Chapter 137: Concept
Independence Day had just finished its tenth weekend in North American theaters. Its cumulative box office in North America had reached a staggering $328.75 million. While it was still a long way from the domestic numbers of the frequently re-released Star Wars series and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, it had a very real chance of challenging Jurassic Park's $357.06 million record.
It had taken Jurassic Park over sixty weeks to hit that mark. Duke estimated that Independence Day would similarly need dozens of weeks to break $350 million.
After ten weeks in theaters, the North American momentum for Independence Day was softening. The theater count had dropped to around a thousand. Although its week-to-week box office decline remained healthy, the number of screens continued to shrink. By October, it would be lucky to have a few hundred left.
As long as the film remained profitable for theaters, Independence Day wouldn't be forcibly pulled from screens like The Shawshank Redemption. It would continue its North American run on a small scale, likely lasting thirty weeks or more.
Duke was happy to see this. The higher the North American box office climbed, the more he earned from his twenty-percent cut.
By this point, theater chains had already settled their North American box office splits with Twentieth Century Fox twice, involving a total sum of $300 million. This meant the distributor's share of that $300 million was already in Fox's accounts. However, like every other Hollywood studio, Fox had yet to pay out the back-end shares to anyone else.
Duke's compensation was easy to calculate: twenty percent of $300 million was $60 million.
This figure took up nearly half of Fox's box office split, which seemed incredibly unfavorable to the distributor. In reality, Warner Brothers and Twentieth Century Fox were willing to sign this contract because Duke already had the leverage to demand such a price. Furthermore, the profit-sharing agreement was tiered, and most importantly, the box office was only a fraction of a film's total revenue.
With Independence Day exploding at the box office, sales for television rights, videotapes, the original soundtrack, and other merchandise would naturally soar. These were long-term assets. As long as the studio held the copyright, it would generate a steady stream of income down the line.