After a quick check of his bank account, Jihoon's life returned to its version of "normal."
And by normal, we mean: Jihoon had absolutely nothing to do.
Summer simply wasn't the right moment to produce or release anything from the HCU.
As mentioned countless chapters ago, small-budget films like the HCU series had zero breathing room in the summer season.
These months belonged to the giants — colossal studios with marketing budgets big enough to buy small company.
They dominated the box office with explosions, capes, dinosaurs, and actors being paid enough to fund a prostitute hunt at LA's well-known street-based sex zone, Sunset Boulevard.
Any film released beneath them would be crushed instantly, beaten so badly by their promotional onslaught that the poor thing would walk out looking like it had just survived a street protest gone wrong.
So, to avoid getting gangbanged by the summer blockbusters, Jihoon halted all HCU production for the season.
But he didn't stop the creative work.
No — far from it. Instead, he redirected the entire company's effort into what he called the quiet phase: writing scripts and polishing post-production.
His logic was simple.
Once the summer "ban season" lifted, the HCU engine could start up again without a single hiccup.
Producing a low-budget HCU entry was, after all, child's play compared to JH's mid-range monsters like Inceptionor The Departed.
Based on experience, an HCU film only needed a month — maybe a little more — to finish shooting.
If things went smoothly, editing could be wrapped up early in the second month.
So technically, the low-tier JH projects could be released after a minimum of two months of work… not counting post-production.
But post-production, under Jihoon, had become something else entirely.
He'd transformed it into a near factory-like system — a production line where films flowed from one stage to the next with mechanical efficiency.
In JH, arrangement was everything.
Jihoon broke down filmmaking into clean, manageable sequences: location spotting, equipment checks, casting artists, polishing scripts — each step sliding neatly into the next like pieces of a well-oiled assembly line.
Once the groundwork was set, Jihoon would initiate filming itself, the only stage still handled manually and full of the usual chaos of real humans.
After that, it all fell into the hands of the editors.
This system allowed JH Picture to manage budgets, crews, and logistics more effectively.
Time was saved, money was saved, and most importantly, quality never dropped.
Because if there was one thing Jihoon refused to compromise on, it was his reputation.
He wasn't about to let anyone whisper that he cut corners for cost or time.
Every HCU film — even the cheap ones — had to meet his standard.
And so far, he'd kept that promise; each release was polished enough to prove that small films can still carry big ambition.
I mean, if they couldn't, Oscar and Cannes wouldn't be knocking on his door, right?
So now Jihoon only had The Departedleft in his inventory that hadn't been released, and it was still undergoing the editing phase.
According to the timeline his team scheduled, the film should be done by late August.
After that, once he secured a slot for airing, the movie would be released either in late October or November, depending entirely on the traffic for that slot.
It wasn't that Jihoon didn't want to release the film as fast as possible—far from it.
From a financial term, a film like The Departed, a mid-budget project, should be released the moment it's complete so the financial cycle remains smooth.
But the problem was Jihoon himself.
He was a quick shoot. In fact, too quick.
So quick that most studios in Hollywood were already making noise about it.
Because ever since Jihoon set foot into Hollywood, he had produced and released four films back-to-back, each one doing amazingly well.
Results that made other studio heads both envious and red-eyed.
And now, news of his next film The Departed being already in the editing phase?
Yeah, that struck a nerve in their blood pressure.
What Jihoon was doing right now felt like suffocating them—squeezing all the oxygen out of their breathing space.
By now, our lovely reader should already have a full understanding that in Hollywood, film release is like a blood-slash battle.
Only one can prevail at the end of each theatrical cycle.
In other words, every month has a limit on how many viewers are actually available.
Some months can generate 1 billion in gross box office, and some months struggle to even hit 300 million, depending on the viewers' wallet power.
And no matter what, such limitation always applies back to the producing studio.
This is why the slots that can generate high gross box office are the most favorable to any studio.
Because they aren't stupid.
It's like choosing between a jackpot slot that pays one million dollars versus one that pays one billion.
Which one would you pull?
Of course the bigger prize one. Same logic applies here.
And Jihoon had already secured one prime slot this summer.
Now he wanted another for his film The Departed.
So naturally, the rest of the studio heads threw tantrums.
From their perspective, Jihoon was sitting there eating all the pie in the market.
And based on his previous results, Jihoon had already proven that no matter what slot he took—rainy season, broken season, empty season—he could still produce results.
Beginning from this year's February with Get Out, which produced 150 million, to the latest Inception, which predicted to pull in at least half a billion in gross box office sales.
Anyone with half a brain could see it: Jihoon was like a single drop of poison that infects the whole tun of wine.
Wine that they had maintained for years in Hollywood, following their norms, systems, and sacred old-man practices.
Then suddenly Jihoon—this Korean brat—stepped into Hollywood and slapped them with his mighty kimchi style-slap, announcing: "It's time for a change to that rule."
So you can't really blame these people for calling Jihoon spoiling the market.
It's just that Jihoon was coming in too potent, too fast, too unstoppable.
And they had to resist his so-called "predominant" rise in the showbiz.
Which is exactly why his request to release the film in early October was revoked by the film association.
Even with Fox trying to hassle and pressure them into giving in. E
ven bribing didn't work this time.
So The Departed was scheduled for a November release instead.
But little did they know, Jihoon already had another surprise prepared—one that might even break their senses.
The next HCU project he was about to release—the one he told Jim he would be sending to compete in this year's Venice Film Festival—was going to shock them even more than the HCU films already out.
In fact, Jihoon himself didn't even know what kind of crazy attention that film was about to cause.
But that's for October. We'll get there when we get there.
With that in mind, Jihoon, in the year of 2008, would be producing and releasing six films in total.
One has to fully understand just how insane that truly is to grasp the weight of it.
Because for a filmmaker to produce a single film in a year is already considered demanding but doable.
But continuously producing them, one after another?
That's like a crazy person carrying an AK-47 and storming into the film market, shooting movies out like it's just a game of turkey shoot at a carnival.
No one dared to do it before. No one even thought to try.
And yet Jihoon did it anyway.
Luckily for him, ever since his reincarnation, his brain was functioning far better than in his previous life.
His cognitive thinking, the way he processed scenes during filming—it was at its absolute peak.
As if before the shoot began, he already knew exactly what he wanted. And even during the shoot, he could already picture the entire scenario in his brain, instinctively finding the right camera angle for the most perfect scene.
It was like his brain was functioning as an Adobe Suite with lifetime subscription.
This was why he shot so quickly.
And with the carefully assembled team behind him, he had crafted the perfect shooting concoction — maybe even rivaling Spielberg's famed crew.
Spielberg was known for quality but infamous for devouring time.
Titanic took nearly three years to finish.
Only a wealthy studio could survive that without collapsing.
Jihoon understood the truth of this industry: time is money.
The faster the production, the faster the profit.
Same rule bankers preach every day.
So with that we are done with the pleasantary, now time for today's chapter starts with another knock on Jihoon's office door.
Seems weird, right?
This is the third time someone came knocking in the previous few chapters.
Well, it's just that the author sees it would be polite to have people come knocking for the new appearance of a character.
Or you, dear reader, would prefer someone coming in wiggling their dick?
Well, if that's your fetish, comment and like, and it could be arranged. (wink)
"Knock, knock, knockin' on reader's door"