After some simple back-and-forth bargaining, Simon and Leslie Wexner agreed that the copyright for the Victoria's Secret fashion show would be jointly held by Daenerys Entertainment and LTD. The two sides would split the show's budget investment, and Daenerys Entertainment would receive standard distribution fees for future film and television promotion of the show.
In addition, Simon agreed to personally serve as the producer of the Victoria's Secret fashion show.
The riots in Los Angeles lasted four days. It was only after thousands of National Guard and Marine Corps troops entered the City of Angels that the chaos was finally suppressed.
After spending the first weekend of May in Columbus, Simon returned to Los Angeles on May 4.
Unlike the mess in the south-central part of the city, the Santa Monica Mountains area of Los Angeles had basically remained unaffected.
With the incident over, Hollywood quickly returned to its usual glamour.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, which had been released on April 17 during the holiday period, had already been in theaters for two and a half weeks.
In its second week of release, the film's box office dropped by the expected 41 percent, earning another 22.31 million dollars.
Over the third weekend from May 1 to May 3, the drop narrowed to 27 percent. The film earned an additional 11.39 million dollars over three days, bringing its cumulative box office to 71.08 million dollars.
In two and a half weeks, with a cumulative box office of 71.08 million dollars and weekly earnings still above ten million, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 was projected to reach a North American total between 110 million and 120 million dollars.
Although slightly lower than the first film, it still exceeded Simon's initial expectations.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 was therefore smoothly added to the production schedule.
To avoid too rushed a pace, the third installment was still scheduled for two years later, in 1994.
However, during these days, what Simon paid the most attention to was no longer Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, but the Marvel 2D animated movie Spider-Man, which had also been released directly through the videotape channel during the Easter period.
Spider-Man officially went on sale on April 10, one week before Easter.
With a total production and distribution budget of 15 million dollars, this 2D animated film needed to sell one million copies to basically break even.
Daenerys Entertainment's distribution department expected the Spider-Man videotape to sell between two million and three million copies.
Reaching that range would allow Marvel's animation department to continue producing 2D animated films featuring other superheroes. If it failed to hit the two-million-copy sales floor, even if it still achieved decent profits, Simon had no intention of letting 2D animation continue consuming the popularity of Marvel superheroes.
However, with limited production and promotion resources, the initial batch of 300,000 Spider-Man videotapes sold out rapidly in just the first three days after release.
Daenerys Family Entertainment Company, the subsidiary primarily responsible for videotape and television channel distribution, quickly restocked while investigating the reason. They soon discovered that a group of Marvel fans had launched a campaign on the internet forums that had risen in popularity over the past two years. The campaign supported the Spider-Man animation and pushed Daenerys Entertainment to produce a live-action film.
Born thirty years earlier, Spider-Man's popularity was no less than that of DC's Batman or Superman, giving it an extremely broad fan base.
The forum campaign was only the beginning and initially did not attract much attention.
However, through word of mouth among comic fans, the activity had already spread offline before Spider-Man's release, ultimately creating the spectacular situation where the first batch of 300,000 videotapes sold out rapidly.
The Daenerys Family Entertainment team had not initially anticipated the scale of this campaign's influence.
The distribution team, however, made excellent use of the opportunity. Through media hype and guidance, they spread various half-true stories: how difficult it had been for the Marvel team to produce this 2D animated film under the shadow of the DC Cinematic Universe, how Daenerys Entertainment executives had deliberately suppressed Marvel to protect the interests of the DC universe, and how they had even refused to allow a 3D version of Spider-Man while tightly controlling the budget. This quickly generated an event-driven effect.
Although the budget was only 12 million dollars, under the Marvel team's careful production fueled by pent-up determination, the Spider-Man 2D animated film's reputation received widespread media recognition, achieving a composite critic score of 8.3. This became the strongest foundation for the film's success.
Driven by various factors, the Spider-Man 2D animated film's first-week sales reached 1.09 million copies. During Easter week, videotape sales rose again to 1.23 million copies.
In just two weeks, total sales of 2.32 million copies had already met Daenerys Entertainment's preliminary sales expectations for the film.
Moreover, selling 2.32 million copies in two weeks meant Spider-Man's overall sales were likely to exceed 10 million copies.
At an average retail price of around 30 dollars per videotape, 10 million copies would generate 300 million dollars in sales revenue.
And this was only in North America.
Although the DC Cinematic Universe had successfully expanded overseas, as an American superhero whose 2D animated film had no theatrical release plans, Daenerys Entertainment did not hold high expectations for the overseas market.
Even so, the expected returns this 2D animated version of Spider-Man would bring to Daenerys Entertainment far exceeded the initial projections.
The retail price of 30 dollars per videotape usually meant the studio's wholesale price was around 15 dollars. After deducting material and transportation costs, the gross profit margin exceeded 40 percent.
Therefore, based solely on 10 million North American copies, this 2D animated film could bring Daenerys Entertainment at least 100 million dollars in net profit. Even if overseas distribution and television platform revenues were not particularly high, they would certainly be substantial given the popularity boost from the hot-selling videotapes.
The estimated final net return would be at least ten times the initial 15 million dollar investment.
In Hollywood, film projects capable of generating 150 million dollars in net profit for studios across all channels in a single year were rare enough to count on one hand. This showed that the Spider-Man 2D animated film was yet another super dark horse that left other studios green with envy.
Even though some accidental factors contributed to the project's success, with such profits on the table, Simon had to take it more seriously.
The first priority was to extinguish the public opinion fire.
To help Spider-Man sell well, the distribution team had created quite a bit of unfavorable dirt about Daenerys Entertainment's senior executives.
Using every possible favorable factor when releasing a film had been Simon's principle since founding Daenerys. Since Spider-Man had succeeded so spectacularly, the distribution team's previous operations naturally received positive affirmation.
However, they could not allow the narrative of Daenerys Entertainment suppressing Marvel for DC's sake to spread freely.
Anyone with even a little rationality should easily realize that even though Daenerys held the rights to DC's big three, those DC superheroes were ultimately not Daenerys Entertainment's own children. Fully 100 percent owned Marvel was.
Even from a pure profit perspective, when Daenerys and Time Warner jointly built the DC Cinematic Universe, careful calculation showed that Warner could share profits from the big three while separately holding the rights to heroes like The Flash and Cyborg. Overall, Warner's gains should actually be richer.
If Daenerys developed the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the benefits would belong entirely to itself.
Therefore, as long as it was feasible, Daenerys Entertainment had absolutely no reason to deliberately neglect Marvel.
Since it had not launched live-action projects for Marvel superheroes, the Daenerys Entertainment executives must have their own considerations.
Subsequently, as CEO of Daenerys Entertainment, Amy Pascal personally explained the reasons for temporarily not developing live-action Marvel superhero films during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
Compared to DC, Marvel superhero films often required more complex special effects technology. Current effects technology had not yet reached a satisfactory level. For example, realizing Peter Parker swinging through New York's urban jungle would be extremely difficult.
This was why Daenerys Entertainment had temporarily postponed Marvel superhero development.
The decision to cooperate with Time Warner's DC Comics was also intended to lay a foundation in advance for the future Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Amy Pascal's explanation received affirmation from most movie fans. Combined with other private efforts by the Daenerys public relations department, the public opinion noise previously created by the Spider-Man distribution team quickly subsided.
There were, however, some less desirable results.
Because of Amy Pascal's revelation, the current DC Cinematic Universe project now appeared to exist entirely as preparation for Daenerys Entertainment's future development of Marvel. This cast a faint shadow over the prospects of the DC Cinematic Universe.
In the future, people worried whether Daenerys Entertainment, which held the rights to DC's big three, might one day deliberately suppress and shelve this direct competitor in order to launch its own Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Similar concerns appearing in the media directly caused Time Warner's stock price to decline for several consecutive days.
This inevitably led to another round of chaos.
After handling the public opinion situation, the next step was the follow-up animated film development plan.
Although the Marvel Cinematic Universe was still several years from launch, thanks to his memories from his previous life, Simon already had a rough plan in mind.
With Spider-Man's videotape sales performing so outstandingly, animated films would definitely continue, forming a long-term crossover series. However, Simon could not allow the animated films to affect the live-action movies. Simply put, the animated movie universe could not overlap too much in plot with the planned live-action movie universe.
Otherwise, after audiences experienced a Marvel Cinematic Universe journey through the animated films, even if they remained excited, many would probably not want to see simple plot repetition in the live-action version.
Fortunately, as a comic company that had existed for over half a century, Marvel had accumulated more than enough material to draw from over the years.
In the roughly agreed plan, the animated movie universe would draw as much as possible from Marvel comic stories accumulated before 1990.
At the same time, to lay the groundwork for the future live-action Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel would restart a series of major event plans this year. These major events would revolve around the main storyline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Simon's memory, including the superhero civil war, Kree invasion, and others. Some superheroes would also be relaunched.
Speaking of which, the North American comic industry had grown increasingly depressed in recent years. As people's entertainment options became more diverse, comic sales continued to fall.
The decline was almost irreversible. Both Marvel and DC had been living off past successes in their core comic businesses for the past two years, boosting revenue by hyping collectible reissues of classic editions.
Simon also hoped that this large-scale relaunch of Marvel superheroes could provide some lift to the steadily declining comic sales.
As time entered May, the 1992 North American summer movie season was drawing near.
The heaviest blockbuster of this summer was undoubtedly Wonder Woman, scheduled to release on June 5.
Over the past several months, thanks to Daenerys Entertainment's relentless promotion, Wonder Woman had become the most anticipated film of the summer season.
With only one month left until release, the main cast of Wonder Woman had begun a nonstop publicity schedule, and Daenerys Entertainment was putting out promotional materials even more intensively across all media platforms.
To avoid clashing with Wonder Woman, many studios had moved their key summer projects forward into May.
Mel Gibson's new film Lethal Weapon 3 chose the May 15 slot.
Columbia Pictures' Tom Cruise-starring Far and Away was set for May 29, one week before Wonder Woman.
Disney also had Sister Act starring Whoopi Goldberg scheduled for May 22.
As a black comedy, Sister Act had a budget of 31 million dollars, far exceeding Disney's initial expectation of 20 million.
Disney executives lacked Simon's foresight and could not know that Sister Act would become a box office dark horse, so they were quite worried about the film's prospects. It was said that Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg had even gotten into a heated argument over it, trying to shift responsibility between them.
As Disney continued recovering, the cracks between the two executives who had once worked seamlessly together were becoming increasingly obvious.
Of course, such insider gossip would certainly not reach outsiders.
With three films leading the way, Wonder Woman completely owned the week starting June 5. Even the following week of June 12 had no major heavyweight releases.
Amid the intense summer movie promotions, after Cersei Capital finalized its acquisition of LTD, another piece of news quickly spread through the industry.
Daenerys Entertainment would cooperate with LTD to create a large-scale lingerie fashion show.
It was said that Simon Westeros would personally serve as producer and that the fashion show would be broadcast on television networks.
Subsequently, the various reports were confirmed one by one.
The news was true.
Clearly, in order to promote LTD's Victoria's Secret lingerie brand, Simon Westeros planned to take charge personally.
People in this era obviously could not imagine what the Victoria's Secret show in Simon's memories looked like.
In the minds of most of the public, a group of models simply walking back and forth on a runway did not seem like it would have much appeal.
However, with the news confirmed, more media outlets began paying attention to the LTD acquisition that Cersei Capital had just completed. The Victoria's Secret brand also gained sudden fame through repeated mentions.
Leslie Wexner had always been a highly skilled marketer. Taking advantage of this opportunity, he quickly launched a new round of brand promotion.
As for Hollywood and the fashion world, even though they were still wondering what kind of spectacle one could create with a fashion show, it did not stop the major modeling agencies from contacting Daenerys Entertainment one after another, all hoping to get their models attached to the towering tree that was Simon Westeros.