Hollywood Hunter

On May 21st, the 43rd Cannes Film Festival in France officially ended.

Simon did not rush to Cannes this year. Ella Deutschman went as usual. Giuseppe Tonadore's second feature film "Journey to Heaven", which was jointly invested by Gomen Films and several European film companies, entered the main competition. In the unit, it’s just that, compared to “Paradise Cinema” which won Palme d’Or under Simon’s operation last year, “Heavenly Journey” did nothing.

David Lynch's "My Heart Is Wild" won this year's Palme d'Or award in a severely polarized word-of-mouth controversy.

In the original time and space, because of the controversy, even the publisher of "My Heart is Wild" was not found, and the producer had to run the theater itself.

Simon doesn’t like "Wild Heart", but he did not stop Deutschman from buying the North American distribution rights of this film. In my memory, "Wild Heart" has received various criticisms, but the box office seems to be pretty good. Not bad.

In addition to "My Heart is Wild", Deutschman also bought another film from Cannes that is very niche for North America, called "Judou". The North American distribution rights for this film should have been Mira Max's, also won the 1991 Oscar nomination for best foreign language film.

From Simon’s earliest "Run Lola" to this year’s Oscar winner "Drive for Miss Daisy", plus the commercial success of films such as "Sex, Lies and Videotapes" and "My Left Foot", The Hollywood literary film market has clearly seen a resurgence, and major studios are making efforts one after another. Even the terminal cinema market has gradually opened up a complete line of literary cinema due to the continuous success of literary films in recent years.

The involvement of giants naturally squeezed the living space of independent film producers to a large extent.

After the continuous interception of "Paradise Cinema", "Sex, Lies and Videotapes" and "My Left Foot", although only one of the distribution rights was acquired by Daenerys Entertainment, the Weinstein brothers were as expected by Simon , In Hollywood increasingly difficult, at this time Miramax is almost unsustainable.

It was against this background that Gaomen Pictures obtained "Ju Dou" and plans to try to buy more Asian films to operate in North America in the future.

After the test of last year, Simon let go of the shackles of Ira Docman, and plans to increase the number of films released by Gaomen Films to more than 10 in the next two years, replacing Miramac in the original time and space. Sri Lanka’s industry status.

Speaking of it, not only Miramax, but Daenerys Entertainment's emergence is also squeezing another independent film producer that should have emerged this year, a new line.

"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" was originally New Line Pictures' first film with a global box office of over 100 million yuan. It was this film that established New Line's position in Hollywood and ultimately created the pinnacle of the "Lord of the Rings" series.

Now, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" has long been a project of Daenerys Entertainment and will be released this summer.

Daenerys Entertainment's New World Pictures has also begun to exert its strength in the field of horror films that New Line is good at. The success of the "Scream" series far exceeds that of New Line's pillars of the "Meng Ghost Street" series, New World Pictures It also successfully continued the horror movies of the "Hunter Chaser" series and the "Children in the Cornfield" series.

After the Easter schedule of "Children in the Cornfield 2" was released on April 13, with a production cost of 3 million US dollars, as of the end of May, the North American box office had been close to 25 million US dollars.

Following last year's "Hunting Ghost 2", "Hunting Ghost 3" will also be released at the end of the summer season in August.

Although the "Children in the Cornfield" and "Hunters" series can't compare with the box office revenue of the "Screaming" series, they can bring very stable revenue and profits to New World Pictures. The development of other projects provides a steady stream of funds.

Moreover, not only horror films, Simon has recently started to guide Danny Morris, the head of New World Pictures, to try another genre of commercial films with promising box office, vulgar films.

In the original time and space, in the 1990s, two major comedians headed by Kim Carey and Mike Myers opened the market of Hollywood vulgar **** movies in one fell swoop, Kim Carey's "Dumb and Agua", Mike May Paul's masterpieces such as "Ace Ace" have achieved outstanding results in the North American box office of over 100 million. It just so happens that these two comedy stars have risen with the support of the new line.

That's right, after completing the cut on Miramax, Simon's next goal is the new line.

The Friday after the Cannes Film Festival ended, that is, on May 25th, Hollywood’s 1990 summer vacation was officially opened.

Universal Pictures' "Back to the Future 3" and Paramount's "Firebird Attack" became the opening films of this summer.

After the “Back to the Future 2” at the end of last year’s fall from the first episode, Universal was obviously not confident in “Back to the Future 3”. It was only then that the final step of the series was released before the fierce competition in the summer.

However, the situation in the "Back to the Future" series is pretty good.

Paramount obviously has no information on "Firebird Attack", which naturally starts from the fact that Paramount "stolen" the two projects of "Rocket Expert" and "Firebird Attack" from Daenerys Entertainment last year. .

It was also the end of last year's schedule. Paramount had high hopes and the comic-based science fiction film "Rocket Expert" starring Tom Cruise and Meg Ryan, because of the impact of the film itself and "Batman: Hour of War" , The production budget of 45 million U.S. dollars and the announcement cost of 20 million U.S. dollars, in the end only recovered the box office of just over 43 million U.S. dollars, which is far below Paramount’s expectations for this project.

The "inside story" of the "Rocket Expert" series is not a secret in Hollywood. Daenerys Entertainment also took the opportunity to promote the idea that a project she fancyed might not be successful in the hands of others. This allowed Daenerys Entertainment to follow. The process of fighting for the copyright of film and television is obviously a lot easier.

In addition, in order to make room for "Rocket Expert", Paramount moved the originally successful Oliver Stone's new film "Born on July 4th" to this year's Easter schedule. The film was on April 20th. Released.

However, due to the lack of popularity of various nominations and awards during the awards season, although it has won unanimous praise from the media, "Born on July 4th" has a total box office of only 33 million in the five weeks before May 25th. U.S. dollars, although by virtue of word-of-mouth, "Born on July 4th" is finally expected to obtain a total North American box office of 50 million US dollars with a good lasting box office curve, but this result is still far lower than the original time and space of more than 70 million US dollars in North American box office. data.

Oliver Stone was initially dissatisfied with Paramount’s dropping his film on the Easter schedule. After the word-of-mouth and box office confirmation of "Born on July 4th", this Hollywood first-line director who has been in the limelight in recent years is very He unceremoniously criticized Paramount’s serious mistakes in its announcement strategy in the media, saying that "Born on July 4th" should have had a better box office.

Immediately after the launch of "Firebirds", the media's reputation was also a bad comment. This military film about the US Apache helicopter force, let alone hit the box office record of "High Aspirations" a few years ago, even if it was due. "Back to the Future 3" is far worse.

It can be said that Paramount has ‘smashed up’ three projects in a row.

Although in March before, Paramount Pictures produced the second box office dark horse "Hunting Red October", which closely followed the Valentine’s Day schedule in 1990, "Hunting Red October," but Simon knew that Barry Diller and Michael · Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg's deep foundation for Paramount has been defeated.

In the end, Martin Davis, chairman of Paramount Communications, who squeezed out the three outstanding executives of Barry Diller who were enough to support a large film company out of the company, had to sell Paramount to Wei Summer Redstone of Yacombe.

Palo Alto City in San Francisco.

The time is May 26. Apart from taking care of DC Cinema Universe and Daenerys Entertainment’s other businesses, Simon also flies to Silicon Valley frequently during this time, but rarely stays for a week like last time, usually on the same day. Will return.

Today is Saturday, Simon flew to San Francisco's destination to view the Internet cafe project led by AOL.

Prior to this, Westeros has completed the reorganization of the shares of Cisco, AOL and Eaglet.

The process of capital injection of AOL was completely completed, and Westeros' shareholding ratio increased to 75%.

At the same time, Westeros also completed the acquisition of a total of 42.5% of the shares of Cisco’s other shareholders at a valuation of 300 million US dollars. After the transaction, Westeros acquired a total of 127.5 million US dollars. The shareholding ratio in Cisco increased to 57.5%.

In addition, after a year of operation, Simon's initial capital injection into Eaglet has also been exhausted, and Eaglet has obviously not yet generated revenue that can maintain daily operations.

Westeros reinvested Igreat at a valuation of 20 million US dollars, which is also US$20 million.

Simon originally gave Tim Berners Lee a 10% stake in the company. In this capital injection, Simon did not deliberately reduce the proportion of Tim Berners Lee’s shareholding. He also proposed to Li was loaned a sum of money in the form of interest loans to allow him to maintain his shareholding.

However, Tim Berners-Lee, who tends to be conservative in character, did not suddenly add 2 million in debt to himself, so his equity was compressed to 5%.

Westero's shareholding in Igreat therefore increased to 95%.

Personnel aspects.

John Chambers, who originally worked at IBM, officially joined Cisco at the invitation of Simon and temporarily held the position of president of the company. Simon plans to let John Chambers take over when his contract expires at the end of next year.

Carol Bartz from SUN and Jeff Bezos, who was pulled into the Internet industry by Simon from Wall Street in advance, quickly entered their roles and have begun to control the daily operations of Igreat.

For the last AOL, the management will temporarily not make adjustments.

However, in the past month, due to the continuous increase in exposure and its own marketing efforts, as well as the official launch of Eaglet’s graphical interface browser and portal business, AOL’s performance has seen a small explosion. .

In just one month, the number of AOL users increased by 38,000, and the total number of users exceeded 100,000 in one fell swoop.

In fact, this is actually the result of the accumulation of PC users in the United States since the 1970s. The huge user base already has all this.

In Simon's memory, when the Internet began to explode, AOL's user base exceeded the tens of millions in 1996 from hundreds of thousands in 1993.

While expanding new users, Steve Case also very efficiently upgraded the original users of AOL free of charge. On the basis of retaining some of the original online game functions, he installed a modem that is more suitable for accessing the World Wide Web. And IE browser.

The next step of the technical team led by Tim Berners Lee is to further improve the dynamic web page and graphic display functions of the IE browser, so as to integrate the online games and other functions originally operated by AOL into the IE browser. .

In order to achieve this goal, Simon had dug another computer language development team from that company before he dug Carol Bartz from Sun.

In the original time and space, this unheard-of team originally under SUN introduced the Java language that is more powerful than the C language in the following years, and further introduced the embedded language JavaScript, which greatly improves the display function of Internet web pages.

In order to be able to get this team, Simon and SUN agreed that the team’s expenses would be borne by Eaglet. The patents for the Java language originally planned to be developed are still owned by SUN, but at the same time the patents for the JavaScript embedded language for web pages are owned by Eagles. Owned by special company.

Although JavaScript still needs about a year to complete, with the cooperation of the IE team, many functions have been implemented in advance.

The Igreat portal, which seems to have suddenly appeared, as well as the online news, e-mail, personal homepage, and online forums within the website have attracted more and more multimedia and public attention during this period.

In a shop on a commercial street near the Eaglet Company.

A large group of people including Simon, Tim Berners Lee, Carol Butts, John Chambers, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Case gathered here.

If someone can take a picture at this time, they will definitely find out in a few years what a strong lineup this will be.

The shop is the prototype of the Internet cafe led by AOL. This is the result of the AOL team that has been busy for nearly a month after moving to Silicon Valley.

Compared with the misty and dim Internet cafes in Simon’s memory, the Internet cafes in front of you can really be called'bars.' Simon’s Internet cafe plan is not to make money, but to promote the products of AOL, Igreat and even Cisco. , The shop basically follows the casual layout of a traditional coffee shop.

The model in front of me is a very spacious 50-square-meter store layout. There are only 20 latest IBM desktop computers equipped with Windows 3.0 system, or couples side by side, or a small private space with a block. A word arrangement suitable for communication.

Not only surf the Internet, but also provide a variety of drinks and snacks in the Internet cafe, as much as possible to give people a relaxed and comfortable family-style environment.

In terms of price, Simon would really like to adopt the subsidy operation model in memory, after all, it is for brand promotion.

However, because AOL specifically registered its subsidiary'InternetBar' brand and introduced IBM's 40% shareholding investment, profits must still be considered. Therefore, the hourly Internet price is set at $3, and additional beverages and snacks are different. Count.