Fox could barely wait a day before holding a press conference, officially announcing that Terminator 2, as one of the ten co-production projects in Daenerys Entertainment's plan, was moving forward.
With Terminator 2 included, six of the ten external partnership films in Daenerys Entertainment's slate were now locked in.
Back then, the original Terminator had only made a little over 78 million worldwide, yet it had launched Schwarzenegger straight into the top tier of Hollywood action stars. That alone showed how much weight the film carried. So the moment Terminator 2 was greenlit, it ignited intense attention from both the media and fans.
James Cameron had long since finished the script. With Daenerys Entertainment and Fox both giving it the go-ahead, the film was expected to start shooting mid-year and land in next summer's release window.
After the weekend, The Fugitive also hit a breakthrough in its preparations.
Harrison Ford officially signed on, with his fee likewise confirmed at ten million.
With Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Harrison Ford all crossing the ten-million base-salary threshold in quick succession, it meant one thing: Hollywood's A-list star salaries had officially entered the eight-figure era.
In Hollywood, a filmmaker's paycheck was essentially a measure of their status.
If Simon had never appeared, then with the rapid expansion of the film market and improving economic conditions pumping hot money into Hollywood, the 1990s would have become the era when top talent held the greatest leverage. That dominance would have lasted until the rise of effects-driven filmmaking in the new century.
Now, riding on the success of Batman, Simon had effectively carved out a model ahead of its time: a film business driven by IP and technology, not by stars.
Of course, at the moment, most people still had not realized it.
As the new week began, even though Schwarzenegger had agreed to star in Terminator 2, Simon still took the time to look into the Kindergarten Cop project.
In Simon's memory, Kindergarten Cop was not exactly a pure dark horse. Beyond Schwarzenegger, its director Ivan Reitman was also a major name in Hollywood, the director of the Ghostbusters series, and two years ago he had worked with Schwarzenegger on the more unusual Twins.
What Schwarzenegger's agent had mentioned at Joe Roth's party, the "other film Arnold was considering," just happened to be Reitman's new project, Kindergarten Cop.
But since most people treated Twins as a fluke, Schwarzenegger did not have enough confidence to commit to another family-friendly comedy. That was why he ultimately chose Terminator 2.
After getting a sense of Kindergarten Cop's situation, Simon gave up on trying to snatch it. Partly because without Schwarzenegger, Reitman would have to recast. But more importantly, Universal had already secured the project.
As long as Simon could successfully acquire MCA this year, it would effectively become his project anyway. There was no need to waste effort now.
In the rush of work, another week passed quickly.
During the week of February 2 to February 8, Batman dropped only 13% and still brought in another 20.35 million, pushing its total to 347.11 million.
And yet, the film that drew the most media attention that week was still Driving Miss Daisy.
In its ninth week, and its second week in wide release, the film's word of mouth and buzz continued to spread. Its box office did not fall at all. Instead, it posted a tiny reverse drop of 0.5%, surprising a lot of people.
An 8.18 million weekly take pushed the cumulative total for what had once been an unassuming little film to 27.55 million.
27.55 million did not sound like it could compete with anything at the top of the charts. But out of all 502 films that had hit theaters over the past year, Driving Miss Daisy's 27.55 million was already enough to place it at number forty-three on last year's annual box office list. In other words, it had outperformed roughly 90% of all releases.
And this was only the beginning.
After last week's numbers came in, most box office tracking firms projected that Driving Miss Daisy could break sixty million domestically.
Now, with its second wide-release week holding almost steady with the prior week, plus Daenerys Entertainment increasing the screen count again to 1,302, its North American ceiling was clearly higher than even many of the boldest forecasts.
It might become another member of the hundred-million club.
And it would absolutely be the lowest-budget hundred-million-club film of last year.
While the media remained fixated on Driving Miss Daisy, Daenerys Entertainment's Valentine's slot release Pretty Woman premiered on February 9. With it being the slow season, the distribution team easily secured 1,563 screens.
Compared to the original Richard Gere, the new male lead, Pierce Brosnan, had very little name recognition. And over the past two years, Julia Roberts was only just reaching "familiar face" status with audiences. The upside of casting them was that the budget dropped even further, to only ten million.
Because several internal test screenings had received excellent audience feedback, Daenerys Entertainment set a clear strategy: if star power was lacking, marketing would make up the difference. Just the early promotional spending alone reached seven million, with five million specifically allocated to ad buys across multiple platforms.
As long as the first week hit expectations, the marketing budget would be expanded immediately.
On opening day, however, Pretty Woman did not win broad critical approval. Average review scores barely scraped by as passable, and that was with Daenerys Entertainment's PR influence factored in.
Time magazine bluntly criticized it as "a tired Hollywood assembly-line product."
A critic at the Chicago Reader mocked it with thinly veiled sarcasm: "The male lead pays three thousand dollars, and then they fall in love. Truly, very Hollywood." Entertainment Weekly took the same ironic tone, writing, "This story says Roberts's character suddenly becomes 'better' because she meets a rich man, and even learns to cry at the opera."
Yet those reviews, dripping with a certain intellectual superiority, did not dent the film's reputation with ordinary audiences.
Most people's demands were not that high. They just wanted a simple story that hit an emotional nerve.
And Pretty Woman's audience base was far broader than Driving Miss Daisy's.
Add to that Daenerys Entertainment's relentless promotional push to ride the Valentine's mood, and in its opening weekend alone, the film earned 12.47 million over three days.
Then, across the full seven-day opening week, with Valentine's Day around February 14 driving attendance sharply upward, Pretty Woman's first-week total reached 19.16 million, knocking Batman out of its seven-week reign as the weekly box office champion.
In its eighth week, Batman dropped 19% and earned another 16.51 million, ranking second. Its cumulative total reached 363.62 million, steadily marching toward 400 million.
Third place that week was no longer Driving Miss Daisy, but a Warner Bros. action film starring Steven Seagal, Storm of Seven Years, which took in 12.14 million in its opening week.
Under the impact of two new releases, Driving Miss Daisy expanded to 1,302 screens and still managed an 11% reverse drop, earning 8.95 million and pushing its total to 35.50 million.
In a slow February market, even with critics lukewarm, a first-week haul of 19.16 million was beyond what most people expected from Pretty Woman. That earned the film more media attention, or rather, more controversy.
At the same time, among audiences, even though some did not agree with the film's message, most viewers loved it and began recommending it to people around them.
So in its second week, despite Valentine's Day having already passed, Pretty Woman fell only a tiny 5.5%. Its second-week gross was 18.11 million, almost no drop at all compared to the first. In just two weeks, it had already accumulated 37.27 million.
There was no doubt about it: the first box office dark horse of 1990 had been born.
And once again, it came from Daenerys Entertainment. Once again, it came from Simon Westeros.
After Batman premiered at the end of last year, Simon had done everything he could to keep himself out of the media spotlight. To that end, on February 22, his twenty-second birthday, he spent it quietly with Janet, without a ripple.
Now, with Pretty Woman succeeding again, the media's attention swung straight back to him.
The first headline to catch fire was simple enough: the federal tycoon who had just turned twenty-two would be marrying his girlfriend Janet Johnston next month.
In fact, the press had already been camped out in Melbourne for a while, following the wedding preparations in real time.
Naturally, they began spinning every imaginable angle around Simon and Janet's wedding. The most-discussed topics were, without question, Simon's personal fortune and what their life would look like after marriage. Because of the age gap, quite a few outlets did not think the marriage would last. One article in The New York Times even made a point of reminding Simon to sign a prenup.
And from there, the conversation slid seamlessly into the question everyone actually cared about.
How much money did Simon Westeros have now?
Six billion was the authoritative figure everyone knew, the number published in the Forbes rich list.
But that was last August's data.
What about now?
Amid that question, on February 23, the day after Simon's birthday, The Wall Street Journal suddenly published leaked full-year financials for Daenerys Entertainment.
Even after paying for enormous expansion-related expenses, the sheer volume of successful projects over the past two years had poured incredible revenue into a company that had existed for barely three years. Daenerys Entertainment's after-tax net profit for last year reached a staggering 531 million dollars.
It was an astonishing number.
Financial reports for many American companies from the year just ended had not yet been released. But based on prior years' data, a profit figure above 500 million was enough to place Daenerys Entertainment within the top fifty American companies by profit.
And compared to Daenerys Entertainment's age, those other companies at the same profit level were without exception giants that had been operating for decades.
Motorola, for instance.
In the fiscal year ending last September, the electronics titan's annual net profit was only 490 million, and even that was one of its best years in recent memory.
At the same time, with multiple projects last year, especially the ongoing back-end performance of Batman, many media outlets predicted Daenerys Entertainment's profit this year could very well double. If that happened, the implication was almost terrifying.
Because Daenerys Entertainment was a company wholly owned by Simon Westeros.
Even setting this year aside, if you used last year's 531 million profit figure and applied the most conservative ten-times earnings multiple, then compared to Forbes's 3-billion valuation estimate last year, the market value of this fast-rising Hollywood studio this year could easily surpass five billion.
Without even counting Simon Westeros's other assets, that alone would practically be enough to keep him seated as the federal richest man.
So people began asking outright: was Daenerys Entertainment really worth five billion?
Film had always been a high-risk business. Maybe the last few years had been exceptional, but the next few could slump.
But the moment that doubt surfaced, it met the hardest, most unshakable rebuttal.
Marvel.
That's right. Marvel Entertainment was a wholly owned subsidiary of Daenerys Entertainment.
The success of Batman alone was projected to bring ten billion dollars in profit to all relevant parties, and that was only the opening salvo of the DC cinematic universe.
If the first installment was that successful, then the massive plan of more than ten films, now publicly announced and personally overseen by Simon Westeros, might not replicate the same explosive start every single time, but it would very easily outperform most Hollywood projects.
And the greatest advantage of the DC cinematic universe plan was sustainability.
It meant Daenerys Entertainment and Time Warner no longer had to operate like traditional film projects, gambling each time against brutal uncertainty over box office prospects.
So anyone with even a little foresight could see it: beyond the DC universe plan, Marvel, which Daenerys Entertainment owned outright, had even more terrifying potential.
A few years ago, Warner Bros. had planned to sell DC for a few tens of millions. Now, after the success of Batman, even if someone offered a billion, Steve Ross would not agree to sell. More than that, any single popular hero under DC might itself be worth hundreds of millions.
So Marvel, which held a whole stable of superhero rights, was undeniably a super goldmine.
That point alone was enough to support Daenerys Entertainment's value.
In a society where media runs on commercialization, attention always invites excavation.
After The Wall Street Journal's leak about Daenerys Entertainment's annual report lit up the conversation, another business magazine, Fortune, suddenly dropped an additional bombshell, detonating public opinion outright: the overseas asset figures Simon Westeros had registered with the IRS.
Cash.
Four point five billion dollars.