In "Steel 2", there was originally a role of Scarlett.

It's just that in the original time and space, this role was competed by herself, of course, there are some deals behind it, so it's not enough for outsiders.

Of course, transactions are not all the kind of transactions that everyone thinks, there are many kinds of transactions, there are transactions on interests, and transactions on favors...... And many times, this kind of transaction will not directly determine someone to play a certain role, especially an important role, basically the transaction is just a stepping stone, just to give someone more opportunities when everyone is at the same level. In the final analysis, it is Scarlett herself who is strong and good enough to get such an important role as "Black Widow".

After taking a shower and packing up her clothes, Scarlett left the villa.

The contact information has been left, and it can be seen that the relationship between the two should not be bad in the next few years. After all, Marvel movies are series, and Scarlett has to appear in them many times, and she will not leave Zhou Fangyuan casually. As for the end of the shooting plan...... Then it doesn't matter, at that time, it is estimated that Zhou Fangyuan is also a little tired.

Seeing Scarlett leave, Zhou Fangyuan came to the study, and a phone call came, asking about the degree of the theater's shareholding and investment plan.

To be honest, as long as you play movies, it is impossible not to think about the theater chain, or if you want to play movie investment, it is better to have some theater resources in hand.

The distribution of benefits in each link of the film industry chain is carried out in the form of box office accounting. In the entire industrial chain, the top-down is the business flow, and the bottom-up is the capital flow. The profit level of the cinema industry is closely related to the total box office revenue and the proportion of account sharing, and the determination of the specific account sharing ratio between each link mainly depends on market factors such as supply and demand, film quality, schedule, genre and bargaining power between upstream and downstream. At the same time, the development of cinemas can simultaneously reflect the maturity of the film industry.

The domestic film market will develop very fast in the future. In the 17 years before Zhou Fangyuan's rebirth, the total number of domestic film screens had surpassed North America and became the film market with the largest number of screens in the world. In just one year, that is, in the first quarter of 18 years, the domestic film box office has exceeded 20 billion yuan, surpassing North America to become the world's largest film market, and thus ending the situation that the North American film market has dominated the world for many years.

On May 18, "The Blue Book of Chinese Films (2018)", "Green Book of Chinese Film Industry Trends" and "Chinese Film Audience Satisfaction Survey - 2018 Spring File" were released in Beijing, once again clearly stating that after experiencing a trough in 2016, domestic box office revenue increased by 13.45% in 2017, reaching a total of 55.91 billion yuan of soft girl coins, and truly ushered in an unprecedented new era of Chinese films.

As early as before the release of "Avengers 3: Infinity War" in China, the media made predictions based on the film's popularity in North America, believing that the film's box office revenue in China would show explosive growth. And the market response after the release of the film did live up to expectations, becoming the highest-grossing sci-fi blockbuster in 2018 with a super high box office of more than 2 billion.

Of course, this film is not the only one that has achieved high box office results, the report card of the first quarter of the domestic film market in 18 years is a cumulative box office of 20.218 billion yuan, an increase of 39.8% over the same period in 17 years.

The rapid development of the Chinese film market has naturally attracted strong attention from filmmakers from all over the world to this "big cake". But in the face of such a huge potential market, is it as easy as imagined? Will the Chinese film market become a new continent and a new gold mine for the world's filmmakers? In fact, the money of the Chinese audience is not as easy to make as they imagined.

Compared with the popularity of the Chinese film market, the box office revenue of the North American film market in the first quarter of 18 was 2.853 billion US dollars, which is about 18.174 billion yuan, which is not any growth compared with previous years. In addition to indicating that the North American box office has stabilized, this result also conversely confirms that the Chinese box office is achieving rapid development with the growth of the total number of screens and the accelerated improvement and maturity of the industrial chain, and it is far from reaching its ceiling. It is estimated that in the second half of '18, it will continue to show a blowout growth. It's just that such a growth trend is not closely related to foreign imported films.

This has also become another sign that the Chinese film market is truly maturing.

All this is not only because of the continuous improvement of Chinese people's preference for movies, the continuous improvement of Chinese people's living standards, but more importantly, the construction of cinemas.

In 2016, there were 1,612 new theaters in China, with 9,552 new screens, an average of 26 new screens per day. The total number of screens in the country is as high as 41,179, exceeding the total number of screens in the United States of America (39,523), accounting for 26.56% of the world's digital screens, becoming the country with the most screens in the world. In the first quarter of 2017, there were 589 new theaters and 3,418 new screens in China, with an average of 37 screens per day, continuing to maintain a high growth rate.

The growth of cinemas has led to the rapid growth of domestic cinema chains.

When the global movie screen market tends to be saturated, the development of cinema chains will gradually change from the new cinema model to the merger and acquisition model. In 2016, the total number of screens owned by the world's top 10 cinema chains was 47,191, accounting for 30.4% of the total number of screens in the world. Among them, the largest cinema chain is Wanda Cinema Line in China, with a total of 13,884 digital screens, accounting for 8.95% of the total number of digital screens in the world. The rapid expansion of cinema chains is usually done through mergers and acquisitions, such as Wanda's acquisitions of AMC in the United States, Hoyts in Australia, and Oden & UCI in the United Kingdom in a few years, with a footprint in Asia Pacific, North America and Europe.

The parent company of Dadi Cinema Group, the world's fifth-largest cinema chain, has acquired a total of 531 screens in 76 theaters operated by Orange Sky Golden Harvest in China, which has not only significantly increased its domestic market share, but also expanded its operation scope from third- and fourth-tier cities to first- and second-tier cities.

Cinema operations are closely related to film screening. Affected by the slowdown in the growth of the film market, the box office of no theater entered the threshold of 100 million yuan in 2016, and theaters around the country experienced varying degrees of box office decline. Sparkle Roll Jackie Chan International Cinema, which ranks first in the box office, has a box office of about 99 million yuan, becoming the cinema with the highest output in the country for 6 consecutive years. The number of movies screened in theaters is closely related to the box office revenue of the films. On average, about 400 films are screened in theaters every year in China, and there is still a big gap compared with the more than 1,000 films screened annually in Fuso, Asan and other countries. Excellent films will bring high box office revenue, such as "Fast and Furious 8", "Let's Wrestle! Dad" and other films. In 2016, the number of moviegoers in urban theaters reached 1.372 billion, a year-on-year increase of 8.89%, and the annual per capita moviegoers were nearly 1 person.

However, despite the rapid development, to be honest, there is still a gap between domestic theaters and rice countries.

According to the National Association of Cinema Owners (NATO), as of October 2017, there were 40,393 screens in the country, about half of which belonged to the top three theater chains in the country - AMC, Regal and Cinemark. It's not that the number is inferior to the other party, the main thing is that the market development is not enough, the maturity is not enough, and the overall maturity of the market is not enough.

After all, the film market in the United States has experienced nearly two hundred years of development, and there is no generational problem in the middle, so it is relatively more mature.

In the beginning, there was no dedicated independent screening venue for rice films, and they were all screened as one of many programs in entertainment parks and juggling theaters. Many vaudeville audiences later became loyal consumers of films, and many vaudeville agents became the backbone of early brokerage companies, and William Morris, the founder of WME, started as a vaudeville agent.

On June 19, 1905, the first nickelodeon theater was opened in Pittsburgh. The emergence of nickelodeon theaters marks the beginning of the cinema chain. Five years later, more than 10,000 nickel coin theaters were born in the whole territory of the country, with more than 9 million moviegoers and nearly 1/5 of the population of the country. The founders of Universal, Fox, MGM, Warner, and others all laid the foundation for the future through investments in nickelodeon theaters during this period.

Since the 10s of the 20th century, the film projection industry in the United States has entered the period of large-scale construction of movie palaces with luxury cinemas. These luxury theaters are called movie palaces, with a screen and seats as many as 2,000-5,000, which is a bit like a large-scale concert now, so the public opinion circles are commonly known as movie palaces. The ticket price has also risen from 5 cents to a few cents to a dollar, which is equivalent to a 180 summit ticket skyrocketing to 3600, and you can't sit in the infield. Watching movies suddenly became a luxury.

The Cinema Palace originated in 1917 as the Central Park Theater, founded by Balaban and Katz, and began to acquire a large number of theaters after making a profit. In 1926, it was acquired by the Lasky Company, the largest producer in Hollywood at that time, and established the world's largest and most profitable Publix chain of theaters at that time, forming the first real national chain of theaters in the United States.

With the formation of the Publix cinema chain, the Chinese cinema market quickly entered a monopoly, and the alliance between producers and cinema exhibitors reached its peak in the 40s of the 20th century.

In the end, the five major film companies, namely Paramount, Loy, Warner, Twentieth Century Fox and Raiden Hua, were formed, with a monopoly on the Chinese film market. They formed giant associations such as the MPAA, established the famous Hays Code to regulate the content of films, and boycotted the screening of foreign films through a monopoly on cinemas. By 1945, the eight major Hollywood studios owned 17% of the country's movie theaters and controlled 45% of the country's copy rental revenue.

But the 1948 Paramount Act banned major Hollywood companies from vertically producing, distributing and exhibiting films, and major studios reluctantly sold their theatrical companies. The vertical integration system officially collapsed, which also laid the groundwork for the entry of foreign cinema companies.

Then with the popularity of television and the development of suburbanization, the impact on the entire film industry is immeasurable. With the process of suburbanization of the country, large shopping malls and super-large shopping malls began to appear in the suburbs. A new wave of cinemas and cinemas has found an ideal home in these malls, and the boom of shopping mall cinemas has given rise to the construction of multiplexes that still dominate the market in the history of film projection. The era of the cinema palace came to an end, replaced by multiple screens, multiple films being screened at the same time or at different times. In 1963, Deward introduced the concept of multiplex cinema to the film projection market for the first time and built the first two-hall cinema, which was a huge response to the market, and since then multiplex cinema construction has become the mainstream of the North American film projection market.

With the increase in the number of screening rooms, some screening rooms with fewer seats can be used to stage so-called "special films", and on the other hand, because the big Hollywood studios have been encouraged by the increasing popularity of independent films in the 80s by critics and Oscars, they have set up relatively independent production companies within the company through mergers and acquisitions. Films produced by these independent companies have not only found their way out in independent cinemas, but are also increasingly being absorbed by large multiplexes. At present, some theaters under Regal, AMC and other cinema chains have art theaters dedicated to showing art films.

Now of the top ten theaters in the United States, Zhou Fangyuan has already sent people to start contacting.

The first place is undoubtedly AMC, which is also the world's largest chain of cinemas, with the largest market share in the United States, and belongs to Wanda Group in the original time and space. There are a total of 8,218 screens and 659 theaters. In addition to the introduction of multiplexes for the first time, AMC has many firsts in the history of cinema. For example, the stadium's stepped seating can be introduced into the theater to ensure that the view of each seat is unobstructed, the armrests can be adjusted so that the armrests can be raised to form a couple's seat, and a cup holder can be placed on the armrests to facilitate the placement of drinks.

The second place is Regal Entertainment Group, known as "Royal Entertainment Group" in Chinese, which has three main studio brands: Regal Cinemas, Edwards Theaters and United Artists Theaters.

Founded in 1989 in East Tennessee, Regal Cinemas was a theater that was all about "high-end," with plenty of "push" exterior architecture and interiors, as well as premium coffee. In 2001, Regal went bankrupt due to overexpansion. In 2002, when Regal Cinemas, Edwards Theatres, United Artists Theatres and other three cinema brands went bankrupt, investor Philip Anschutz turned the tide and made a large-scale investment in the three cinema brands and became the de facto head of the company. In March 2002, Philippe Anschutz announced that in order to strengthen management, he planned to establish the parent company of these three companies, which is now the Imperial Entertainment Group.

In third place is Cinemark USA.

Cinemark has 337 theaters and 4,544 screens in North America, ranking third among the top 10 theater chains in North America, and 131 theaters with 1,120 screens in Latin America, the most widely distributed theater chain in Latin America in 12 countries. Cinemark's cinemas are distributed under different brands, including the Cinemark flagship store, Tinseltown USA, Century, and CinéArts, which specializes in independent films.

As for other companies, there are a lot, I won't list them all here, Zhou Fangyuan belongs to casting a wide net, whether he can catch fish, can only wait and see. As for the domestic film market, it will be 10 years before it really rises, so Zhou Fangyuan is not ready to make too many moves, just develop slowly every year, as long as he can have enough screens in about 10 years.

As for Wanda, Wanda is also laying out the cinema industry now, or in other words, Zhou Fangyuan's path in China is similar to that of Wanda in the early days. It's just that Wanda didn't extend its plan to foreign countries in the early days, but Zhou Fangyuan will not let go of such an opportunity. With the rapid development of the Internet, the film industry has begun to shrink in the past two years, and the life of the cinema company is beginning to be difficult. Of course, in the name of investment, not himself.