Chapter 734: Something Very Important

Even though he was on vacation, Duke barely had a moment to himself. After returning to Los Angeles from San Francisco, he made a trip to Marvel Pictures in Burbank to meet with Kevin Feige and discuss future plans for The Avengers.

"Iron Man 2 is tentatively scheduled for release in next year's summer season..."

In the office, Kevin Feige laid out Marvel's schedule for Duke. "Thor will follow Iron Man 2, and it'll be the last standalone superhero movie before The Avengers."

He asked Duke, "Do you have a plan in place for The Avengers yet?"

Duke already had a fairly clear plan in mind for The Avengers. "I intend to start preparations and filming in 2010, and release it in the 2011 summer season."

His schedule for the next few years was packed tight. Warner Brothers was still pressing him for the follow-up to The Dark Knight, so The Dark Knight Rises would simply have to wait until after The Avengers.

"Can we move it up a bit?" Kevin Feige asked, a little impatient.

"Kevin..." Duke slowly shook his head. "One movie a year is already my limit."

A film had to go through the entire journey from its initial spark to development, revision, reshaping, polishing, adjustment, refinement, and repeated rounds of editing before it was finally approved and locked in for release. Throughout that process, it wasn't just Duke working alone—he also had to guide, entice, supervise, push, pressure, inspire, scold, organize, and praise a massive crew through weekdays and days off alike, getting them to pour their hearts and souls into the production...

All of that sounded simple enough in theory, but pulling it off was anything but easy.

Kevin Feige sighed. He understood how these things worked, so he moved on and asked, "What about Phase Two?"

"We stick to the plan," Duke said without hesitation. "We'll open Phase Two with Captain America 2, and then expand the worldbuilding out into the cosmos."

Audiences would inevitably grow tired of superhero movies one day—there was no doubt about that—but that day was still a long way off. Until then, the obvious move was to squeeze every last drop of value out of Marvel.

After leaving Marvel Pictures, Duke was still mulling over The Avengers during the ride back to Malibu. On the surface, the movie looked straightforward—just packing a team of heroes into a single film—but in reality, it was extraordinarily difficult to pull off. Every hero had a distinct style. Put two of them together and the clash wasn't too noticeable, but when six fought side by side, blending all their styles seamlessly was a serious test of a director's craft.

One misstep could turn six superheroes into a messy hodgepodge, which would never deliver the desired results and might even risk outright failure.

Whether in North America or anywhere else in the world, movies that turned into a disjointed hodgepodge of styles were rarely well received.

In the past, Joss Whedon had done quite well. Having fully absorbed the lessons from the failure of his hodgepodge project Firefly, he made The Avengers genuinely stunning. By the time he got to Avengers 2, however, he slipped right back into his old habits, catering so heavily to hardcore fans that the film became downright unfriendly to casual moviegoers.

On top of that, Ultron, the main villain in Avengers 2, lacked the personal charisma that Loki had.

Having a relatively weak main villain in The Avengers was completely normal and fit right into Marvel's broader blueprint; in Marvel's playbook, villains were meant to be one-dimensional, goofy figures to begin with.

Still, Ultron...

Duke shook his head and put those thoughts aside. After all, The Avengers hadn't even been filmed yet.

Besides, even if he gave it some thought now, his main focus had to stay on his next project.

The script for the new project had long since been submitted to Warner Brothers, and the relevant reviews had wrapped up the previous month. Leonardo DiCaprio was already locked in as the male lead; all that remained was for the project to be officially greenlit so negotiations could begin.

It was an ensemble piece led by Leonardo, and Duke planned to put together a fairly star-studded cast. For instance, Scarlett Johansson, who was currently preparing for next year's film, would also join the crew to play Leonardo's assistant.

Then there was James Franco. Duke had reached out to him back during the Cannes Film Festival, and James Franco had been very interested.

Even so, the biggest headache in assembling a cast like that would be the salaries. Sky-high actor fees would only crush Duke's budget.

The best solution was to shift part of their pay into back-end profit participation. Just how much Warner Brothers, as the sole investor, would be willing to concede on that front was hard to say—after all, the combined cut for Duke and Leonardo alone was already going to be astronomical.

When Duke got home, he found that Leonardo had arrived and was sitting in the living room chatting with Scarlett.

"Hey, Duke."

He waved, and Duke walked over, asking, "When did you get back from Spain?"

"Been back two days," he said, standing up to bump fists with Duke. "I came over specially to go fishing with you."

"Give me a minute to change."

Duke headed upstairs, changed into casual clothes, and walked down with Leonardo to the small pier by the beach, where they took the small yacht out to sea.

"So the project is getting greenlit in July?" Standing beside the helm, Leonardo asked, "Aren't you going to take a few more days off?"

"Over the next year, our footprints might cover the globe," Duke said, gradually easing back on the yacht's throttle. "For the main locations alone, I've planned shoots across six countries on four continents."

"I heard you've always wanted to travel around the world but never had the time," Leonardo joked. "Are you just using this as an excuse to take that trip around the world?"

Duke shrugged and changed the subject. "Leo, now that you've read the script, how do you feel about your role?"

"Very interesting," Leonardo said, taking out their fishing rods and getting the tackle ready. "I like this Extractor role!"

Indeed, the next project Duke had settled on was Inception. He had registered the script with the Writers Guild and the Copyright Office years ago, and as for Paprika, the anime from Japan that Nolan was rumored to have drawn inspiration from, Duke didn't give it a second thought.

In Hollywood and across film circles around the world, whenever a movie became a massive hit, all kinds of chatter inevitably cropped up.

Nearly every famous Hollywood director had been hounded by similar claims, and Duke was no exception. Some years back, a writer from Argentina had claimed that Independence Day plagiarized his unpublished manuscript, and later a comic artist from the Catalonia region insisted that The Matrix infringed on the copyright of his comic...

Duke couldn't be bothered to pay any attention to such nonsense. Even if those opportunists looking to cash in on his success actually tried to do something, Warner Brothers, as the copyright holder, was right there on the front lines to deal with them.

As the saying goes, fame brings trouble—and those weren't just empty words. More often than not, even when you had no intention of stirring up trouble, trouble would come knocking on its own.

In an industry that magnified the struggle for fame and fortune countless times over, hoping to make movies in peace and quiet was virtually impossible.

The competition here was cutthroat; if you wanted to climb to the top, you would end up stepping on others even when you didn't mean to.

Gal Gadot had come to Hollywood from Israel a few years earlier. Through an introduction from her good friend Natalie Portman and her Jewish background, she landed her very first Hollywood role in Fast and Furious 4, a big-budget production that had earned a solid response. She had thought she would establish a firm foothold from there and, like Natalie Portman, become a leading face among the new generation of actresses.

Yet during the subsequent auditions for Quantum of Solace, despite holding a clear advantage, she lost out to Olga Kurylenko, a model from Ukraine with almost no name recognition. Little by little, she came to realize that this industry was far more complicated than she had imagined.

Even though she was Jewish, succeeding here was no easy feat.

She considered herself plenty talented, but did talent guarantee recognition? After the audition for Quantum of Solace, Gal Gadot had tossed that utterly naive notion aside; after all, she wasn't some wide-eyed kid anymore.

Gal Gadot understood the importance of connections, so at her agent's prompting, she had grown even closer to Natalie Portman.

Standing in the studio, she watched the petite girl dancing gracefully to the music of Swan Lake, a trace of envy flickering through her heart...

When the music stopped and Natalie Portman walked over rubbing her wrist, Gal Gadot quickly took a towel from her assistant and stepped forward to hand it to her.

"Here, dry off, Nat," she said with a smile.

"Thank you, Gal." Natalie Portman took the towel and wiped the sweat from her forehead. "I'm really glad you could come see me."

Gal Gadot walked with her to the rest area, sat down on a chair, and said, "You've been unhappy ever since you got back from Cannes. I've been a bit worried—what happened?"

Natalie patted her hand lightly. "It's nothing, just some trivial little things."

Seeing that she wouldn't get anything out of her, Gal Gadot changed the subject. "Are you free tonight? I booked a table."

"I'm sorry, Gal." Natalie's eyes shifted toward the instructor who had just been practicing with her. "I already accepted someone else's invitation this morning."

"That's alright, I think Blake will be happy to join me." She was referring to her agent.

Natalie Portman nodded. "Let's do tomorrow night. I'll keep you company tomorrow night."

Ballet practice resumed. Gal Gadot sat and watched for a little while, called her agent, and then left.

A little over ten minutes later, she arrived at an Italian restaurant nearby. A waiter led her to the table she had reserved, where her agent, Blake, was already waiting.

After they ordered, Gal Gadot asked, "You said on the phone just now that there was something you wanted to talk to me about?"

"Yes, something very important—it concerns your future!" Blake's demeanor was dead serious. "If you can win the favor of certain big shots, your career from here on out will be smooth sailing!"

Gal Gadot looked at her agent in confusion, not understanding what he meant.

"Someone doesn't like Natalie Portman!" Blake raised his eyebrows.