“Let’s pick this back up once Saw has finished its run,” Adam said, shaking his head with a slight smile.
“It will be a lot easier to talk about my next project once the dust settles.”
Jeff Robinov nodded, not pushing the issue any further.
Given his established relationship with Michael Ovitz, the Warner Bros.
executive figured that as long as his studio came in with a highly competitive number, there would be little reason for Adam to look anywhere else.
Of all the players in this town, very few could outmatch Warner Bros.’s resources in a bidding war.
They didn’t need to play unfairly; they simply had more capital to offer.
“Enjoy the rest of the party,” Robinov said.
“Michael and I have a few more people to talk to tonight.”
He gave Adam and Angelina Jolie a knowing look before heading off into the crowd.
“Adam, that was incredible,” Jolie said the moment they were alone again, practically glowing.
Watching him hold his own in back-to-back conversations with men who ran half the industry had clearly done something to how she saw him—admiration, mostly, with something warmer mixed in underneath it.
Adam felt the pull of that look more than he expected to.
The two of them left the party not long after and headed back toward his hotel together.
What happened once they got there stayed between the two of them.
The next morning, the bright October sun came in through a gap in the curtains, waking them both.
“Could you get those?” Adam said, nodding toward the window.
Jolie got up, pulled the heavy curtains shut, and came back to settle in beside him.
His phone rang before either of them could fully relax.
He answered, and Derek’s voice came through the receiver, more energized than usual.
“Adam—Shay wants to sit down and talk about the Saw rights.”
Adam felt a sharp spark in his chest.
This was the call he had been waiting for.
The percentage of the box office, as good as it was, had never been the real prize.
The underlying rights were where the actual fortune sat.
“No problem,” Adam said.
“Come by yourself too, and make sure you line up a lawyer for me.”
“We have plenty of legal consultants on retainer at CAA.
I’ll have someone there.”
“Two-thirty.
New Line’s offices.”
Adam hung up, unable to keep the excitement entirely off his face.
“What is it?” Jolie asked, noticing immediately.
There was no reason to keep it from her.
“The rights to everything Saw could become after this—sequels, licensing, all of it—that belongs to me.
New Line wants to buy the whole thing outright.” He paused, running the calculations.
“I’m thinking somewhere north of twenty million dollars.”
That was the absolute floor, as far as Adam was concerned.
The real long-term value of those rights was almost certainly closer to a hundred million, but realizing that kind of return required infrastructure—distribution lines and industry connections only a small handful of studios possessed.
Twenty to thirty million was close to as high as any of them would go for an upfront buyout.
New Line happened to be the one most willing to pay near the top of that range.
“Twenty million dollars,” Jolie repeated, the number clearly not fully registering the first time she said it out loud.
The average person barely cleared a few thousand dollars a month, and most people, herself included, couldn’t have produced a thousand dollars in actual cash if their life depended on it.
Twenty million wasn’t a number she could meaningfully picture.
Something quiet and deeply calculating settled into her thoughts as she sat there.
The legal implications of marriage and shared assets crossed her mind in a flash of ambition.
She didn’t say anything about it.
Not yet.
Later that afternoon, Adam sat down for a long, unhurried lunch at a quiet upscale restaurant near the hotel.
He had a car deliver a meal to the room for Jolie while he ate alone, taking his time over the food in a way that would have felt indulgent to him only a few months earlier.
It wasn’t an exorbitant lunch by the standards he was about to start operating under, but it hadn’t been that long since it would have been.
Once he finished, he caught a taxi over to New Line.
Inside Shay’s office, the mood was considerably less relaxed.
“You just handed him the sequel rights?” Shay said, his voice echoing off the walls.
“Is this how you are running film selection around here?”
Dean stood there and took it.
It was the kind of dressing-down that happens entirely after the fact.
Before Saw became a phenomenon, giving up the long-term rights in exchange for securing the director’s upfront investment had been a completely sound trade.
Nobody could have known, walking into that initial negotiation, that the film would outperform every projection in the building.
Shay knew that too, somewhere underneath the anger.
But there was value in making sure Dean understood exactly how costly the oversight had turned out to be.
Dean, still early enough in his career that walking away over one bad afternoon wasn’t an option, absorbed the criticism quietly and waited it out.
Once Shay had said what he needed to say, his tone shifted back to business.
“When we sit down with him about the rights, you open the negotiation.
Once we hit a number that feels close, I will step in.”
“Understood,” Dean said.
Walking back into New Line’s offices that afternoon, Adam noticed the difference immediately.
Everything about how the staff treated him this time felt several degrees warmer, built on a foundation of absolute respect.