Owen and Larry were already in the living room of Owen's parents' house.
Elizabeth, Sarah, Matt, Jenna, Eric, and Tyler were there. Edward, on the other hand, was still at work.
After greeting everyone, Owen and Larry took two of the empty spots on the couches.
"Just in time," Eric commented before taking another bite of a cookie.
Owen settled back against the couch, "How long?" he asked.
"Eleven minutes," Matt replied, sounding slightly more animated than usual as he checked the time on his watch.
The reason they had all gathered there was fairly simple.
In eleven minutes, at exactly five in the afternoon, the second official trailer for Lights Out would be released.
Unlike the first one, which had been uploaded directly to Owen's channel, this one would appear on Universal's official channel.
It had been a decision Owen had accepted without any issue when they finalized the distribution deal. After all, he didn't want to turn his own channel into an endless succession of trailers for the same movie either.
One trailer on his channel was fine.
Sarah, who had spent the last several seconds absentmindedly staring at the TV screen with YouTube open, finally asked, "Do you think it'll do better than the first one?"
There was nervousness in her voice, and it was understandable.
Lights Out was her first feature film. She wasn't playing the lead, but she did have an important supporting role as the main character's younger sister, with a fair amount of screen time and several relevant scenes throughout the story.
Owen tilted his head slightly as he considered his answer.
Movie trailers usually followed a fairly predictable structure.
In some cases, they started with a teaser, usually under a minute long, released several months before the premiere. It didn't need to explain much. Its purpose was much simpler: announce that the movie existed, present a memorable image or two, and get people talking about it.
Then came the first proper trailer.
That was the one responsible for selling the premise.
It introduced the main characters, established the tone, and showed some of the most striking footage without revealing too much from the second or third act. In many cases, it was also the trailer with the greatest cultural impact.
It was the one that generated the first major wave of conversation.
The second trailer served a different purpose.
It no longer needed to introduce the movie from scratch.
It could go deeper.
More dialogue. More relationships between the characters. More of the central conflict. Scenes from the development of the story and even small hints about the antagonist, the mystery, or one of the major twists.
And, above all, it arrived much closer to release.
That was why, even if it often didn't generate the same initial impact as the first one, commercially it could be even more important.
It was the trailer that reached audiences when the question was no longer What is this movie?, but Am I going to pay for a ticket to see it?
There could be a third trailer after that, although that was much more common with blockbusters backed by massive marketing campaigns.
For a movie like Lights Out, two were enough.
"No," Owen replied, the first one to answer.
Jenna, sitting beside him, slowly turned her head toward him, "How optimistic," she said, the sarcasm impossible to miss.
Owen looked at her and smiled. Without making too much of the gesture, he reached for the hand Jenna had resting on the cushion between them and intertwined his fingers with hers, "I'm being realistic. Besides, usually the first trailer is the one that gets the most views and has the biggest impact, and Universal's channel has fewer subscribers than Second Take Films."
"That's it!" Eric and Tyler celebrated almost at the same time, raising their fists as though they had just won something.
Matt immediately joined in, "Universal zero, Second Take Films one," he said with a grin.
Owen let out a small laugh.
Even though the channel, the brand, and the company officially belonged to Owen, to the three of them it also felt a little like their own.
Matt, Eric, and Tyler had been part of practically the entire history of Second Take Films.
They had been there for Paranormal Activity. For Paperman. For One Minute Time Machine. For the original Lights Out short film and then the feature film. Eric and Tyler had also worked on Curve, even though Matt hadn't been directly involved in that project.
But Matt had been the one who found Curry and told Owen that he would be a talented director worth hiring.
Now came Chronicle.
Owen and Matt were already developing the movie together, and both of them pretty much took it for granted that Eric and Tyler would once again be part of the crew.
They weren't just employees hired every now and then.
They had watched Second Take Films grow from small productions made between friends with limited resources into a company whose YouTube channel had more subscribers than Universal Pictures'.
So yes.
For them, it was a small victory too.
The difference was around two million subscribers. It took on another dimension when you learned that Universal's channel had existed since 2009.
Second Take Films' had been created in 2022.
Of course, the two channels didn't offer exactly the same thing either.
Universal mainly used theirs as a promotional showcase: previews, trailers, TV spots, clips, and, occasionally, a particularly recognizable scene from one of their movies.
Second Take Films worked very differently.
There, you could find a trailer and, with a couple of clicks, end up watching a complete short film that told a story from beginning to end for free.
Then there were the vlogs.
Those had turned the channel into something fairly unique within the industry.
Owen didn't limit himself to showing a red carpet for thirty seconds or a prepared backstage interview. He had taken a camera with him to Sundance, Cannes, and the Oscars, showing from the inside things the public normally only saw from the outside.
For millions of people, that offered a much closer feeling than a studio's traditional advertising.
Owen watched Matt, Eric, and Tyler's satisfied expressions for a second before looking back at Sarah.
"That's why I think it'll get fewer views," he continued, "The first one reached forty million. That's already insane. I don't think this one will beat it, but it'll still get a pretty good number."
Forty million views for a movie trailer was monstrous.
For comparison, two of the most-viewed videos in the entire history of A24's channel were the trailer for Hot Summer Nights, starring Timothée Chalamet, released in 2018 and sitting at around thirty-six million views, and Everything Everywhere All at Once, the movie that had swept the Oscars barely a year earlier, with approximately thirty-four million.
The fact that the first Lights Out trailer had surpassed both numbers made the level of traffic Second Take Films handled fairly clear.
The second trailer wouldn't have exactly the same advantages.
It would appear on a channel with a somewhat smaller audience, and it wouldn't have the surprise factor of a first look.
To Owen, that made it very difficult for it to surpass forty million.
Although that didn't mean it was going to go unnoticed, "Either way," he added, "millions of people are probably going to watch it. Twenty or thirty million views wouldn't be crazy, and there'll probably be more analysis than with the first one, because this time they're going to show more of the plot and the performances."
Sarah blinked, "That doesn't help," she muttered.
"Anyway, millions of people are going to see your face again. You can be happy about all that exposure," Owen concluded.
Eric burst out laughing, "I think you just made it worse."
"You're definitely not good at reassuring people," Jenna commented with a smile as she looked at him.
Owen simply shrugged.
Sarah let her head fall back against the couch and slowly exhaled.
In a few days, her face would be projected in movie theaters across the country. Now, even before the release, millions of strangers could watch her in a trailer, analyze every scene, and comment on her performance.
'I've already been through this with the first trailer. It won't be that different,' she reminded herself.
It wasn't as if this were completely new to her.
Her mother, sitting nearby, seemed to be at the opposite extreme.
Elizabeth listened calmly to the young people's conversation.
It was also her first feature film, and she was also playing an important supporting character, although her presence in the movie was smaller than Sarah's. Still, she had enough emotional control not to get genuinely nervous over something like that. Besides, she had already lived through the madness of the first trailer.
Elizabeth then shifted her gaze toward Owen and Larry, "How did it go?"
The question immediately made several of them stop paying attention to the clock.
Owen answered quite naturally, "I got the role. I'm the Creature."
For a moment, there was silence.
Then came the applause.
Jenna was one of the first to smile, Sarah immediately raised her head, and Elizabeth smiled with visible pride.
Matt, Eric, and Tyler, of course, decided to turn it into something much bigger than necessary.
"We always believed in you," Tyler added solemnly.
Larry shook his head, amused.
Sarah had almost completely forgotten about her nerves by then, "So you're going to be in Guillermo del Toro's next movie?" she asked.
"Yeah," Owen said with a nod.
Sarah still looked at him in surprise. She had already heard the news that they wanted him for the Creature.
The strange part was that there had been no audition, and that Guillermo had wanted him specifically.
He had personally invited Owen to his house, talked to him for hours about Frankenstein, about his vision for the Creature, and about what he hoped to achieve with the movie. Rather than evaluating whether Owen could play the character, he had spent a good part of that meeting trying to convince him to accept it.
And now it was official.
Her brother had just landed one of the lead roles in a hundred-and-twenty-million-dollar production directed by Guillermo del Toro.
Owen hadn't mentioned how much he was going to be paid.
You didn't exactly have to be a genius to understand that it was probably a lot.
His last real salary in an outside movie had been for The Spectacular Now.
He had earned a six-figure sum that hadn't even reached five hundred thousand dollars.
Now he had jumped into seven figures, and not seven figures barely clearing the one-million-dollar mark.
More than six million dollars.
It was a massive change in scale in barely a year.
Sarah was about to ask him something else when Matt checked his watch again.
"It's five."
The conversation died immediately.
Owen let go of Jenna's hand only to lean forward and grab the remote from the coffee table.
YouTube was already open on the enormous living room TV, directly on Universal Pictures' official channel page.
He refreshed.
Nothing. He waited a few seconds, refreshed again, and this time it appeared.
LIGHTS OUT | Official Trailer
Runtime: 2:30.
"There it is," Sarah said, much more quietly than before.
The thumbnail already looked considerably more aggressive than the one for the first trailer.
It was a close-up of Anya Taylor-Joy's character, leaning slightly forward in the middle of an almost completely dark room. An intense red light washed over one side of her face and cut through her hair, while she stared at something off-screen with a furrowed brow and her lips slightly parted.
The background was practically black, barely allowing the outline of a doorway behind her to be seen.
Owen pressed play and the trailer began.
The first few scenes passed, and then the first logos appeared.
SECOND TAKE FILMS
A second later, the next one appeared.
UNIVERSAL PICTURES
The image faded back to black.
They showed more scenes, with Elizabeth appearing as the mother who seemed to be losing her mind and talking to an imaginary friend.
Then the screen went black again and new text appeared.
PRODUCED BY OWEN ASHFORD, WINNER OF THE BEST ACTOR AWARD AT CANNES
Eric let out a whistle.
Several quick scenes introduced the family again, although this time spending considerably more time on the relationships between the characters.
Anya as the older daughter.
Sarah as her younger sister.
And Elizabeth as their mother.
Unlike the first trailer, which had focused almost exclusively on the concept of the creature that could only appear in the darkness, this one was beginning to reveal that the problem wasn't something recent or isolated.
There was a connection tied to the mother's past.
One scene showed Elizabeth's character staring intently at an old photograph.
[Mom, who's Diana?] Sarah asked from off-screen.
Elizabeth turned her head and the screen cut to black as the music stopped.
Then another title card appeared.
DIRECTED BY MATT ROGERS
DIRECTOR OF PARANORMAL ACTIVITY
Matt immediately pointed at the television with both hands, "That's me!"
"Yeah, Matt, I remember seeing you direct the movie," Tyler said, earning a few laughs.
The trailer continued picking up speed until the title finally appeared.
LIGHTS OUT
Smaller text appeared beneath it.
WORLD PREMIERE
SEPTEMBER 21
FANTASTIC FEST
The image remained for barely a second before changing.
IN THEATERS WORLDWIDE
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 6
The screen went black and the video finally ended.
Owen, Jenna, and Larry were the first to applaud.
After all, most of the people in that room had worked directly on the movie, so it would have been strange if they didn't applaud.
For a few seconds, the living room filled with satisfied comments and congratulations being exchanged.
When the noise began to die down, Owen looked back at the screen.
The detail of his credit was still lingering in his mind, "Now that I think about it..." he said, "It doesn't make much sense to put 'produced by Owen Ashford, winner of Best Actor at Cannes.'"
Matt laughed, "Yeah, what does one thing have to do with the other?"
"Exactly," Owen nodded.
"It gets people's attention," Eric commented.
Owen couldn't argue with that.
From a marketing standpoint, it was obvious what Universal was trying to do. The Cannes award said absolutely nothing about his abilities as a producer, but it did make his name much more recognizable to anyone watching the trailer.
On the other hand, his position within Lights Out had been somewhat different from the one he had held on other projects.
On a movie like Good Will Hunting, Owen had been heavily involved in the day-to-day production work. Now, with Chronicle only beginning to take shape, his role as a producer meant being involved on every front.
With Lights Out, however, his function had been much closer to that of an executive producer with real authority over the project.
He was the one who had pushed the movie forward.
The one who had put up the money and who, ultimately, had the final say on the most important decisions.
That didn't mean he had spent every day dealing with schedules, permits, transportation, or minor problems on set.
They had hired producers for that, people who devoted far more physical hours to the project.
There had even been a period when Owen was so consumed by Good Will Hunting that he had practically disappeared from the day-to-day operation of Lights Out for weeks.
But he still stepped in when it truly mattered.
For the next several minutes, they kept talking while refreshing the video's page every so often.
The views were climbing quickly. So were the likes and, of course, the comments.
Larry was the first to leave.
Not long after, Eric and Tyler gathered their things as well.
Matt was the last of the three to reach the door. He was already about to leave when he turned back toward Owen, "What time are you uploading the sketch?"
Owen immediately knew which one he meant.
The I Want It That Way one.
They had already filmed and edited it. All that was left was to post it.
"When I wake up. I guess around seven in the morning," Owen replied.
Matt raised an eyebrow, "At seven?"
"Yeah," Owen nodded.
Matt kept looking at him for a couple of seconds.
He wasn't entirely convinced that seven in the morning was the ideal time to post a comedy sketch on Instagram.
Although, considering the size of Owen's account, that probably mattered a lot less than it would have for anyone else.
"Well, it'll work anyway," Matt muttered, raising one hand in farewell, "See you."
Owen closed the door behind him and returned to the living room. When he walked in, he stopped. Only Jenna and Sarah were left, "Where's Mom?"
Sarah didn't even answer. She had two phones in her hands.
On one, she had YouTube open. On the other, Instagram.
She alternated between the two, refreshing comments, views, and mentions with a level of concentration that was concerning.
Owen watched her for a moment, "You look like one of those kids who watches TikTok on five phones and three tablets at the same time."
Sarah didn't respond to the mockery.
Jenna, who was using a single phone like a relatively normal person, looked up, "She went to make dinner. She invited us to stay and I said yes."
Owen's expression changed immediately.
"Oh, thank God," Owen said as he dropped onto the couch beside Jenna.
"Yeah. And your mom's cooking is delicious," Jenna said with a smile.
That was one of the few things they could both admit, without too much embarrassment, that they were incredibly lazy about.
When it came to work, they were practically the opposite.
They were disciplined, responsible, and fairly serious when it came to their careers.
But cooking was another story. It wasn't that they were bad at it.
They just had trouble getting started.
In both of their minds, making dinner meant losing forty minutes they could use to do literally anything else.
That was why they had developed their own methods.
Sometimes they cooked together, turning it into a couple's activity and making it considerably more entertaining.
Other times, they decided through some kind of game and the loser had to cook.
A few minutes later, they heard the front door open.
Edward had returned from work.
He called out a greeting from the entrance first and had barely managed to put his things down before Sarah appeared in front of him with one of her phones, "You have to see the new trailer, Mom looks amazing."
"Hello to you too," Edward said.
"Hi. Look."
Sarah practically shoved the phone in front of his face.
After congratulating her, he finally went to the kitchen to greet his wife.
Owen waited a few minutes before getting up, "I have some things to talk about with Dad," he said, looking at Jenna.
She immediately understood that it probably wouldn't take five minutes. She stood up as well, "Then I'll help your mother."
Jenna headed toward the kitchen and Owen went to find Edward.
A few minutes later, father and son were inside Edward's home office.
A large desk occupied the center, accompanied by filing cabinets, a bookcase, and several documents related to his work.
Edward closed the door and began rolling up his shirt sleeves to his elbows as he walked around the desk, "Should we pick up where we left off?"
"Yeah," Owen nodded.
Time passed considerably faster than either of them expected.
When Elizabeth finally called them to let them know dinner was ready, Edward closed his computer and they both left the office.
Dinner passed quietly.
Until Sarah, who seemed to have taken a surprisingly long time to process what had happened, looked up at her brother and father, "What were you two doing?"
"Adult stuff," Owen replied as he calmly moved his utensils around his plate.
Sarah stared at him blankly, "Ha, ha. I'm eighteen."
Owen raised his eyes slightly, "You still can't buy alcohol."
"You turned twenty-one a few months ago," Sarah shot back.
Owen would turn twenty-two in December.
"But I can buy alcohol," Owen countered.
"What does being able to buy alcohol have to do with what you were talking about?" Sarah muttered impatiently.
Jenna hid a smile.
Owen and Edward didn't usually lock themselves inside that office immediately after his father got home from work.
When they did, it normally meant something important.
The last time Sarah remembered a similar situation, they had been analyzing contracts, numbers, and legal structures related to a negotiation that ended up involving intellectual property valued at tens of millions of dollars.
"Seriously. What are you doing?" Sarah asked again.
"Laying the foundations of my company," Owen replied.
"The foundations?" Sarah repeated.
Elizabeth also looked at her son curiously.
Jenna already knew a little more about it.
Owen explained himself better.
Second Take Films was already, technically, a production company. It had hired crews, financed movies, and even a series.
It had intellectual property, distribution agreements, revenue, a recognizable brand, and several completed productions.
But it still revolved too much around a single person.
Owen.
Up until that point, every time Owen wanted to make a movie, he had to build a large part of the team practically from scratch.
Production companies hired the vast majority of a movie's physical crew specifically for each production.
That was standard in Hollywood.
The problem was that Owen still had to get involved too early and too often.
With Lights Out, for example, he had officially occupied a position much closer to that of an executive producer, but during the early stages of pre-production he had ended up personally involving himself in too many things.
Like choosing the producers, the budget, the schedules...
Then, once he had hired the producers and the rest of the team, he had been able to delegate much more.
The idea Owen had for Second Take Films was different.
He wanted to remain the person who decided which projects got made.
He could write a script himself, receive one from someone else, buy an idea, acquire the rights to an intellectual property or a book, and decide whether it was worth developing.
He also wanted to keep the most important creative decisions under his control, determine which projects to finance, how much he was willing to invest, and what the company's overall strategy should be.
That was different from having to personally handle building the production of every movie from scratch.
He didn't need to be the one finding and hiring the right producers for every project.
Nor did he need to be the one developing every budget in detail, organizing schedules, or continuously supervising every stage of pre-production.
He could approve those decisions without being the person doing the day-to-day work behind them.
Of course, that didn't mean he was going to completely abandon direct producing.
There were movies he wanted to be much more involved in.
He had done it with Paranormal Activity, Good Will Hunting, and planned to do it again with Chronicle.
On projects where he was the lead actor, the writer, or had an especially strong creative interest, Owen would continue working as a much more active producer.
The difference was that he wanted that to be a choice.
Not an obligation.
Second Take Films needed to be capable of developing several projects simultaneously even if Owen was shooting one movie, writing another, or working as an actor for an outside studio.
To achieve that, he needed to start hiring permanent staff.
Until then, he had almost always used the same structure.
People were hired for a specific amount of time for a particular project and, once production ended, that team was dissolved.
But that didn't mean established production companies like A24, Neon, and other similar companies didn't have permanent employees.
They did.
Development, production, finance, business, administration, and other teams that continued working even after a movie was finished.
That was precisely what Owen wanted to begin building.
He had no intention of hiring fifty people immediately.
Second Take Films was still a young production company, and a structure that large would only increase costs unnecessarily.
His initial target was around ten to fifteen permanent employees.
Edward was helping him with exactly that.
He had more than twenty years of experience in the business world, which meant he had far more experience than Owen when it came to designing internal structures, distributing responsibilities, creating hierarchies, and determining which positions a growing company actually needed.
Among all those future hires, one of the most important would be the President of Production.
That person would effectively become the main operational executive responsible for Second Take Films' movies once Owen greenlit a project.
Their job would be to oversee the development of each production, find and hire the right producers for every film, control budgets, schedules, and progress, coordinate the different projects running at the same time, and make sure the normal problems of a production were resolved without ending up directly on Owen's desk.
Above all, they would report directly to him.
That was important because Owen already had a fairly clear example of why he needed that structure.
Don't Breathe.
The script was finished.
His original idea had been to take it to A24 and propose a co-production. Owen would contribute roughly half the budget and the initial development, while A24 would handle physically putting the movie together.
It was a convenient option.
Owen would be able to maintain a certain degree of creative control and, between his investment, his writing credit, and his position as producer, he could negotiate a fairly strong share of the profits.
But there was still an obvious question.
Why give a significant part of the project to another production company if Second Take Films could eventually do exactly that work itself?
If he managed to build the structure he was planning, the process would be completely different.
Owen would hand the script to the President of Production and let the machinery start moving.
From there, the permanent team would study the project, prepare its initial estimates, develop a realistic budget, and determine what kind of production they needed.
That information would come back to Owen.
He would review the numbers, decide how much he wanted to invest, and either give it the green light or not.
Once approved, he would no longer need to personally keep track of every step.
The President of Production could hire the specific producer or producers for Don't Breathe, who would work only for that movie. Then they would begin casting, location scouting, scheduling the shoot, hiring department heads, and handling the enormous amount of work required before a camera ever started rolling.
Owen would still be involved in the important decisions.
He could approve the director.
The main cast.
A significant budget increase.
Major changes to the script.
Any creative or financial decision that could seriously alter the movie.
Those were the kinds of things that would still reach Owen.
But he didn't need to be physically present to resolve them.
If, for example, he was filming Frankenstein for three months, Second Take Films couldn't simply stop until he returned.
The projects had to keep moving forward.
The President of Production and the rest of the team could continue developing a movie.
When an important decision came up, they would simply present it to him.
They could send him a report with three finalist directors. How much each one was asking for, among other details.
Owen would review the options and decide.
This one.
Done.
He didn't need to personally take part in the first fifteen meetings or spend hours searching for candidates from scratch.
The same would apply to other decisions.
All of that could be handled through email, phone calls, or video calls from anywhere.
Even while he was on a shoot.
Even while Owen was right in the middle of filming.
That year, he had managed to push three major projects forward while still being heavily involved in their respective pre-productions: Good Will Hunting, Lights Out, and Black Mirror.
If he managed to step away from much of that work, it wasn't difficult to imagine Second Take Films increasing that number.
Owen had an advantage that no other production company could replicate.
The scripts.
He had too many stories inside his head. Movies and series that didn't exist in this world.
He could sit down and finish a new script every month if he wanted to.
If he managed to maintain that pace for several years, Second Take Films' catalog would grow at an enormous speed.
Every movie meant a new property.
At that point, it would stop being seen as simply a successful independent production company.
It could become one of the most important companies in the industry.
And live action was only one part of the plan.
Animation interested him especially.
Owen remembered far too many animated movies and series that didn't exist here. Some were small and strange projects. Others could become massive franchises.
Besides, animation had something Owen considered particularly attractive from a business standpoint.
Merchandising.
A good live-action movie could make a lot of money in theaters.
A major animated property could keep selling for years: toys, plushies, figures...
It was an especially powerful kind of intellectual property.
'Smiling Friends will be a good first step...' Owen thought as he brought his fork to his mouth.
That series would be small compared to what he imagined for the future, but it would serve as a way to begin building a different division within Second Take Films.
One idea inevitably led to another.
'Who knows... maybe in a few years I'll end up creating my own streaming platform.'
It sounded excessively ambitious.
Maybe even extreme for a production company that was still figuring out how to hire its first ten or fifteen permanent employees.
But Owen no longer looked at those kinds of ideas the same way he once had.
Not after discovering that Good Will Hunting had generated more than one hundred million dollars gross for him.
That number had completely changed the scale on which he could think.
Even if Owen financed Chronicle entirely on his own, there would still be around seventy million left from Good Will Hunting alone.
And that ignored the fact that Owen had already had more than twenty million in his account before that.
In simple terms, he was operating with around one hundred and twenty million dollars before even considering everything that was still to come.
And there was a lot still to come.
Frankenstein alone would earn him more than five million dollars.
Then there was Lights Out. His share of the box office would probably allow him to easily recover his investment and make several million dollars in profit again.
Finally, Black Mirror.
If, by the end of the year, some platform ended up paying thirty or forty million for several years of exclusive distribution rights, Second Take Films could keep another twenty or twenty-five million in margin before taxes and other corporate expenses.
Even after financing Chronicle with thirty million, he would still have an absurd amount of capital available.
Plus the money that would continue coming in.
Plus the movies that already belonged to Second Take Films and would continue generating income over time.
The problem was beginning to stop being how to get money.
The problem was what to do with it.
Rather than leave tens of millions sitting idle or invested traditionally and growing very slowly, he would rather make movies he already knew had worked in his previous life.
Dinner ended, and Owen and Jenna, who had arrived in the BMW, headed back home.
The next day, at exactly seven in the morning, Owen uploaded his first sketch to Instagram.
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