I'll Add Points To All Things - Chapter 372
Chapter 372: The Movie Is Released
Su Yang looked at Little Hus’s serious expression and felt a little anxious. He nodded. “There was a change. During the post-production, we changed a lot of details. Also, Bubbles added a few scenes as well.”
Little Hus’s ragdoll dog had an “I see” expression on its face. It said, “No wonder your movie smells different.”
Su Yang asked, “Better or worse?”
Little Hus said seriously, “What do you think?”
Su Yang was speechless.
‘Oh no, am I really going to fail this time?’
‘Lin Jiali’s prophecy is about to kill me.’
In the end, Little Hus laughed out loud. “Of course it’s better!”
Time stopped, the air was heavy and the living room was filled with silence. After a while, Su Yang put on his gloves and gave Little Hus a good beating. ‘This guy was panting so much while he’s talking! He almost scared me to death!’
Little Hus on the other hand, wailed and screamed. But… it had an amused look on its face.
Su Yang also felt that he was hitting a ball of cotton. ‘It’s so soft and bouncy , it’s as if I can’t hurt it at all!’
Su Yang was furious when he saw how Little Hus was screaming non-stop but had a look of enjoyment on its face!
‘This b*stard has not had its immunity to normal damage removed after its transformation!
‘This bolster is a complete bug!’
Su Yang was tired after beating up Little Hus for a while. He moved a chair over and sat down before looking at Little Hus who was lying on the ground.
Little Hus glanced at him. “Why did you stop?”
Su Yang was speechless.
‘You little s*it!
‘How infuriating!
‘Who did he pick up his character from!’
Su Yang kicked it with the bottom of his slippers. “Stop fooling around. Tell me what you smell, now.”
When they got down to business, Little Hus became much more serious. It laid on the ground and its body that was made of cloth slowly expanded back to its original size. It said, “Actually, the new ability only made my sense of smell more sensitive. Therefore, I can only conclude that this movie will definitely make money and it will be a huge profit.”
“Furthermore, before your post-production, this movie could only earn 12 million. Now, it’s going to earn at least 15 million.”
“15,000,000 yuan…” Su Yang pondered for a moment. ‘After deducting the costs, I still had 10,000,000 yuan left.
‘Just enough to complete the Silver mission! How wonderful!’
Su Yang’s face was filled with excitement as he asked, “Can you tell when it will be profitable?”
Little Hus shook her head. “I can’t do that. I can only sense the overall potential of these kinds of projects. There won’t be a timeline like how stocks do.”
Su Yang thought about it and felt that it was understandable. ‘Stock prices constantly rise and fall with different highs and lows, hence profits change constantly. That means there is a fixed time when Little Hus is able to sniff out the fragrances.
However, for a movie project like this, I have to invest first before reaping the profits and there will be no rise or fall, so the potential would be calculated based on the overall profit.’
With Little Hus’s affirmation, Su Yang was relieved.
Following that, he went to the company as planned. After giving Tan Mei some instructions, he returned to Shanghai.
Pan Zhaodi had left with him as well. As for Li Zijun and Producer Zhao, they remained in Shanghai to deal with the publicity of the movie.
As for the negative news online, after Li Zijun managed to mitigate the issue, she quickly sent the information she found to Su Yang.
Su Yang passed the information to Little Deeny for her to check. However, he realized that the mastermind behind everything seemed to be pointed at the [in] app…
‘This lousy company is really causing me endless amounts of trouble!
‘I’ll deal with them after the movie’s ended.’
Therefore, while he urged Mr. Jia to continue pressuring the affected users with the court and had Little Deeny collect evidence at the same time. He was preparing to sue under the company’s name and expose everything [in] app has done to the society.
In less than two days, on Monday, Li Zijun and Producer Zhao completed the discussion of the marketing strategy for “Fighting The Buddha” with iQIYI.
All promotional criteria for “Victorious Fighting Buddha” were specified according to iQIYI’s S-rank online movie requirements including but not limited to being the blockbuster on their website, movie channels, genre recommendations etc. Li Zijun even managed to negotiate and get the movie promoted on the special recommendations tab. All in all, everything was proceeding better than expected.
Of course, amongst all the good news, there was also some bad news as well. Due to the rush in pushing out the premiere of “Fighting The Buddha”, The promotion for the blockbuster and special recommendations tab had to be applied in advance to the operations department by email, so the release of the movie on both sites had to be postponed.
Based on the release date of the movie that both parties had decided on, the release date on both the blockbuster and the special recommendations would have to be delayed by a week after the movie’s actual release date.
After obtaining Su Yang’s approval, Li Zijun agreed to this condition.
Hence, after a heated discussion, the movie that Su Yang had placed all his hopes on was going to be released on Tuesday, August 5th, half a month before the new semester of school began…
It was 7 pm on Tuesday night. Su Yang was lying on the sofa with a virtual interface in his hand as he refreshed the front page of the iQIYI app.
‘Although the schedule of the new recommendations for iQIYI had not started yet, this movie is still an S-rank project after all, so there would still be some level 2 promotions in place whilst entering the website.
‘There are two level 2 recommendations this time. One is being promoted from the movie channel’s banner while the other is from the front page of the movies’ category. Even though they are not as good as level 1 recommendations, the amount of people coming through is quite high.’
After Su Yang refreshed the movie countless times and even wanted Little Deeny to come up with a program to refresh the movie every millisecond, the movie finally came online!
The cover of the movie was made by Su Yang and Little Deeny together. The cover was filled with close-up shots of Chen Min acting as Sun Wukong. There were a few words in bold fonts clearly written on it, “Fighting The Buddha!”
‘The words are ethereal and domineering!’
Su Yang knew very well, ‘The selling point of this movie is simply based on Chen Min and Goku’s gimmicks.
‘Therefore, Chen Min and Sun Wukong, the two most attractive aspects of this movie must definitely be on the cover.’
In fact, Su Yang even used the words “lead actor – Chen Min’ on the cover in huge fonts. He was afraid that others might miss it…
‘After all, Chen Min’s remuneration alone took up two-thirds of the total production cost. I have no need to waste my money…’
‘In fact, during the meeting with Li Zijun and Producer Zhao, Producer Zhao also explained why he chose to film this movie on the platform of iQIYI.
‘It turns out that the Top 3 online video websites each had different ways of distributing the earnings from online movies.’
For example, Youku’s method of calculating the box office earnings was [The length of time each member spent to watch the movie] divided by [The total length of the movie], then multiplied by [The number of members who watched the movie].
As for Tencent, the calculation was much more complicated. Usually, a single member’s price would be the [Membership fee] divided by [The Number Of VIP category movies watched by members this month] multiplied by [The amount of ratings awarded by members]. Finally, all the membership prices would be added together to split the box office earnings.
‘iQIYI is the perfect platform for this online movie.
This was because it divided the box office earnings based on [The number of members who had watched the movie for more than 6 minutes] multiplied by [the unit price of the movie reviews].
‘Therefore, it doesn’t matter how good or bad the movie is, as long as iQIYI’s members watch it for more than 6 minutes, it’s a win for us.’
When he heard about iQIYI’s payment scheme and watched the finished product, Su Yang could not help but admire Producer Zhao’s… shamelessness.
‘Producer Zhao knows full well that the most important thing in a commercial movie is to earn money, so he did everything with that objective in mind.
‘It has been mentioned before that the first 10 minutes of ‘Fighting The Buddha’ will be completely filled with fantastic fight scenes which are very dazzling, and illustrates the life story of Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie after they attained enlightenment.
‘Ten minutes later, the two of them would fall into the mortal world and become an urban romance drama…
‘Producer Zhao had prepared this movie with the intention of marketing it at iQIYI from the very beginning!
‘After all, as long as the audience was ‘coaxed’ into the movie for the first 6 minutes, we would be eligible for payment. So even if they stopped watching after that, it would not affect the movie’s box office.
‘Producer Zhao… you talented man.
‘However, it’s still thanks to Bubbles and myself that this lousy movie would be saved.’
‘After we made some adjustments, despite the main plot of the movie being a melodramatic romance movie, at least there were explosions and special effects added into it to make it look like the setting had some kind of superpower. Although it’s still a s*itty romance movie, it’s not a scam anymore…
‘Also, at the end of the movie, Bubbles probably noticed that the script was incomplete, so she added a few more scenes. They were mainly scenes to describe how Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie had once again achieved enlightenment and the love-hate relationship they had with each other.
‘Perhaps because there was no script, Bubbles had completely gone wild with the scripts and there were many explosions inside the movie.
‘I wonder where she got so many explosives from?
‘Therefore, this film is much more complete than Producer Zhao’s original plan.
‘This was probably why Little Hus thought that the film had more potential after sniffing it again.
‘However, despite the amount of anticipation I have for this movie, everything would still be for naught if the customers did not like it. Therefore, it would still depend on whether the audience gets coaxed to watch the movie or not.
‘Or at least… the first 6 minutes of the movie.’
As Su Yang pondered, he clicked on his movie.
After that, the movie gradually began…
As soon as the movie started, it was a clip of Sun Wukong fighting some monsters in the sky.
Because of Su Yang’s harsh requirements during post-production, that scene looked extremely domineering and exciting.
Coupled with the passionate drumming music, it made one’s blood boil.
Even though he had seen it many times, this was the first time he saw this scene on a video website. Su Yang was still overwhelmed with emotions! ‘This is my company’s movie. It was a movie made by my little monsters and it is also a movie that I had produced in its later stage!
‘Movie is like a piece of art. If the raw materials did not go through some post-production with no additional music, sound effects, or editing, the movie would be extremely awkward. However, once the music and special effects were added, plus some editing in between shots, it would give the audience the most visualistic feast for their eyes.’
After the battle ended, the movie title slowly appeared on the screen, “Fighting The Buddha!”
Then came the names of the leading actor, main actor, supporting actor, and director.
In the end… the producer’s name appeared: Su Yang, Chen Xiaoyun.
‘This was something Producer Zhao had strongly requested to add. He had forced a bunch of reasons, all of them were reasons like. “Mr. Su Yang has made so many indelible contributions during filming.”, “If it’s not because of Mr. Su Yang’s supervision, the movie would have been completely ruined.”, “This movie would never exist without Mr. Su Yang.” and other kinds of ridiculous excuses.
‘In any case, he has literally come out with all the reasons that he could possibly think of. However… I feel that he’s just trying to suck up to me.
‘Other than that, perhaps he was afraid that I would take revenge on him if the movie failed, so he dragged me along first.
‘However, I felt that the movie was not that bad after watching it myself, so I agreed for him to proceed with it…’
After the names of the producers were announced, the main plot of the movie commenced. Soon, 90 minutes had passed, and the movie was done. When the movie had approached the 6 minutes mark, a notification page popped up and prompted Su Yang to become a member.
Su Yang scanned the QR code. He then paid for 1 month’s worth of membership fee.
The profit sharing scheme that iQIYI Entertainment had also included the registration of new users, so Su Yang was essentially contributing to the box office earnings of his movie.
After watching the movie, Su Yang forwarded it to his WeChat Moments and added a caption, “This is the first online movie produced by my new company, and it’s also my first and last movie to produce and edit. Let’s commemorate it.”
After sending the message, Su Yang left his friend list and wanted to call Li Zijun to obtain some actual data on the movie.
However, what he did not expect was… his WeChat to explode because of his post!
