22: Chapter 22: The Deal — Adam’s arrival got the kind of welcome that hadn’t been there on his first visit.
Staff walked him straight into a well-appointed reception room, where Derek and a lawyer from the agency were already waiting.
After a short break and a tray of food someone had brought in, Dean walked in.
“Have a good few days off?”
“Great few days,” Adam said.
“I’ve mostly just been thinking about how nice it is to actually have money for once.”
He let that sit for a second, casually implying more than he was technically saying—that whatever was coming next, he already expected to walk away from this conversation considerably richer.
Dean’s expression flattened into something between a wince and a tired smile.
With a lawyer already in the room, there wasn’t much point pretending this was anything other than what it was.
“All right.
What’s your number for the rights?”
Adam held up three fingers.
“Thirty million?
That’s not happening.”
Dean’s expression shifted fast.
“Hear me out,” Adam said.
“Conservative estimates already put this film’s total return somewhere close to a hundred million once everything’s counted.
Box office, licensing, the rest of it.
Thirty million doesn’t put you in the red.
It just means a smaller piece of a very large number.”
Even with Adam holding the rights, New Line’s own cut would still be substantial—just less than it would’ve been if they’d controlled everything outright.
Dean opened his mouth to push back on the number anyway, but Adam kept going before he could.
“Two scripts for future installments, and I take a producer credit on both.
I’ll cooperate fully on promotion.
That’s the whole offer.”
It was, in practical terms, about as good a deal as New Line could ask for.
A strong script mattered more than almost anything else for a film at this budget level, and having Adam attached to write and promote the next two installments gave them a real shot at recouping the thirty million before they’d even gotten to the rest of the projected revenue.
He wasn’t asking for a cut of the sequels themselves—just a flat fee for the writing and producing work, nothing more.
Dean sat with that for a second.
“Give me a minute,” he said, and stepped out.
“You really think they’ll go for thirty million?” Derek asked once Dean was gone, clearly unable to hold the question in any longer.
He’d assumed something closer to ten would be the realistic ceiling.
Three times that felt like a different conversation entirely.
“They will,” Adam said.
“I’ve run the numbers more than once.
This deal pays for itself almost immediately.
If they pass, there are other studios who won’t.”
He mentioned, almost as an aside, that Jeff Robinov over at Warner Bros.
had already expressed real interest in the rights at the party.
Derek didn’t need much more convincing than that.
As Adam’s direct agent, his own cut of a deal this size would run into the hundreds of thousands once the agency’s commission structure played out.
It was the first time he fully understood, on a personal level, exactly what it meant to represent a client at this level.
Adam had no complaints about the cut the agency took.
Their backing had gotten him into rooms he never would have reached cold, pitching a script with no name attached to it and no track record behind him.
To Adam’s mind, that was a fair trade, not a tax.
A few minutes later, the door opened again—this time with Shay walking in alongside Dean.
“Who said anything about giving the rights to someone else?” Shay said, half-amused, clearly having overheard at least part of the earlier conversation.
“Thirty million?
Fine.
We’ll take it.”
He’d clearly weighed it out already—two guaranteed sequels, a director with a perfect track record so far attached to both, and a number that, while steep upfront, set the studio up for a much larger long-term payoff than trying to squeeze every dollar out of this one negotiation.
“Deal,” Adam said, smiling.
The mood in the room loosened considerably after that.
With the rights settled, Shay moved straight into the next conversation.
“I want New Line backing your next project too.
Full stop.
Whatever you need, we’re behind it.” He looked at Adam directly.
“And I mean that—creative control stays with you.
The producer we send just watches the budget.
Casting, story, all of it is yours.”
It was about as much authority as a studio could reasonably hand a director, though Adam understood the real reason behind the offer well enough.
This next film was still going to be a low-budget production.
Generosity got considerably harder to extend once a budget crossed into the tens of millions—at that scale, even far more established directors than Adam routinely lost a meaningful amount of creative control to the people funding them.
“I appreciate that,” Adam said.
“But for the release itself, I’d actually suggest bringing another studio in to share distribution.
It’ll get us more screens and a better slot than going alone.”
Shay considered it only briefly before agreeing.
It made sense the more he thought about it.
Saw’s success had made New Line a target as much as a winner this season—other studios weren’t thrilled about getting outperformed by a film one-tenth the size of their own slate.
Sharing some of the upside with another player wasn’t generosity.
It was insurance.
New Line wasn’t yet one of the handful of studios big enough to absorb that kind of resentment without consequence, and a little goodwill now was a small price to avoid getting squeezed out later.