mesbooks Chapter 305 Unparalleled Box Office Success
Chapter 305 Unparalleled Box Office Success
Chapter 305 Unparalleled Box Office Success
1998 October.
As the Northern Hemisphere's summer is completely enveloped by scorching heat, a visual storm, created by the Kitahara Group with an investment of tens of millions of dollars and in collaboration with Steve Jobs' top graphics technology team, finally reveals its chillingly sharp fangs to the global film market.
Resident Evil: Origins has officially entered the countdown to its global release.
The day before the film's release, a promotional tsunami, a textbook example of film marketing, swept through the streets of major cities around the world with overwhelming force.
From Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo to Times Square in New York; from the giant LED screen in Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong to Piccadilly Circus in London—almost simultaneously, the final trailer, personally edited by Shin Kitahara, began playing on the big screens.
In Hollywood at that time, movie trailers were mostly still in the "hidden" stage. Directors were afraid of revealing the most exciting scenes in advance, so they always used a lot of irrelevant dialogue scenes to piece them together, and finally only gave a one-second black shadow as a gimmick, trying to whet the audience's appetite.
But Kitahara Shin, as a time traveler with a future perspective, was all too aware of the terrifying destructive power of those "high-energy bombardment" trailers from the 21st century.
He doesn't bother with any tricks of concealment. The two-and-a-half-minute trailer he edited is all about "unreserved visual bullying"!
The trailer opens with a sudden, heart-stopping, deep bass roar, without any build-up.
The scene then cuts to the eerie and terrifying Arklay mansion. Rendered with system environmental filters and top-notch lighting, the mansion's suffocating claustrophobia is palpable.
Without any preamble, Kitahara Shin threw all the most expensive and thrilling scenes of the film right in the audience's faces:
Accompanied by rapid, heart-pounding heavy metal drumbeats, the expensive tempered glass in the scene shatters with a crash, and a mechanical android zombie dog, its body highly decomposed and its muscles bulging outwards, covered in dripping blood and slime, lunges into the camera through the air.
The scene shifts rapidly, showing Jill, the female protagonist played by Rie Miyazawa, wearing a tight-fitting tactical suit. In a narrow corridor, she performs an incredibly smooth slide tackle, her Remington shotgun spitting fire, directly blasting a zombie's head into a bizarre, bloody firework. The visceral recoil feedback and realistic blood explosion instantly send the adrenaline soaring.
Shin Kitahara, who plays the male lead Chris, showcases tactical movements that transcend contemporary aesthetics. He weaves through hordes of zombies like a ghost, his "Samurai Blade" flashing with flames, every frame of his action as sharp and swift as an ancient Greek god of war.
In the last three seconds of the trailer, all sound is instantly drained away, leaving only heavy, deathly breathing.
In the darkness, a pair of enormous, bluish-gray claws tore through the heavy iron gate. A bio-engineered tyrant, over two meters tall and covered in bulging veins, slowly emerged from the shadows, exuding a despairing sense of oppression, rendered with top-tier CG by Steve Jobs' team. The gleaming, almost tangible silicone muscles and the suppressed roar froze the moment in time!
The moment this trailer was released, the world went completely crazy!
Countless passersby stood in front of the large screen on the street, staring blankly at the chilling images, completely unaware that they had spilled their coffee.
Especially in the North American market. To be honest, in the United States at this time, the vast majority of ordinary people are not as familiar with the name "Shin Kitahara" as they are in Asia. They may have vaguely heard that an Asian tycoon has been very active in Silicon Valley recently, or know that he is the director of some highly-rated foreign films.
But at this moment, in the face of absolute visual spectacle, nationality and fame are all crushed into dust!
No one can resist this most direct and intense visual impact!
"My God! What was that giant monster on the screen just now? Was it a computer-generated effect? Why did it look even more disgusting and realistic than real flesh?!"
"Who is that Asian man with the gun? The way he fired the gun was a hundred times cooler than Schwarzenegger's!"
"A biohazard virus? A zombie apocalypse? Damn, just watching the trailer gave me goosebumps! I absolutely have to buy tickets for the first showing tomorrow!"
Within two hours of the trailer's release, ticket booking hotlines at major North American theaters were overwhelmed, and websites even crashed at one point. Everyone was completely captivated by this unprecedented "sci-fi survival horror" genre and its groundbreaking special effects.
Amidst the immense anticipation and near-frenzied excitement, the global premiere of Resident Evil: Origins finally arrived.
Our focus first returns to our home base—the Asian market.
For decades prior, the Asian film market was dominated by a relatively fixed aesthetic. Japan favored delicate art films, romance films, or tokusatsu movies; Hong Kong was dominated by Jackie Chan's kung fu comedies and John Woo's gangster action films. Although Hollywood blockbusters had also conquered Asia, subconsciously, everyone felt that:
Those kinds of heavy-industry visual effects blockbusters are exclusively for white people; Asians simply can't make them.
But tonight, Kitahara Shinnobu's bloody "Resident Evil" completely shattered this stereotype!
At the premiere screenings in Tokyo's Shinjuku cinema, Seoul's Gangnam district, Hong Kong's Causeway Bay, and Taipei's Ximending, every single seat was filled, with even the aisles packed with film critics who had gotten in through connections.
When the movie opens, when the first zombie slowly turns its head, revealing its rotting face—so realistic it's nauseating, enhanced by Kitahara Shin's "absolute studio domain"—and lets out an extremely piercing roar on the big screen—
A chorus of terrified screams erupted throughout the screening rooms across Asia!
Some timid girls in the front row were so frightened that they threw their popcorn into the air.
So shocking! So real!
As the plot unfolds, the suspenseful moments in the mansion, the grand scenes of the underground research institute, and the despair of the zombies surging like a tidal wave strike the nerves of every Asian viewer like a heavy hammer.
They were completely overwhelmed by this extreme sensory stimulation. In that moment, they even forgot that the tough guy on screen, who was slaughtering everyone, was the high and mighty "President of the Kitahara Group," and forgot that the sexy and aloof female warrior was Rie Miyazawa, who had acted in art films. Their eyes were completely dwindling, robbed of their sight by the special effects, and their minds went blank amidst the frenzied explosions and gunfire.
"This is insane! Is this really a movie made by Asians themselves? The special effects and the grand scale are absolutely crushing those second-rate Hollywood sci-fi movies!" A veteran action film director from Hong Kong sat in the theater, gripping the armrests of his seat tightly, trembling with excitement.
"This isn't watching a movie, it's experiencing a real nightmare! What kind of black technology did Kitahara Shin use?!" The Taiwanese film critic frantically took notes in his notebook, his pen even tearing the paper.
While Asian audiences were amazed that "their own people" could produce such a large-scale, heavy-industry production, audiences in North America and Europe, far across the ocean, were completely "defeated" by the film's hardcore quality.
The Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles.
This place gathers the world's most discerning movie fans, the most ardent Resident Evil game enthusiasts, and numerous Hollywood industry professionals.
Before the film's release, many white viewers held a condescending and critical attitude, thinking that an Asian director making an American horror game would definitely produce a hodgepodge of styles.
But 0 minutes later, when the lights in the screening room came back on, the entire theater fell into a deathly silence that lasted for half a minute.
Immediately following was a thunderous applause and frenzied whistling that nearly lifted the dome off the theater!
"Holy shit! This is absolutely the most exciting and incredible movie I've ever seen in my life!" A white tough guy with a full beard jumped up from his seat and roared.
The North American audience was completely captivated.
Undeniably, last year's Titanic was also a special effects blockbuster, but Cameron's special effects served the grandeur of the cruise ship and the poignant love story, with the emotional focus on the separation of Jack and Rose.
But Kitahara Shin's Resident Evil is different. It's a pure monster movie that pushes visual stimulation and violent aesthetics to the extreme!
Especially in the latter half of the film, when the Licker's terrifying, skinless, brain-exposed body, created with top-notch CGI, crawls rapidly across the ceiling and spits out its deadly long tongue; when Kitahara Shin and the mutated tyrant engage in their final hand-to-hand combat in the underground inferno, the timeless special effects quality left all Hollywood special effects artists feeling a profound sense of powerlessness and dread.
They couldn't help but compare this film to masterpieces in film history. James Cameron's *Terminator 2* stunned the world with its liquid metal, but liquid metal is, after all, inanimate. The zombies and monsters in Kitahara Shin's film, however, are "organic beings" with realistic muscle textures and oozing viscous blood!
Faced with such stunning special effects and Kitahara Shin's artful and sharp action choreography, Western audiences were completely captivated. They even began to wonder, who exactly was this Asian man who exuded deadly hormones on screen, like a cold-blooded god of death? How could he possibly recreate a video game with such a profound sense of realism, as if the apocalypse had truly occurred?
The phenomenal word-of-mouth success directly triggered a meteoric rise in box office revenue!
On the morning the first day's box office figures were released, the front pages of major media outlets around the world were almost entirely dominated by "Resident Evil: Origins".
In Japan, on its opening day, it shattered Kitahara Nobu's own box office record with extreme brutality, even squeezing out all other films released at the same time to less than one percent of the screenings.
In Hong Kong and Taiwan, the opening weekend box office broke all previous records. Countless viewers who didn't usually watch horror movies flocked to theaters after being enthusiastically recommended by those around them with the phrase, "If you don't watch it, you'll be left behind by the times."
What surprised the world the most was the feedback from the North American market!
Over the past few decades, Jackie Chan has undoubtedly achieved the greatest success for an Asian filmmaker in the North American action film market. But Resident Evil: Origins completely transcends that limitation.
In its opening weekend in North America, it raked in an unstoppable $7650 million at the box office!
This figure directly shattered the $2 million opening weekend record set by "Jurassic Park: The Lost World" last year! In 1998, when the average ticket price in North America was only four or five dollars, this means that nearly 7200 million Americans flocked to the cinemas on the opening weekend!
When the executives of Hollywood's six major studios saw this data report, their cigars fell to the ground. Looking at the astonishing figures, they finally realized that the Wall Street Journal's earlier report hadn't exaggerated—that entertainment tycoon from the East had indeed, with his steel behemoth, trampled the threshold of North American theaters and established his new throne.
In the following days, instead of experiencing the precipitous drop in box office revenue that followed its opening week, "Resident Evil" continued to perform exceptionally well due to its high praise and the viral "spectacular special effects."
Various social phenomena followed. Because the film was so realistic, many underage children who sneaked into the theater were so frightened they had nightmares for days, even sparking protests from some conservative parents who demanded a higher film rating. But this ironically became the best free publicity stunt. For thrill-seeking adults, the "scares kids" label was like a powerful aphrodisiac, stimulating them to go to the theater again and again for a second or third viewing.
Film critics and box office forecasting experts around the world worked through the night to arrive at a disheartening conclusion:
For the next three months, cinemas worldwide will be dominated by this bloodthirsty Eastern behemoth. Aside from romantic myths like *Titanic*, *Resident Evil: Origins* has become a towering monument in the realm of commercial action and sci-fi special effects films, a monument that no one can easily surpass in the short term.
——...
After the miraculous box office numbers were released in North America during the opening weekend, the six major Hollywood studios immediately went on high alert.
They convened overnight with the heads of the world's top visual effects studios, including Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) and Digital Domain, to disassemble the film reels of Resident Evil: Origins frame by frame in an attempt to decipher what groundbreaking "black technology" Kitahara Shin had mastered.
However, when a thick joint analysis report was placed on the desks of the presidents of the major film studios, everyone fell into a long, dead silence after reading it.
The report's conclusion was very simple, even bordering on absurd and despairing:
There's absolutely no alien technology involved. Kitahara Shin's ability to crush Hollywood is simply the purest and most brutal "money power."
"In pursuit of a realistic physical feel, he bought a huge abandoned heavy industrial factory in Chiba Prefecture and built an extremely complex Western-style mansion using real materials on a one-to-one scale. Then, for a few action scenes, he smashed and blew it up!"
"For those few tens of minutes of monster CGI effects, he not only spent a fortune hiring the world's best special effects makeup artists to make physical silicone models, but he even bought out all the top-of-the-line Apple workstations from Silicon Valley. He also had Steve Jobs's Pixar engineering team rewrite his underlying rendering algorithm—he literally used money to create the world's largest and most luxurious private film and television rendering farm!" The special effects supervisor roared desperately in the conference room, grabbing his hair.
Hollywood executives were stunned when they saw the estimated cost list.
At this insane rate of spending, even though Resident Evil is a huge global hit in its opening week, sweeping the box office, after deducting theater revenue sharing, global marketing costs, high taxes, and distribution costs, Kitahara Shin's move might not even break even! The most optimistic estimate is that he will only make a meager profit that barely covers his expenses.
"Is this guy crazy?!" a Universal Pictures executive couldn't help but curse, slamming the report in his hand onto the table. "He completely ignores market effects and basic business risk control principles! What if this movie flops?"
What if the audience doesn't buy it? An investment of this size going down the drain could cripple any Hollywood giant. Isn't he afraid of going bankrupt?!
In the traditional logic of the film industry, making movies is about making money, and ROI (Return on Investment) is a Damocles' sword hanging over every producer's head. No one dares to gamble so recklessly and without any backup plan on a video game adaptation.
However, when these executives calmed down and allowed Wall Street analysts to delve into the Kitahara Group's asset portfolio, they collectively fell silent.
It raked in billions of US dollars in pure cash flow during the Asian financial crisis.
He owns a CD/DVD distribution network and a film and television production empire covering all of Asia;
They just raked in massive profits across Asia with a low-budget idol drama called "Boys Over Flowers";
He is even a major shareholder of Apple, a tech giant that is on the rise again.
Looking at this terrifying financial record, the Hollywood moguls were finally completely convinced.
Kitahara Shin wasn't competing with them using the mindset of traditional filmmakers; he was using a "god-level self-made millionaire" perspective to dominate the film industry, dabbling in it and crushing everyone. Even if Resident Evil lost money, that amount would be nothing more than a drop in the ocean for his vast and unfathomable capital empire—just a minor setback. But if it succeeded, he would have forcibly etched his name onto the throne of the global film industry.
This left all the Hollywood giants who tried to follow suit or even try to stop him feeling a deep sense of despair.
Previously, Kitahara Shin dominated Asia with his rare "god-level scripts," a talent that capital could not imitate. Now, Kitahara Shin is entering Hollywood, directly building an insurmountable special effects moat with endless money and computing power.
Traditional film companies are desperately trying to cut costs and increase profits, while Kitahara Shin seems to be making money just to use it as ammunition to shatter the barriers of the entire film industry.
How can these professional managers, who have to be mindful of the board of directors, replicate such a formidable moat built purely through the sheer force of capital? They simply cannot replicate it in the slightest!