In the penalty shootout of the World Cup final, Italy's Roberto Baggio kicked the ball into the stands.
The entire audience exhaled, and together they sounded like a huge sigh. The awards ceremony will be held soon, which is another very painful moment for the losers.
The Hercules Cup is placed on the edge of the field, close at hand but out of reach. The players in the runner-up position are obviously much more disappointed than the two teams in the third or fourth place finals.
"Roberto Baggio scored all the winning goals for the Italian team in the knockout rounds. It is really disappointing to be eliminated in such a way in the final..."
Ronald, who had already taken advantage of the lack of people at the award ceremony and went home early, turned on the TV and heard the NBC commentary commenting on the two leading stars of Brazil and Italy. This is a characteristic of America, and professional teams always like to say this.
A heroic story.
In fact, before Baggio missed the final penalty, Baresi and Massaro had already missed the penalty. Even if Baggio made the penalty, the goalkeeper would lose if he didn't save Brazil's last goal.
But Americans don’t care about this when watching sports games. What people remember is only the regretful silhouette. Maybe decades later, people will only remember Baggio’s missed penalty kick in the World Cup final.
.After all, no one scored a goal in 120 minutes.
The same is true in Hollywood. Everyone will only remember the number one box office hit this week. As for why you fell to second place, for example, your movie does not have a large audience, and it is not the kind of popcorn movie suitable for summer.
But in the long run, its impact on these audiences may be deeper, and maybe they will still remember it a few years later. These will only be regarded as excuses for failure by Americans who like winners. In fact, no one cares.
of.
Because Ronald and Cameron's two movies, "Forrest Gump" and "True Lies", belong to two distributors, Paramount and 20th Century Fox respectively, and were released two weeks before and after.
Direct box office competitors, so neither of them went to the other's premiere.
Because of this, when the two of them talked on the phone, they also had the idea of competition, and they were curious about who would have higher box office this week.
After the weekend when True Lies was released, on Monday morning, the compiled national box office figures had reached Ronald's home. Cameron's True Lies had a total of 2580 box office openings in 2368 theaters.
, surpassing Forrest Gump and ranking first in the rankings.
Seeing Ronald still frowning and reading the summary report carefully, Diane knew that Ronald must have lost. She also came over to take a look and discovered a problem. This weekend's box office of "True Lies"
The result was achieved by 2,368 theaters.
In the second weekend of "Forrest Gump", the total box office of 24.1 million was created by only 2014 theaters. If based on the average box office contributed by each single theater, "Forrest Gump" still has a box office of close to 12,000 US dollars.
Score, ahead of True Lies' $10,900.
"Dear, don't be sad, your movie actually did better than Jim's."
"Huh?" Ronald raised his head, "Actually not really. My Forrest Gump is PG-13 and True Lies is an R-rated movie. I actually got a bit of an advantage. In any case, the box office in the second week can be as good as
I am very satisfied with Jim’s first weekend results.”
Ronald didn't lie. The biggest difference between Forrest Gump and other summer box office hits is that its decline was very small.
In the second week, Ronald decided to modify the two small details on the spur of the moment two weeks before the release. He finally completed all the copies last week and sent them to the planned theaters.
Therefore, the number of theaters and copies released in the second week has increased a lot compared to the first week. With this blessing, the box office of Forrest Gump in the second week is almost the same as that in the first week. Converted to the same conditions
Next, the box office drop of Forrest Gump was also very small, only more than ten percent. Compared with ordinary summer movies, which dropped by about 30% every other week, it is completely different from movies released in the same period.
In other words, Forrest Gump is continuing to penetrate into the audience it should attract, allowing more viewers who don't usually watch movies to go to the cinema for this movie.
This makes Ronald very optimistic about the subsequent box office performance of Forrest Gump. After all, action blockbusters like True Lies consume the mainstream movie-going crowd and cannot continuously attract new audiences into the market.
It's also hard to see some viewers who don't usually watch movies go to see True Lies.
"No matter what, you will always be the best in my eyes, Ronnie." Diane didn't care and gave Ronald a big kiss.
"Hey hey hey... I love you, my dear." Ronald was very happy to enjoy such unconditional love from his wife. It was a very comfortable feeling to have someone blindly worship him.
In fact, Ronald was mainly fascinated by the details of the box office. He was not at all as uncomfortable as Diane thought because his box office was surpassed by a good friend.
Also released at the same time was the Cinema Score, a score for True Lies. This score was one level lower than the score for Forrest Gump, and it got an A.
Although under normal circumstances, there is not much difference between the box office multiplier represented by A and the box office multiplier represented by A plus. But basically other conditions are the same, Ronald just got more than Cameron.
Good audience feedback made him feel very happy.
In "True Lies", there are fighter jets hovering in the air and firing, climbing out of a car at the critical moment when the bridge was blown up and hanging on the helicopter's cable, and riding a horse into the elevator to fight the bad guys on the roof. Actions
The excitement of the scenes can be said to be three times that of other action movies.
In addition, Schwarzenegger's two tango dances, Jamie Lee Curtis' pole dance, etc. gave the audience ice cream, but none of them could compare to Tom Hanks, the actor who plays Forrest Gump.
The cry of "Jenny" moved me.
It's not just such direct sensory stimulation that is the formula for success at the summer box office. Ronald proved that telling a good story in the traditional way is still a successful way to make audiences and film critics applaud at the same time.
Because of True Lies' strong summer action blockbuster qualities, while being welcomed by audiences, Cameron also suffered criticism from film critics.
Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan was dissatisfied with the portrayal of certain ethnic groups in Cameron's films. In California, where the progressive left is dominant, in Los Angeles, one of the most progressive cities in California, in Los Angeles
In Hollywood, the most progressive place, Turan got very angry and directly criticized it in movie reviews.
"Taken individually, the film's crude and childish elements, such as its insistence on portraying unshaven Arabs as terrorists and its constant humiliation of a dodgy used car salesman (Bill
Paxton) may have gone unnoticed, but together they left an unpleasant impression."
Another Los Angeles film critic, John Simon, criticized the plot in which the hero (Schwarzenegger) uses the resources of his intelligence agency to stalk and terrorize his wife, calling it cruel and misogynistic.
In the liberal atmosphere of Los Angeles, the biggest protest Cameron encountered was the not-so-kind words of some film critics. But in New York and Washington, D.C., on the East Coast, the protests he encountered were much more serious.
About 60 protesters marched outside New York's Center Theater, holding signs that read "Goodbye Tolerance" and "Stop Portraying Arab Americans as Terrorists" and handing out leaflets.
The organizers of these small-scale protests are an organization called the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington, their spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said. The council launched "True Lies" in multiple locations over the weekend.
Peaceful Protest".
Hooper also accepted an interview with the TV station, in which he pointed out that the villain Schwarzenegger's character faces is a fictional Arab terrorist organization "Red X War" who threatens America with nuclear missiles.
This is an unreasonable accusation and insinuates the behavior of a specific ethnic group. Although they added a line of subtitles at the end of the movie "This movie is a work of fiction and does not represent the behaviors or beliefs of any specific culture or religion", this is
doesn't work.
Hooper said that he had been waiting to see if there was such a disclaimer at the end of the subtitles. In the end, only he, three companions who came with him, and a cleaner saw this line of subtitles, and the other audience members had already left early.
Twentieth Century Fox, the film's distributor, said, "We don't label the villains as Arabs," but Americans are used to seeing clues that trigger their reactions:
For example, the Arab headscarf worn by the villain. And there is no motive for these terrorist acts, which is also a stereotype of Arabs - full of irrational hatred of the United States."
And Hooper was unhappy with Cameron's balancing act on identity politics. Although a colleague who worked with Schwarzenegger, explained by an actor who looked like an Arab (Agent Faisal,
Racial identity is never made explicit in the film) in an effort to achieve balance.
Hooper complained, "The character of Agent Faisl is like an Arab Stepin Fitch [a black actor in early Hollywood films]"
Hooper was very dissatisfied with Cameron's handling. He said, "You will notice that the way Agent Faisl proved himself was by killing other Arabs."
The reporter also asked Hooper if he thought Arab villains should not be included in Hollywood movies.
Hooper, visibly irritated by the question, responded that he and the group were not opposed to the depiction of Arabs as villains, as long as the ethnic group was also portrayed in a positive light.
The reporter obviously wanted to make some news, so he asked again. Cinema Score's audience ratings all gave Cameron's new film an A rating. Is this dissatisfaction with the villain being an Arab a sign of being overly sensitive?
?
Hooper angrily replied, "What A? All I saw was that it was a B-movie with bombers, billionaires, and belly dancers."
Then he angrily terminated the interview...
Ronald thought for a long time. It turned out that this man mistook Schwarzenegger's vertical take-off and landing fighter for a bomber, and mistook Jamie Lee Curtis's pole dance for a belly dance. As for the billionaire, he mistook it for a bomber.
I don’t understand where this person got it wrong. Could it be that he is the terrorist who pretends to be a rich man who is auctioning cultural relics?
It seems that this Hooper doesn't know much about America. Although he has a name, he speaks more like a person from the Middle East rather than like someone who lives and works in America.
However, Ronald still found it amusing to call this man a triple B-movie director, so he called Cameron.
"Jim, did you hear your new nickname? Hahaha."
"What nickname? Are you talking about 'Ronald's Box Office Beater'? Hahaha."
The two old friends started joking. Ronald relayed the so-called triple B-movie director's statement to Cameron.
"Hahaha, I don't feel offended, but it feels like a compliment." Cameron and Ronald both graduated from Roger Corman Film University. They said that their movies are shot like B-level movies.
That is to say, they used the budget and stars of a big-budget A-level film to create a meticulously crafted work, but in terms of attracting audiences, they did it just as well as the previous B-level exploitation films.
This practice of using A-level budgets and stars to make B-level movies is indeed a trend among Hollywood's box office successes in the past decade.
"Hahaha, Jim. You are right..." Ronald and Cameron joked again, but Ronald still expressed his concern about this trend, "Are you saying that people nowadays are too sensitive?"
No matter what ethnic group a villain is set to be, they have to show it as an offense to their group."
"Aren't you one too? I saw that in Forrest Gump you also handled some scenes with the black comrade Babu very carefully. And I heard that you seemed to have deleted some of them before it was released..."
"Hey, wasn't I worried about O.J. Simpson?" Ronald explained his difficulties and why he had to delete all the scenes of human rights leader Martin Luther King.
"OJ, what a terrible actor. Did you see those performances he did in court? I never liked him."
The two major directors complained about OJ Simpson's exaggerated and poor acting skills. But they also had to admit that with the box office of Hollywood movies rising sharply in North America and the film market in other parts of the world, directors need to pay attention to
There are more and more sensitive things.
No matter who you portray as a villain or a positive hero, you may offend an audience somewhere in the world.
Will we only be able to film scenes of defeating aliens in the future? Anyway, no alien audience will protest in movie theaters in this world. And who is a good person may become a very troublesome issue. We may
We need to find some very politically correct people to be the protagonists and heroes.
"Hey, no matter what, you can't say you beat me at the box office..." Ronald finally told Cameron that this was his second week at the box office and he actually didn't lose to him.
"Numbers are numbers, everything else is interpretation..." Cameron also joked. The two old friends are both directors who value box office, and they cannot give in to each other on this matter.
"We have to keep looking. My number of theaters has only been equal to yours this week..." Ronald refused to admit defeat.
"You mean, you will beat me in the second week in the third week? Do you want to bet?" Cameron chuckled. With each additional week, the box office will only decline faster. Ronald was a bit unreasonable.
.
"What do you want to bet on?" Ronald really felt that he could get his Forrest Gump back next week.