives that things were actually messier and more serious than they thought.

The current Chinese film market is thriving, and each year it creates the best gross box office record ever. However, under the surface of the prosperous Chinese film market, it is actually turbulent. Anyone who cares about this industry has basically heard of it. Vocabulary such as box office and buying box office.

As a member of this industry, Duke has done some understanding of this, and some things are really shocking.

To talk about the details of box office stealing and box office buying, we must first understand the distribution system and accounting system of the opposite side of the film. Players in the market can be roughly divided into three parties-the producer, the distributor and the theater.

It is not difficult to understand that the producer produces the film; the distributor is responsible for the distribution work such as copying, scheduling, and negotiating and signing the contract with the theater; the theater is mainly engaged in film screening.

So how did these three parties split the box office revenue?

If you buy a yuan movie ticket, the yuan is generally distributed in this way. 5% is used as a special fund for the development of the film industry and 3.3% is used as tax.

Excluding these, the remaining 73.36 yuan will be split between the film party and the theater in a ratio of 43:57. In other words, for a movie ticket of one yuan, the producer + distributor can get 31.54 yuan, and the theater can get 41.82 yuan.

Of course, this is just a general basic system, not every movie will follow it completely.

It can be seen that, except for the part that must be handed over to the country, the box office of a movie is divided between the film owner and the theater. Although there is an agreed share ratio, it can't escape a profit. Sometimes the theater line steals the box office in order to make more profits.

This is also one of the reasons for box office stealing.

For example, for a movie with a box office of 1 billion, the producer + distributor deserves a share of nearly 400 million yuan. At this time, if the theater uses a series of measures to reduce the actual box office to 800 million, then the part that is hidden by the snow The theater is exclusive, and there is no need to share the account with the film party.

This means that the movie producer may have lost its due interest, using a simple sentence to explain the box office stealing-the theater used abnormal means to steal the share of the movie party's due.

In order to achieve its own goals, the theater can use a variety of methods.

For example, handwritten tickets, admission without tickets, and admission with invalid tickets are among the most advanced methods of the theater box office.

Of course, it does not rule out that a bug in the ticket issuing system of the theater cannot be issued normally, so handwritten tickets are temporarily used. However, the probability of this happening is very small. If a large number of handwritten tickets and admission without tickets appear in a certain theater, it can basically be concluded that the box office is stolen.

When you encounter a handwritten ticket, you can ask the theater to go out and print the ticket, but if this is not the case, can you avoid the act of stealing the box office? of course not.

Handwritten tickets are among the most advanced methods of box office stealing. Now issuers often adopt monitoring methods. Handwritten tickets are easy to detect, and more advanced methods are popular-structured tickets.

What is a structured ticket?

For example, the distributor will generally agree on the lowest ticket price for a movie with the theater. For example, the lowest ticket price for a movie is yuan. In reality, it will definitely not be sold at the lowest price, but will be priced according to market conditions.

Assuming a movie, the theater sets the ticket price in yuan according to the actual situation. If the audience buys a movie ticket for a yuan, then the yuan will be shared with the film owner, and the theater will have no profit to steal.

So the theater came up with such a method: bundled packages.

The theater also sells a yuan package: movie tickets + popcorn + drinks. 30 yuan of the 80 yuan is counted as the movie box office-30 yuan is the lowest ticket price-the saved yuan is all counted as popcorn and drinks income.

What are the benefits to the theater? The income from popcorn and beverages does not need to be shared with the film party, and they all fall into the pocket of the theater.

In order to profit, the wisdom of merchants is endless, and there is a more advanced method of stealing the box office than bundled packages, which is the dual system of accounting and reimbursement adopted by theaters.

The theater’s billing system is connected to the box office monitoring system. The movie box office that the theater and the film party know about comes from this system, and the other box office system is a private accounting system set up by the theater, which can also be used to issue movie tickets. , But the box office was swallowed by the theater itself.

As we all know, it is not just theaters that steal the box office. In many cases, the film party will also join in. Capital is naturally profitable. Coupled with the imperfect regulatory measures on the other side, various box office methods for profit can be described as endless.

For example, the most typical mobile box office. (To be continued.)

ps: Ask for monthly and recommended tickets!