Chapter 329: Surprise Plan

"What do you think?" Jane Lauder asked Ivanka Trump, putting on her sunglasses as they walked out of the theater. "Did you like the movie?"

"It was all right," Ivanka said, pulling her sunglasses from her bag and putting them on. "But it wasn't as good as you made it out to be."

Jane Lauder nodded in agreement. "Compared to The Matrix, there's a noticeable gap, but it's just a low-budget production..."

She thought for a moment. "The pacing in the first half didn't really feel like Duke's style, but the shootout at the end was classic Duke Rosenberg."

"So the movie feels a little weird," Jane added. "There's a shift in style."

Ivanka stepped closer and linked arms with her. "Let's stop talking about movies and go shopping on Fifth Boulevard."

"Sure."

They weren't far from Fifth Boulevard, so they headed over on foot. "Where are you planning to go this summer?" Jane asked. "Are you going to work again?"

"Yeah, but I don't want to model anymore," Ivanka Trump said. "I haven't figured out what I want to do yet. It's not easy to find a place that pays well and gives me a chance to learn and grow."

"I heard Aerin mention something." A thought occurred to Jane. "They're looking for interns over in New Zealand. You could go check it out."

During the relatively quiet Spring Season—especially on the weekend after the Oscar Awards Ceremony—there were plenty of movies in theaters, but Daylight was the only one with a production budget over six million dollars, let alone ten million.

This was the slowest release window in the North American film market. Daylight had virtually no heavyweight competitors, and the distribution companies weren't willing to pour significant resources into this period either.

As the only genuinely high-profile, high-budget film of the season, Daylight inevitably became a focal point for critics.

The next day's print media featured quite a few reviews of the movie.

As a critic who had watched the film on opening day, Richard Chris naturally didn't pass up the chance to review it.

"The nearly forty-minute shootout at the end of the film strongly evokes the style of Heat, perhaps even surpassing it in intensity and duration. But compared to Heat's nuanced details and indescribably deliberate pacing, Daylight feels more like a shoddily made Summer Season popcorn flick—a flaw inextricably linked to its director, Duke Rosenberg."

"With his talent, he could have taken this nationally sensational subject matter and crafted a film that profoundly explored humanity and social issues. It isn't that a shootout shouldn't be included, but it could have been glossed over. There was absolutely no need for it to drag on for so long. He ruined a premise that could have forged a classic!"

The Summer Season was arguably when critics had the least presence. In recent years, they had simply turned a blind eye to Duke's Summer Season releases. Now that they had caught sight of a relatively mediocre, low-budget production, they naturally opened fire with everything they had.

"Why didn't he just scrap all the plot buildup in the first half and shoot the gunfight straight away? When it comes to Duke Rosenberg, his movies don't need a plot at all; superficial shootouts and explosions are more than enough."

—Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter.

"The initial three-thread narrative structure is eye-catching, especially the film's depiction of familial bonds—a rare touch of delicate emotion in Duke Rosenberg's work. But the moment the shootout begins, the entire movie is ruined. The gunfight is far too long, and the noise it generates makes it difficult to sit peacefully in the theater."

—Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times.

"This is an adaptation that severely contradicts the facts. It neither showcases humanity nor explores the deeper issues behind the event. The family and emotional elements remain purely superficial, much like the explosions captured through Duke Rosenberg's lens—sensationalism purely for the sake of sensationalism."

—Ann Hornaday, Washington Post.

"Are these professional reviews?"

Sitting in the living room of his Wellington home on a Saturday morning, Duke sipped his morning tea. He casually tossed the faxes aside and looked at Tina Fey, who was sitting at the computer.

"Anything else?" he asked.

Tina Fey glanced back at him and pointed to a website on her monitor.

"It's a movie review site that launched just last year," she said. "They specialize in aggregating professional reviews from the media, using rotten and fresh tomatoes to represent a film's score..."

That caught Duke's interest. "Is Daylight on there?"

"It is." Tina Fey turned back to the screen. "But I'm afraid the results will disappoint you. The site has collected fifty-four professional reviews so far, and the negative rating is over sixty percent. Daylight's Rotten Tomatoes score is 'Rotten,' with a freshness rating of only fifty-four percent."

"Pretty low," Duke muttered, picking up his teacup for a sip. "Is that the only metric on the site?"

"There's also an audience rating section."

Tina Fey studied the screen for a moment before shifting her tone.

"Congratulations, Duke. On the Popcorn Index, which represents general audience approval, Daylight is currently sitting at eighty-one percent."

"Not bad."

This was an experimental film to begin with, and Duke had never expected audience praise to go through the roof.

"It's better than I expected," he said.

The movie had only been out for a little over a day, so the number of people in North America who had seen it was limited. Most of those rushing to theaters to catch Daylight on opening day were his supporters, either overt or implicit. Paying for a ticket and giving a high score out of affection for the director or actors was a perfectly normal occurrence.

As viewership grew, the score was bound to drop.

As for the Rotten Tomatoes score representing professional consensus, Duke didn't bother giving it a second glance. It wasn't obvious yet, but as Rotten Tomatoes grew in fame over the next decade, its index would become practically worthless compared to IMDB scores, which actually influenced a large number of viewers. Often, "rotten" movies with terrible professional reviews would boast incredibly high Popcorn Index scores right next to their dismal freshness ratings, and their market reception would be correspondingly excellent.

Just as no one in the future would use professional reviews or critics' words to gauge a film's market prospects, the Rotten Tomatoes freshness rating merely represented the opinions of a tiny cluster of a few hundred people in North America. No commercial film would be foolish enough to take it seriously.

The subsequent evolution of these websites would prove exactly that. The viewer-centric IMDB ratings wielded far more influence than Rotten Tomatoes' freshness scores, which eventually devolved into a metric of negligible value that few people truly cared about.

To put it bluntly, in a dozen years' time, let alone the Big Six Companies, even small independent studios wouldn't give the freshness rating the time of day. The Rotten Tomatoes website itself would teeter on the edge of bankruptcy multiple times.

The fax machine rang again. Tina Fey stood up, walked over, and picked up the incoming document.

"Statistical data?" Duke asked.

Compared to those superficial scores and reviews, this was what he actually cared about.

"It's data faxed over from Warner Brothers," she said.

Having worked together for so long, Tina Fey knew exactly what Duke valued.

"In a sample survey of fifty thousand general viewers, the approval rating is seventy-nine percent, with an overall audience score of A-," she said immediately.

She looked up at him. Duke's expression was calm, showing no signs of surprise.

Tina Fey remembered clearly that this was the worst opening-day audience reception for any of Duke's films. It was also the first time his opening-day approval rating had dipped below eighty percent.

"Go on," Duke said calmly. "What about the rest of it?"

"On its first day of release in North America, it earned 4.21 million dollars across 2,200 theaters, with a per-theater average of 1,913 dollars."

Likewise, aside from Duke's debut film, Speed, this was his lowest opening box office result.

"Not bad." Duke leaned back against the sofa with a smile. "It's not as terrible as I imagined."

Tina Fey couldn't help but roll her eyes at that, though she also felt a little perplexed. Duke was always brimming with confidence, yet this film was the exception.

"Are there any other statistics?" Duke asked.

Tina Fey glanced at the paper. "Warner Brothers compiled the elements that the surveyed audiences liked the most and the least."

She looked down at the fax.

"Over ninety percent of the surveyed viewers found the pacing too slow, calling it the flaw they found hardest to endure," she said. "But over ninety-two percent thought the shootout was brilliantly choreographed—long and explosive enough. That realistic final gunfight was their favorite part of the movie."

This was exactly what Duke had expected. If he had actually shot the film the way those critics suggested, he might have won their praise, but he would have lost the vast majority of his audience. Besides, did tailoring a movie to critics' tastes guarantee success?

What a joke. Doing that only increased the odds of failure—the Wachowski Siblings being the prime example.

Classical realistic shootouts had indeed fallen out of favor, but a film like this could only rely on its gunfights as a weapon to attract audiences. As for the fast pacing, Duke had never once entertained the thought of filming with a sluggish, lukewarm rhythm.

Duke couldn't guarantee exactly what kind of movie would be a surefire blockbuster, but he was absolutely certain of one thing: if Daylight had been paced as sleep-inducingly slow as Heat, it might have coasted through its opening day on his box office draw, but by the second or third day, its earnings would have plummeted drastically.

No director wanted to throw their film into the market just to rake in empty praise from a bunch of critics while actually losing money.

The most textbook example was Heat from a few years ago. Michael Mann's film had reaped endless professional acclaim, yet it had utterly bombed at the North American box office. The gunfights in the movie were indeed highly praised by audiences, but the drawn-out buildup and sluggishly slow pacing were practically unbearable.

And that was years ago. The pace of life now was significantly faster than it had been back then.

Even though Duke had deliberately accelerated the narrative pacing of Daylight, the statistics from Warner Brothers still showed that most viewers felt it was too slow.

After all, the future was an era where only fast-paced movies could truly shine.