The next day, the matter continued to grow, the majority of the newspapers overwhelmingly denounced Columbia at the same time, and maybe because they started to run out of places to vent, they even begun to accuse the owner of Columbia, the CocCola group, to have played a part in that lowly business strategy.
Columbia Pictures' results had hit rock bottom long ago, so CocCola Group had originally not cared much about this 'trivial' company. Surprisingly, the day after the market opened, CocCola who had always been very stable, had its share price directly fall by 1.7%.
This figure might seem insignificant, but if you linked it to the tens of billions of dollars in market value, the higher ups weren't so calm.
CocCola's CEO, Roberto Goizueta, directly called Blount Cohen and madly cursed at him, ordering him to quickly resolve this matter or he would have him step down from his position of Columbia's CEO.
Under the pressure from the CocCola headquarters, at ten o'clock, Blount Cohen personally held a press conference in Columbia. He politely apologized to Eric, and promised that they would seriously uphold their part of the gambling agreement.
Eric got the news, and didn't intend to let things run amok any longer, he immediately let his personal lawyer, Edward Lewis, publish a statement in The Los Angeles Times about accepting their apology. Thus, the emerging storm started to rapidly subside.
Because of the controversy, they expected that Home Alone's tickets sales would experience a decline, but after receiving the week's data, not only did it not fall, the sales had risen instead. The movie had made 28,760,000$, breaking the 50 million $ mark in its second week of running.
17 Again made 14,730,000 $, maintaining its second place at the box office. Eric's two movies together had made more than 50% of the total North American box office this week, which again left people in wonder.
Although the results were amazing, the media's attention slowly died down. And after several days of not being able to get any useful news, the reporters that had been camping around Eric's neighborhood finally began to leave.
This week, Eric basically stayed at home and concentrated on writing Resident Evil that he had promised to Michael Klaus. His past world had two version of the series, one was the Capcom game story line, the other was the film version with Alice as the main lead.
Unfortunately, Eric had only played the fourth and sixth chapters of the game series, so he didn't understand a lot about it.
As for the movie version, there was obviously not much that could be written, since it was based on game content, it only featured Milla Jovovich's badass moments.
Therefore, writing the Resident Evil novel wasn't as easy as writing Jurassic Park, Eric spent three days before he conceived the outline for Leon alone. From him joining the police at the beginning, until all of them working together to escape Raccoon City's outbreak.
After chatting about Resident Evil a little, James told Eric why he had come.
"The Fox is inviting me to a reception ?" He thought James had come to discuss Home Alone overseas' copyrights, he didn't think it would be about another matter.
These days, Eric had already received several phone calls about the movie, even Michael Eisner who had initially joined hands with Columbia was no exception. But he had already his own plans in mind, so he directly refused them all.
Seeing Eric's taken aback expression, James smiled and said: "I heard you've been getting a lot of offers about Home Alone lately, I also heard that you turned them all down. I thought that maybe you were waiting for the 20th Century Fox to take the initiative, am I right ?"
Eric's eyes flashed briefly with surprise, he had indeed been waiting for the Fox's offer so as to have the upper hand. Now that the other party had guessed it, if Eric denied it in front of James Brooks, he would look petty.
He shrugged and smiled: "That was indeed my intention James, after all, our mutual relationship is quite a happy one."
James sincerely said: "That's why I personally came today. In fact, Mr. Barry Diller would also like to meet you to talk about Home Alone, Jurassic Park, and your upcoming movie."
"Oh my, is the Fox getting greedy ?"
James smiled and said: "This has nothing to do with greed, Eric, this is business. If the Fox does not do it, others will become interested instead. Besides, we are certainly not as short-sighted as Columbia, we hope that our two sides can cooperate in mutual benefit."
Of course, Eric was not stupid enough to really believe those words. That was only Fox's excuse, the real reason was most certainly because they had missed out on the prior Home Alone's distribution rights.
The Giants were all the same, they battled for profits on every single front, it was just that some were smarter than others.
But right now, Eric had to rely on the backing of one of those giants, so as to reduce the others' covetous intents, he had to first better protect himself to secretly increase his strength. After a comparative assessment, Eric selected the Fox.
For the next few years, the company's main goal under Barry Diller's leadership would be to launch the Fox's television network, so relatively speaking, their attention in movie would certainly decrease, which would be Eric's opportunity to spread his wings.