Chapter 446: Internet Smear Campaign

To Duke, the most striking change in this brand-new Matrix Reloaded was its rich, oil-painting-like colors. Although the film's palette still relied heavily on cyan and black tones, Zack Snyder had successfully integrated his own strengths. Coupled with a reduction in pretentious, philosophy-for-the-sake-of-philosophy plotting and overhauled action sequences, the film earned a tidal wave of applause by the time the screening ended.

It was now the summer of 2002, and kung fu-style action was no longer a novelty to Hollywood and North American audiences. Matrix Reloaded discarded the kung fu currently overused in Hollywood action films, especially the flashy, complex routines. Although the actors' fighting styles varied, they leaned toward a simpler, more direct futuristic mode.

Hollywood's traditional tough-guy brawling caused aesthetic fatigue, and kung fu would inevitably do the same.

Even as the center of the global film industry, Hollywood chased trends just as hard as the Eastern film circles. For today's Hollywood action films, studios would be embarrassed to even start shooting without hiring a few action choreographers from Hong Kong and showing off some Tiger and Crane Dual Form and Tai Chi.

With a massive influx of similar movies swarming the market, the consequences were not hard to imagine.

In Duke's future plans, action elements would carry heavy weight. Just like Zack Snyder's version of Matrix Reloaded, he would not use kung fu.

He was well aware that whether it was Muay Thai and Taekwondo, or kickboxing and kung fu, it was impossible to just stuff them into a movie and expect them to sweep the globe. Ever since filming The Matrix a few years ago, Duke had instructed his action choreographer, Jimmy Carter, to use Hollywood's technical methods, borrow Yuen Woo-ping's Hong Kong-style shooting techniques, and synthesize various close-quarters combat arts to design an entirely new action mode.

These new action routines did not require any overly flashy movements; they needed to be simpler, more powerful, faster, and more direct—or at the very least, they had to look that way through the camera lens.

As for promoting kung fu and kung fu movies, it was simply too difficult for a non-enthusiast like him. Kung fu was broad and profound, not something a layman like him could truly understand; countless people on the other side of the ocean were far more suited for the task.

After the release of Matrix Reloaded, the overall response was quite positive. Although countless film critics voiced a chorus of complaints, claiming the film was just endless fighting and explosions without the slightest depth or philosophical thought, they could not stop the surging enthusiasm of moviegoers paying for tickets.

Over the three days of its opening weekend, Matrix Reloaded soared to 92.77 million dollars at the North American box office, setting the highest opening record for an R-Rated Film in history.

This massive box-office explosion directly ended Spider-Man's three-week championship streak, making it the fourth massive box-office hit of this Summer Season, following The Two Towers, Attack of the Clones, and Spider-Man.

By its second weekend, although Matrix Reloaded was limited by its R-rating and could not maintain an exceptionally stable trend like The Two Towers, it still managed to keep its drop-off within fifty percent. With 51.02 million dollars in its second weekend, it successfully defended its championship at the North American box office. Moreover, in just ten days of release, its North American box office broke through the 200 million dollar mark, reaching a staggering 211.05 million dollars!

The facts were very clear: this was yet another blockbuster whose North American box office could surpass 300 million dollars.

When July came to an end and the 2002 Summer Season concluded, the two films associated with Duke, The Two Towers and Matrix Reloaded, had undoubtedly become some of the biggest winners.

The Two Towers started its massive theatrical run in the first weekend of the Summer Season across 3,876 theaters. By the time it entered August, its North American theater count had shrunk to 1,462, but its cumulative North American box office had reached 478.55 million dollars, with a staggering global box office of 1.12311 billion dollars. Although Spider-Man had also performed extraordinarily well, box office trend estimates suggested its North American and global totals would stall around 400 million and 900 million dollars, respectively. Duke had practically locked in both the North American and global annual box office championships ahead of time.

Even constrained by its R-rating, relying on the explosive word-of-mouth of its predecessor and the impressive quality of the sequel, Matrix Reloaded had already approached 300 million dollars in North American box office after a month of release. Its final North American box office would inevitably cross the 300 million dollar threshold, and it would vie with Attack of the Clones and the Thanksgiving release of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets for the third-place spot in both the North American and global box offices.

"What's even more outstanding than the box office is the merchandise performance for both series."

At the Warner Board of Directors meeting, Doug Walter, who had just taken the CEO position, was radiating high spirits. "From the release of The Fellowship of the Ring up until the end of July, the total global sales of merchandise related to The Lord of the Rings reached a whopping 1.73255 billion dollars. The highest-grossing item among them is The Fellowship of the Ring DVD box set, which hit 521 million dollars in global sales..."

Pausing here, Doug Walter looked around at the dozen or so directors participating in the meeting and said with full confidence, "The theatrical run of The Two Towers is already approaching its middle-to-late stages. Based on the research and evaluation from the marketing department, the sales of the film's original soundtrack album and DVDs will inevitably surpass those of The Fellowship of the Ring."

The moment Doug Walter finished speaking, the eyes of the other directors turned toward Duke. This man had single-handedly propped up nearly one-third of Warner Brothers' revenue!

Duke sat there quietly, not saying anything; he was the films' biggest individual beneficiary.

Indeed, compared to the total profits from the box office and merchandise, the more than 200 million dollars in net dividends he held in his hands might not seem like much. But one couldn't forget that movie merchandise relied even more heavily on distribution channels than theatrical box office did. Without the support of a conglomerate platform, merchandise could only generate crude licensing revenue. Why else did Pixar Studio, Blue Sky Studio, and the later DreamWorks Animation Studio, as well as other small and medium-sized film companies, scramble to join or desperately squeeze their way into those large corporate groups?

Besides funding and risk resistance, the major companies' advantage in consolidating resources was a crucial draw.

Perhaps many years in the future, Hollywood's era of giants would come to an end, but from the early-to-mid nineties through the following decade or more, Hollywood was in a bona fide era of giants.

His experiences were indeed extraordinary, but seeing and doing were fundamentally two different things. Hollywood's problems simply couldn't be solved just by shooting a sufficiently excellent movie.

To put it bluntly, newcomers and new ideas really weren't worth much in Hollywood.

Without any track record of success, casually mailing out a script to a film studio or a director and expecting them to eagerly come knocking on your door? Stop joking around.

Duke's initial experiences had been slightly better; after all, his mother and his family background were able to play at least some role. Those rookie screenwriters simply had no chance of ever meeting studio executives. As for famous directors and producers, even a fool knew that scripts mailed to them would never actually reach their hands.

Just look at Duke and Tina Fey. What major director or renowned producer didn't have assistants?

Even for a director at Duke's level, Tina Fey managed a team of over ten assistants under her. Mailed-in scripts would inevitably land in the hands of these assistants first. Who could realistically expect these assistants to pass a newcomer's ideas and scripts up the chain?

Let's put it this way: the screenwriters who wanted to write scripts for major directors and famous producers could form a line stretching from Long Beach all the way to Malibu.

Collaborating with a major director meant an extremely high likelihood of success. Success, in turn, would give the screenwriter—often the most vulnerable link among a project's key elements—a chance to climb the ladder and even become a gold-tier screenwriter.

Take the gold-tier screenwriter Ehren Kruger, for example. Was a single plotline he ever penned actually brilliant or even logical? Yet he wrote Transformers film after film, and even though he was mocked by countless people, the production company still wouldn't replace him.

This was an incomparably realistic circle, where a proven track record carried a hundred—even ten thousand—times more persuasive power than mere creativity.

Similarly, countless talented individuals were buried in this industry. The most typical example was the so-called Hollywood Black List; many of the scripts on it had been finished for years or even longer, yet they persistently failed to become real projects, and the reasons for that were not hard to imagine.

Just like the rumors of Bill Gates bowing his head to Wall Street, a single person trying to fight against an entire massive system was no different from a pipe dream.

Therefore, from the beginning until now, Duke had consistently chosen to stand on the side of the major companies and engage in deep cooperation with them.

Having reached his current status, Duke was actually well aware that if he hadn't had his mother's financial backing in the beginning, only God would know when his first movie would have ever hit theaters.

Just like during the release of Speed, the film had received unanimous praise from selection experts and even had George Lucas's help, yet Twentieth Century Fox still chose the most conservative and self-beneficial limited release strategy, fully prepared to pull the film at any time if the market response turned out poorly.

Hollywood offered countless ways to climb the ladder, but gaining the appreciation of big shots and major companies through a single script was undoubtedly one of the most unreliable.

Moreover, the scripts for quite a few massive blockbuster films were truly very average; their concepts and tropes were often things Hollywood had already used to death.

As for innovation? The flip side of innovation was risk. When innovation was combined with a newcomer holding absolutely zero track record, what kind of choice would directors, producers, and film studios make?

It was safe to say that as long as they didn't have water in the brain, these people would only ever make one choice.

And among those who managed to climb to high positions out of Hollywood's fiercely cruel competition, how many of them would actually have water in the brain?

The board meeting's agenda items proceeded one after another. For most of the time, Duke didn't offer many opinions; only when discussing film-related topics would he seriously say a few words, and whatever he said always commanded sufficient attention from the Warner Board of Directors.

For example, the meeting heavily discussed matters regarding the establishment of Justice League Studio, to which Duke held a positive attitude.

Moreover, pushed by Duke and Doug Walter, Warner Brothers also decided to begin reaching out to Marvel, striving to secure the distribution rights for Marvel films.

Marvel and DC had a relationship of both competition and cooperation. Although the competition was far greater than the cooperation, as long as the benefits were large enough, cooperation was not impossible.