"I wanted to know… if you'd be interested in a role for Wednesday season two."
Owen stayed silent for a few seconds before asking, "Is this an offer from you or from Netflix?"
Because there was an important difference.
One possibility was that Jenna simply wanted to bring him into the season because of their relationship and because she wanted to work with him.
The other was more serious: that there was genuine interest from the studio and Netflix themselves, probably seeing the enormous marketing potential of having Owen inside the series alongside Jenna.
"Both," Jenna answered honestly. "There are people inside the team who want you. Burton, John Papsidera, and Netflix too, seeing the impact there'd be if you joined the cast."
'John…' Owen thought immediately.
John Papsidera again.
The same legendary casting director who, just days earlier, had been evaluating him for Superman.
The guy was literally handling two of the biggest castings in the industry at the same time: a massive superhero movie and one of the most successful series on the planet.
For a second, Owen wasn't sure whether to feel flattered or panic.
Because if he accepted a major role in Wednesday season two, he probably wouldn't be able to do Superman due to scheduling conflicts.
Which meant his Superman role wasn't as secure as he had originally thought.
From what he knew through Jenna, Wednesday season two would begin filming sometime between January and February of 2024.
Meanwhile, Superman, based on the information DC had been giving finalists in order to coordinate schedules and availability, would start production around October and have a shooting schedule of four to five months.
That meant filming until around late February, and being Superman, there wouldn't be any real flexibility.
As the absolute lead of the project, he would have to be available practically one hundred percent of the time. It wasn't like being a supporting character who shoots for a few weeks and is done.
Not to mention possible reshoots or schedule changes.
"Is it a character who'll have a romance with Wednesday?" Owen asked.
That seemed strange to him.
Especially because Jenna had pushed hard to reduce the romantic focus of the show and move away from love triangles in order to give more weight to the horror and mystery elements.
It would be odd for them to suddenly add a new character solely to make him Wednesday's love interest.
For Netflix, that would be pure gold.
The hottest young couple in Hollywood having an on-screen romance inside the platform's biggest series.
The marketing would practically sell itself.
"No," Jenna replied, shaking her head. "Although they did want to create something like that for you."
Owen raised an eyebrow slightly.
"Thankfully, Alfred and Miles stood their ground," Jenna continued. "They preferred keeping the supporting character they already had written instead of changing the entire dynamic just for marketing."
Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, the creators and showrunners of the series, still held a lot of creative power within the project.
And apparently, they had managed to stop the idea of turning Owen's character into "Wednesday's boyfriend."
Owen nodded slowly. He liked that a lot more.
Honestly, if he ended up combining it with Superman, he needed it to be a smaller, manageable role schedule-wise. He didn't want to get trapped in another gigantic project as the absolute co-lead.
"So… what character?" he asked curiously.
"Bruno Yuson," Elizabeth answered before Jenna could, unable to contain her excitement. "A new transfer student at Nevermore. A werewolf."
Owen looked at her, amused.
Clearly, his mother was already pretty invested in the series.
Elizabeth had ended up watching Wednesday with Sarah and had genuinely liked it. Even more so now that Sarah would probably audition for Agnes, another one of the season's new characters.
Jenna then started explaining a bit more about Bruno and the conversations she'd had with Netflix and production.
The character already existed in the season drafts. He was an important supporting role, the kind of part that would normally pay somewhere between fifteen and thirty thousand dollars per episode depending on the actor.
A completely impossible rate for Owen at this stage.
His quote was already in a completely different category. And there was another real concern from the studio as well:
That someone with the prestige profile Owen was building might not want to get involved in a teen streaming series.
That was why they had gone to Jenna first. And they knew CAA would handle any negotiation by driving Owen's market value way up.
What they wanted was an exploratory meeting. To talk with him. See if he connected with the character and the tone of the series.
If the creative conversation worked, the role would practically be his.
There wouldn't be a normal casting process.
Especially because Bruno Yuson wasn't an extremely technical role or a physically ultra-specific character. At Owen's current level, it would've almost been insulting to make him compete in standard auditions against up-and-coming actors who were just trying to break into the industry.
Make a Cannes Best Actor winner compete for a supporting role?
CAA wouldn't take that well at all.
'Enid Sinclair's love interest…' Owen thought with a slightly strange expression.
Bruno Yuson's storyline revolved heavily around Enid. A new werewolf transferred to Nevermore who ended up creating tension with Ajax and forming a sort of romantic triangle.
From what Jenna explained, the character had a strong presence in the early episodes, which were currently the most developed scripts, and then gradually lost prominence toward the end of the season before eventually leaving the school.
That was perfect for Owen.
Especially because it meant he probably wouldn't have to come back for a potential third season, something that already seemed almost guaranteed considering the monstrous success of the series.
He stayed quiet for a few seconds before looking at Jenna.
"So… is that all?" Owen asked with a small suspicious smile. "Netflix asked you to help convince me using couple marketing and to get me cheaper?"
Elizabeth immediately burst out laughing.
Jenna, meanwhile, looked at him somewhere between annoyed and amused. "I'm not going to lie to you and say that doesn't play a part," she admitted. "Of course they know the kind of impact that would have."
She paused briefly before continuing.
"But the main reason I agreed to try convincing you is because I want to work with you."
"When filming starts, we're going to be shooting in Europe for five or six months," she explained. "And if you accept, even if your character doesn't have that many shooting days, at least we'd get to spend part of that time together over there."
For a moment, Owen simply looked at her and couldn't help smiling at her affectionately.
"I wasn't expecting such an open display of affection," he said. "You're going to make me blush in front of my mother."
Jenna immediately frowned. "Shut up."
Under the table, she quickly kicked him in the leg.
Owen let out a small laugh. "I'm just joking," he said, still amused. "And yeah… honestly, that would be a lot of months apart. I'd miss you too."
Jenna's expression softened slightly when she heard that.
Then she quickly returned to her more practical tone. "So, what do you say?"
Owen thought for a moment before answering, "I can have that meeting next Thursday."
Right now, his schedule was far too packed.
He was at a key stage writing and organizing the new Black Mirror episodes, along with all the pre-production work that came with them.
And above all, he had the final Superman test on Monday.
That alone was already taking up a lot of mental space.
Jenna nodded approvingly. "Good. Then I'll tell Netflix to contact Larry or your agent to set it up."
Owen nodded back while thinking once again about Bruno Yuson.
Aside from the Jenna situation and not wanting to spend that many months apart, the project had several pretty attractive advantages.
The first was the money.
Even negotiating a relatively "reasonable" quote for his current level, it would still only amount to around twenty-five to thirty-five actual shooting days spread across several months.
He could easily make more than seven hundred thousand dollars.
The second advantage was perhaps the most interesting one to him:
It would be the first time in a while where he'd only have to act.
No carrying an entire project on his shoulders.
No financing.
No constantly supervising editing or production.
Just show up, act, and enjoy himself.
Meeting important people like Tim Burton, working on a massive set in Europe, wearing weird costumes, and simply having fun inside a huge production without all the usual pressure he constantly placed on himself.
To Owen, honestly, it almost sounded like an extremely well-paid recreational vacation.
And besides, from the little he knew about the character, Bruno didn't seem like a particularly exhausting role emotionally or technically.
Of course, he'd still give one hundred percent whenever he acted. But it wouldn't be something like Good Will Hunting.
Then there was the scheduling aspect. He could actually make it work even if he got Superman.
If Wednesday season two started filming in February, both projects could coexist.
Because Superman would probably wrap right around late February.
And if he closed the deal with Netflix, Owen could negotiate something pretty simple: that Bruno Yuson's scenes not be filmed at the beginning of production, but instead later toward the middle of the shoot.
With that, the scheduling problem practically disappeared.
The same thing applied to Jenna. If she got Lois Lane, she wouldn't really have a scheduling conflict between Superman and Wednesday either.
The role of Lois, while important, wouldn't require constant presence throughout the full five months of filming the way Superman would.
Normally, that kind of co-lead worked in specific blocks, totaling around sixty to seventy actual shooting days overall.
That meant that if Superman started production in October, Jenna would probably finish most of her work around mid or late November.
Dinner ended, and later that night Owen drove his mother back to her house before returning to Jenna's apartment.
After that, they watched a movie together and ended up going to bed relatively early.
Both of them had to wake up early the next morning.
Before going to sleep, however, Owen checked the Good Will Hunting box office numbers one more time.
What he saw immediately brought a smile to his face.
-Thursday: 1.1 million dollars.
Only in 150 theaters.
The word of mouth kept growing.
Between the limited Thursday opening the previous week and the first weekend, the film had accumulated approximately 7.9 million dollars.
Now another four days had passed:
-Monday: 850k
-Tuesday: 780k
-Wednesday: 820k
-Thursday: 1.1 million
That added another 3.55 million.
The total had already reached 11.45 million dollars.
In just eight days.
And the most important thing wasn't just the gross total.
The per-theater average was still excellent.
The movie wasn't collapsing after the initial hype. On the contrary, the word of mouth seemed to grow stronger every single day.
Tomorrow, in just a few hours, Neon would expand the film to more than six hundred theaters for the second weekend.
That could blow everything wide open.
Owen quickly did the math in his head. He had a sixty percent post-theatrical split.
That meant that from the current 11.45 million, approximately half stayed with exhibitors, and from the remaining half, sixty percent went to him and forty percent to Neon.
So his real share so far was around 3.4 million dollars.
Considering that producing the movie had cost around thirteen million, he would need approximately 43.5 million dollars in total box office revenue to fully recover the initial investment solely through the post-theatrical split.
It was practically impossible to hit that number that very weekend.
But judging by the film's current performance, the per-theater average, and the continuously growing word of mouth, it was almost certain that Good Will Hunting would pass the break-even point during the third week once the nationwide expansion fully happened. And from that point onward, almost everything would be profit.
Especially because the international market still hadn't even launched yet, something Neon was already planning.
And that wasn't even mentioning everything that came after the theatrical run: Blu-ray, VOD, streaming, television licensing…
There was still a massive amount of money there too.
Owen was already fairly certain he would end up making more from this movie than he had from Paranormal Activity. Excluding IP sales.
From theatrical box office alone, Paranormal Activity had generated him approximately 14.4 million dollars thanks to his twenty percent post-theatrical deal.
But here, the difference was brutal:
On Good Will Hunting, he had sixty percent.
Three times the participation.
That completely changed the scale of the profits, even if hypothetically Good Will Hunting never reached the 144 million worldwide gross that Paranormal Activity had achieved.
For example, if the movie ended up reaching 100 million globally, Owen's share would land somewhere around 30 million dollars.
More than double what he had made from Paranormal Activity despite significantly lower box office numbers.
And the weekend was good, very good.
By Sunday, Good Will Hunting had an extremely successful weekend.
The numbers were as follows:
-Friday: 6.5 million
-Saturday: 8.2 million
Meanwhile, Chelsea Hale was getting ready to go see the movie on Sunday.
For personal reasons, she still hadn't been able to watch it until that Sunday, which was pretty unusual considering that practically everyone around her had been talking about it ever since Cannes.
In her college circle, on social media, and among friends, there barely seemed to be any other topic.
First came the buzz from the festival.
Then the viral vlog.
And now the massive box office success.
'Thankfully I avoided spoilers,' Chelsea thought, having been extremely careful with social media and with what people told her.
In barely ten days, the movie had already passed 26 million dollars. More than double its budget, and that still didn't include Sunday's full grosses yet.
What was truly impressive was that only two weeks had passed, and movies like this, with excellent reviews and this much word of mouth, could easily stay in theaters for ten to fifteen weeks.
Not even counting the international release yet.
The projections were already extremely positive.
Another hit for her former college classmate and, technically, her boss for a brief period: Owen Ashford.
'Does he only make hits?' Chelsea thought while finishing getting ready in front of the mirror, still somewhat incredulous.
Because looking at it objectively, the numbers were starting to look absurd:
Paranormal Activity: 144 million
The Spectacular Now: 68 million
Good Will Hunting: 26 million and climbing incredibly fast
Three movies written and starring him.
In two of them, he had also personally produced and financed the projects.
The only exception was A24's The Spectacular Now.
In total, more than 235 million dollars at the worldwide box office.
And the most ridiculous detail of all:
The combined budget of those three films was only around 17.02 million dollars.
Not even counting his short films.
Chelsea's own situation had also changed massively since starring in Black Mirror: White Bear.
First, she had officially joined SAG-AFTRA.
That was enormous for someone who, not long ago, didn't even have representation and was only doing student short films.
On top of that, she had signed with Innovative Artists, a major agency with offices in Los Angeles and New York specializing in film, television, theater, comedy, and production.
Technically, it was considered a "mid-tier" agency, below the Big Three:
CAA, WME y UTA.
But Chelsea honestly didn't see that as a bad thing.
Quite the opposite.
She knew perfectly well that simply being part of an agency like that already placed her within a very small percentage of actors who actually managed to enter the professional industry.
And there were real advantages too.
Innovative Artists handled less volume than the giant agencies, yes, but precisely because of that, agents could dedicate more individual time to each client.
She didn't have to compete internally for attention against twenty A-list superstars inside the same agency.
And because it was a smaller, more flexible structure, they often closed deals faster for independent films or mid-budget projects, movies under twenty-five million dollars, where the giant agencies sometimes didn't even focus that heavily.
Being the lead of the first episode of Black Mirror, the new series created by the guy literally all of Hollywood was talking about, had suddenly brought her all of those benefits at once.
For the first time, she truly felt like her career was moving forward, all thanks to winning that casting call.
Owen had even mentioned her by name on Jimmy Kimmel Live!.
That alone had already made quite a few people start recognizing her more, while the hype surrounding Black Mirror kept growing even before its release.
'I wonder what the other two episodes are like…' Chelsea thought with genuine curiosity.
She had no idea.
But the first one had already impacted her deeply. Especially the final twist.
When she first received the audition scenes, she never imagined the true nature of the story.
For almost the entire episode, the protagonist Victoria seemed like a victim.
A terrified, confused woman being hunted down by "hunters," while the people around her simply recorded everything on their phones instead of helping.
Then came the punch.
Victoria wasn't a victim.
She was a convicted criminal.
Together with her fiancé, she had kidnapped and murdered a six-year-old girl, while she herself filmed the murder.
As punishment, her memory was erased every night through a device that forced her to wake up confused the next day and relive the exact same terror all over again from scratch.
Chelsea hadn't expected that at all when she first read the full script. Honestly, she had been fascinated by the chance to play a character like that.
Because Victoria completely changed meaning depending on the point in the story.
At first she was a victim.
Then she became the perpetrator.
It forced the audience to reevaluate all the empathy they had felt for forty minutes.
Chelsea could already perfectly imagine the discussions the episode would generate once it premiered.
A lot of people would completely reject Victoria after the final reveal. But she was also sure others would think the punishment was far too brutal, even considering how horrible her crime was.
'Did Owen come up with that?' Chelsea thought, feeling a strange mixture of admiration and disbelief.
It was already obvious that Owen Ashford was an incredible screenwriter.
But it was still shocking seeing the quality of his stories one after another.
And on top of that, there was the acting side.
The guy had just won Best Actor at Cannes Film Festival, and Chelsea had already read articles and comments saying he should even be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor.
She finally finished getting ready and walked downstairs.
She was at her parents' house.
She was going to watch the movie with them and with her fourteen-year-old younger brother, Jack.
Most of her friends had already seen it, so honestly, she preferred going with her family. Besides, she liked it better that way.
With the money she earned from White Bear, Chelsea had tried to give practically all of it to her parents so they could use it for Jack's future college expenses.
Her family wasn't rich.
Middle class. Comfortable within reason, but nowhere close to the world of enormous money Chelsea had started seeing ever since entering Hollywood.
Her parents had spent years saving and working hard to pay USC's extremely expensive tuition. Chelsea knew perfectly well how much it had cost them.
That was why she wanted to give something back.
But her father, stubborn as always, had initially refused outright to accept the money.
After several arguments and a lot of insistence from both Chelsea and her mother, they finally managed to convince him to accept ten thousand dollars.
The money went directly into Jack's college fund.
Eventually, they arrived at the theater.
The auditorium was completely full.
A normal theater room with roughly three hundred people, and not a single empty seat.
The movie started.
Both Chelsea and Jack had extremely high expectations.
Especially Jack.
Chelsea had practically raised him to be a cinephile from a young age, making an effort to teach him to genuinely love cinema and not just explosive superhero movies or empty action films.
And even then, the movie completely surpassed their expectations.
Chelsea now understood why there was so much noise surrounding this film.
Why there were so many comments, the constant conversation, the exploding box office, and why Owen had won Best Actor at Cannes.
Then that scene arrived.
"It's not your fault."
Chelsea immediately felt her eyes fill with tears.
Beside her, her mother couldn't hold back either.
But what truly surprised her was something else.
She slightly turned her head and saw her father with visibly watery eyes.
'Dad?' Chelsea thought in surprise.
That, she absolutely hadn't expected.
Her father was stubborn, reserved, old-school.
He had mostly gone just to accompany them on a family outing, and yet that scene had almost made him cry right there in the theater.
When the screen finally faded to black, the entire auditorium began applauding.
"That was cinema, Chels!" Jack said enthusiastically while clapping. "Your ex-boyfriend made cinema!"
Chelsea, still applauding, turned her head to glare at him, "He is not my ex-boyfriend!" she exclaimed indignantly.
They hadn't even really had anything serious enough to call it that.
Jack let out an amused laugh while continuing to clap.
Sunday ended, and Good Will Hunting closed the day with 5.1 million dollars.
The domestic total had already reached 31.1 million.
Monday arrived, and early that morning, Owen headed toward Warner Bros. studios for his final audition for the role of Superman.
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