Chapter 33
The next day, the matter continued to grow, the majority of the newspapers overwhelmingly denounced Columbia at the same time, and maybe because they started to run out of places to vent, they even begun to accuse the owner of Columbia, the Coca-Cola group, to have played a part in that lowly business strategy. Columbia Pictures’ results had hit rock bottom long ago, so Coca-Cola Group had originally not cared much about this ‘trivial’ company.
Surprisingly, the day after the market opened, Coca-Cola who had always been very stable, had its share price directly fall by 1.7%. This figure might seem insignificant, but if you linked it to the tens of billions of dollars in market value, the higher ups weren’t so calm.
Coca-Cola’s CEO, Roberto Goizueta, directly called Blount Cohen and madly cursed at him, ordering him to quickly resolve this matter or he would have him step down from his position of Columbia’s CEO.
Under the pressure from the Coca-Cola headquarters, at ten o’clock, Blount Cohen personally held a press conference in Columbia. He politely apologized to Eric, and promised that they would seriously uphold their part of the gambling agreement.
Eric got the news, and didn’t intend to let things run amok any longer, he immediately let his personal lawyer, Edward Lewis, publish a statement in The Los Angeles Times about accepting their apology. Thus, the emerging storm started to rapidly subside.
Because of the controversy, they expected that Home Alone’s tickets sales would experience a decline, but after receiving the week’s data, not only did it not fall, the sales had risen instead. The movie had made 28,760,000$, breaking the 50 million $ mark in its second week of running.
17 Again made 14,730,000 $, maintaining its second place at the box office. Eric’s two movies together had made more than 50% of the total North American box office this week, which again left people in wonder.
Although the results were amazing, the media’s attention slowly died down. And after several days of not being able to get any useful news, the reporters that had been camping around Eric’s neighborhood finally began to leave.
This week, Eric basically stayed at home and concentrated on writing Resident Evil that he had promised to Michael Klaus. His past world had two version of the series, one was the Capcom game story line, the other was the film version with Alice as the main lead. Unfortunately, Eric had only played the fourth and sixth chapters of the game series, so he didn’t understand a lot about it.
As for the movie version, there was obviously not much that could be written, since it was based on game content, it only featured Milla Jovovich’s badass moments.
Therefore, writing the Resident Evil novel wasn’t as easy as writing Jurassic Park, Eric spent three days before he conceived the outline for Leon alone. From him joining the police at the beginning, until all of them working together to escape Raccoon City’s outbreak.
The protagonists from his past, Chris, Jill, Wesker and more were cleverly integrated into the novel. Of course, the most popular amongst Chinese fans’, sister Wong, was certainly indispensable. Eric very wickedly portrayed Ada Wong and Leon’s relationship as a Queen and her toyboy.
This was not something Eric had come up with, in the internet of his past, many fans of the game had expressed their desire for the two’s relationship to be this way.
In the games, the sultry and elegant Ada Wong often appeared when Leon was in trouble, calmly helping him before drifting away.
……
While Eric was manipulating a water kettle into the kitchen, James Brooks was sitting on the couch in the living room, reading Resident Evil’s manuscript.
“James, what do you think ?” He pushed a cup of coffee he had just brewed in front of James as he sat opposite him and asked.
“It give the sense of a screen, people have a feeling of being there, like watching a movie, it’s very exciting.”
Eric nodded, James’ assessment was on point. In his past career, Eric had spent a lot of time writing and had become proficient in giving a sense of vividness to his texts.
“If it were to be made into a movie ?” Eric asked again.
James put down the manuscript, and seriously said: “I think at this stage, it’s not suitable for the novel to be adapted to the screen. Although people enjoy the zombie theme, the audience is still quite sparse, so you wouldn’t be able to invest a lot in it for fear of making a loss. If you want to adapt it into a movie, you’ll need a lot of special effects, and too little investment will ruin this. So I think it would be better to wait for the technology to develop further, maybe a few years later the cost of production would be cheaper too.”
Indeed a great producer, with a few words he had outlined Resident Evil’s adaptation prospects and limitations. In Eric’s past, a lot of Resident Evil fans had complained about the movie company investing too little in the series: What kind of special effects are those ? Mira again, seriously ?? They hadn’t really shot the movie in accordance to the fans wishes, which resulted in them suffering a loss.
After chatting about Resident Evil a little, James told Eric why he had come.
“The Fox is inviting me to a reception ?” He thought James had come to discuss Home Alone overseas’ copyrights, he didn’t think it would be about another matter.
These days, Eric had already received several phone calls about the movie, even Michael Eisner who had initially joined hands with Columbia was no exception. But he had already his own plans in mind, so he directly refused them all.
Seeing Eric’s taken aback expression, James smiled and said: “I heard you’ve been getting a lot of offers about Home Alone lately, I also heard that you turned them all down. I thought that maybe you were waiting for the 20th Century Fox to take the initiative, am I right ?”
Eric’s eyes flashed briefly with surprise, he had indeed been waiting for the Fox’s offer so as to have the upper hand. Now that the other party had guessed it, if Eric denied it in front of James Brooks, he would look petty.
He shrugged and smiled: “That was indeed my intention James, after all, our mutual relationship is quite a happy one.”
James sincerely said: “That’s why I personally came today. In fact, Mr. Barry Diller would also like to meet you to talk about Home Alone, Jurassic Park, and your upcoming movie….”
“Oh my, is the Fox getting greedy ?”
James smiled and said: “This has nothing to do with greed, Eric, this is business. If the Fox does not do it, others will become interested instead. Besides, we are certainly not as short-sighted as Columbia, we hope that our two sides can cooperate in mutual benefit.”
Of course, Eric was not stupid enough to really believe those words. That was only Fox’s excuse, the real reason was most certainly because they had missed out on the prior Home Alone’s distribution rights. The Giants were all the same, they battled for profits on every single front, it was just that some were smarter than others.
But right now, Eric had to rely on the backing of one of those giants, so as to reduce the others’ covetous intents, he had to first better protect himself to secretly increase his strength. After a comparative assessment, Eric selected the Fox.
For the next few years, the company’s main goal under Barry Diller’s leadership would be to launch the Fox’s television network, so relatively speaking, their attention in movie would certainly decrease, which would be Eric’s opportunity to spread his wings.