Hollywood Hunter

After winning Zhou's "Toy Story 2" again, "Ghosts in Disguise" ranked second.

After experiencing a 38% drop in the box office the following week, the third week of "Ghost in Disguise" was released, the decline narrowed to 23%, and it received 17.65 million U.S. dollars, and the cumulative box office reached 77.66 million U.S. dollars in the three weeks of its release.

Daenerys Entertainment confirmed that it won another 100 million box office club work in 1994.

Paramount's sequel to the classic sci-fi series "Star Trek 7: Star Trek" slipped from second to third place on the list. In the week following its release, the film’s box office dropped by 31%, with a total of 15.94 million U.S. dollars and a cumulative total of 39.05 million U.S. dollars in the two weeks. It is estimated that the total domestic box office of 60 million to 70 million US dollars is not a big seller, but it is as stable as ever. Paramount will definitely continue this series.

"Interview with the Vampire" starring Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt ranked fourth. The decline narrowed to 19% in the past week, and it earned $14.11 million. This vampire movie had a cumulative box office of $67.92 million in three weeks. Because of this good trend, the chances of "Interview with Vampires" hitting billion-dollar clubs have increased significantly.

Ranked fifth is "Terror Zone" produced by MGM. In the third week of its release, the film's box office dropped by 27%, with a total of $10.53 million and a cumulative box office of $53.03 million.

In addition to the top five, Disney's "Cool Tiaozi" earned 9.64 million US dollars in the first week of its painting, and ranked sixth on the list. This black crime comedy with a production cost of only 10 million US dollars performed better than expected. Of course, it is only relative to the cost. It is estimated that the total domestic box office of the film is about 30 million US dollars. It is a small profit, but it is far from comparable to a series of blockbusters.

The seventh-ranked Halloween horror film "The Mortuary Haunted Incident", which ranked seventh on the list last week, remained unchanged this week, with a box office drop of 33% and a gross of 6.39 million U.S. dollars. The cumulative box office was 99.61 million U.S. dollars.

Sony Pictures’ $60 million men’s pregnancy gimmick comedy "Little One" fell 49% the next week after losing its start. With only $4.99 million left at the box office, it fell from sixth place last week to eighth this week. It is a famous position, and the cumulative box office in two weeks was only 14.79 million US dollars.

Arnold Schwarzenegger's new film had a rather bleak start, and the next week was a deep drop of 49%, even the initially expected threshold of 30 million is far away. Because there were only more than US$2,800 left in the next week, most theaters have removed their canvases after December 1, which is basically two weeks off the shelf.

Frequent losses for a year in a row have made the industry news that Sony is planning to withdraw from Hollywood.

In the past, Sony has been holding on until it can barely be regarded as Yunkai Yueming. In addition to supporting its own interests in the hardware industry such as video recorders, DVDs, and high-definition Blu-rays with content, there is also the occasional success of this company. The results are not so ugly.

This time, because Daenerys Entertainment Group's overwhelming position in Hollywood has severely squeezed the living space of other studios, the stronger the stronger, the weaker the weaker, and the harder it is for Sony to maintain its efforts.

There was a lot of rumors in the circle, but Simon knew that Sony still had no plans to withdraw from Hollywood.

At least not in the short term.

This can be regarded as the obsession of Sony founder Akio Morita.

Because Sony invested in Columbia Pictures and caused huge losses under the toss of two unreliable managers, Akio Morita took the blame and resigned as chairman. However, the influence of the business tycoon on Sony is still there.

On the other hand, and also the main reason, the promotion of DVD technology is imminent, because the DVD standard is temporarily divided into two camps. In order to gain an advantage in the DVD promotion process and not repeat the mistakes of the VCR business that year, Sony must stick to its own Advantages in content resources.

It is in the interest of Daenerys Entertainment Group that Sony stays in Hollywood.

Just as Simon secretly pushed Vivendi to acquire Disney.

Daenerys Entertainment, which is a major Hollywood studio controlled by foreign companies, is able to suppress it either explicitly or implicitly. If Sony lets go of Columbia and falls into the hands of local federal companies again, and Daenerys Entertainment bullies people again, some people may look down on it.

Simon once considered that if Sony can't hold on, Daenerys Entertainment's latest 10 cooperation projects will give each other one. Now that it was certain that Sony had no intention of quitting, Simon dismissed that idea.

The box office week from November 25 to December 1 ends, and the Thanksgiving holiday schedule ends smoothly.

On December 2nd, a new box office week started. The public temporarily returned their energy to work. The North American film market entered a deserted period between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

However, this week there is still a commercial film "Heaven Is Difficult" that opened more than 1,000 screens. The film was produced by Fox Pictures, with 1,286 screens. It mainly tells about three young people who robbed a small town bank. For a series of hilarious stories, Fox obviously didn't have much confidence in the film, so he would put it in the deserted schedule on December 2, probably in anticipation of a miracle.

In addition to "Difficulty in Heaven", there are three other small-scale launches of new films this week. They are adaptations of classics produced by Daenerys Entertainment's Gaomen Films, "Little Women" and Paramount's. The biographical film "The Poet and His Lover" released by Orion Pictures and the documentary "Bauhaus" produced by Warner Bros.

Once "Little Women" was produced by Sony Pictures, both at the box office and awards were very good, Winona Ryder also nominated the Oscar for Best Actress with this movie

It is the routine of Daenerys Entertainment.

Simon also adjusted the main creative lineup of the original film in his memory. The roles of Susan Sarandon and Kirsten Dunst remained unchanged, mainly the heroine, because they have always been to Winona Ryder. I didn't feel it, this time it was replaced by Mia Koshina, who I met at the Sundance Film Festival at the beginning of the year.

In Simon's view, the Russian actress who was born as a Canadian child star is not much worse than Winona Ryder in acting. All she lacks is opportunity.

Hollywood is like this, or the whole world is like this.

Some people strive for nothing, and some people just sit back and enjoy their achievements, almost squandering the resources that others dream of.

Already standing at the top of the pyramid, Simon had no intention of changing this state.

In fact, it cannot be changed.

After all, Simon himself is the biggest beneficiary of this injustice.

Captured a'Mia' at the beginning of the year. Simon hasn't had anything to do with the girl so far. He just likes the gloomy temperament hidden behind her innocence, and is looking forward to digging out this temperament and showing it on the big screen.

The number of opening screens of the film is 23.

After the release, the comprehensive media rating of "Little Women" reached an excellent level of 8.7 points. Mia Kirschner's performance did not disappoint Simon. Most of the film review articles specifically mentioned the actress who had suddenly begun to emerge. The film critics inside the casting have publicly expressed regret for Winona Ryder's failure to appear, and now all have changed their tone.

Of course, the film reviews about Mia Kirshina are more or less driven by WMA.

After being selected by Simon, WMA designed the positioning for Mia Kirschna to be tit-for-tat against Winona Ryder under ICM.

Orion Pictures’ biopic "The Poet and His Lover" is obviously coming for the prize. The number of screens for the film is 17. It’s a pity that the word-of-mouth after the release is very average, not to mention the prize-winning, the box office is back. The probability is very low.

"Bauhaus" released by Warner Bros. is following the trend of documentary films created by Daenerys Entertainment in recent years. It opened 31 dot-screen screens. The media reputation is not bad and it is expected to be nominated for the best documentary Oscar.

When Simon was busy with various key projects of Daenerys Entertainment in Los Angeles, "This Man Comes From Earth" quietly started shooting outside Toronto, Canada on December 7.

The plan is to follow up in person for a day or two. Before that, Simon rushed to San Francisco again on December 8.

On December 8, it was exactly one month since the midterm elections.

Nothing happened during this period, and the possibility of future changes was greatly reduced, and Simon's continued tight heartstring relaxed a lot.

After this operation is completed, the layout of the Westeros system in the political field will be transformed into a state of intensive farming. Simon promised to several bigwigs in Washington last month that the proportion of members of Congress would not exceed 10%, but he did not promise that he would not contribute to the electoral system of local states in the future.

The American electoral system is a bottom-up system. Because of the inertia of the human subconscious mind, starting from the primary municipal elections all the way up, the results of each stage of the election may be crucial to the final presidential election Impact. While maintaining his influence in Washington, Simon's next step is to quietly carry out political arrangements in some key states and counties so as to influence the direction of American politics at critical moments.

Having said that, the purpose of this trip to San Francisco was to discuss the settlement plan between the three giants of the Westeros system Cisco-AOL-Igreat and the Federal Department of Justice's antitrust investigation.

Simon’s remarks with the big bosses in Washington still played a role. Of course, there must be some elements of the Westeros system that were exposed in the midterm elections. Now, no one in Washington wants to offend Simon. Just as the Westeros system put the National Rifle Association as a target, it did not have much impact on it.

As a result, antitrust investigations and settlement negotiations that had been deadlocked for several months began to turn around.

In fact, most antitrust investigations in the United States will not reach the point of final judgment, including the well-known Microsoft antitrust case in memory, which ended in a settlement between Microsoft and the US Department of Justice.

After Simon proposed to Clinton a plan to use the new federal technology industry giants to conquer the world, the executives of Cisco, AOL, and Eaglet were all invited to Washington to participate in a series of secret meetings.

No matter what the politician's thinking mode is, he can't resist this tempting plan proposed by Simon.

Because once it succeeds, the United States will gain unmatched economic hegemony in the information age in addition to its military power. Moreover, unlike the huge military expenditures required by military hegemony, this economic hegemony can continue to provide the United States on a global scale. Grab huge profits to make up for the country’s growing debt deficit.

Therefore, when such a plan to benefit the country and the people spreads in a small range among top politicians, who can oppose and who dares to oppose?

Don't you love America?

If you want the plan to proceed smoothly, you must first unbind the technology giants. The Westeros system also took the initiative to make a concession and gave the Ministry of Justice a step. The two sides took less than a month. A settlement plan was roughly negotiated.

First of all, none of the three companies needs to be split.

This is the absolute bottom line of the Westeros system.

At least the bottom line at this stage.

Cisco and AOL certainly cannot be separated. As for Eaglet, Simon is well aware of the company's potential.

If the search engines, social networking sites, and e-commerce continue to work on the whole line, and always maintain the current industry advantages, then, twenty years later, Eaglet will be a collection of Google, Facebook and Amazon in Simon’s memory. Coupled with the monopolistic Internet basic software business and Eaglet’s huge investment portfolio in the Internet field, this is likely to be a super giant with a market value of more than 3 trillion US dollars.

Not to mention the federal government, Simon himself does not want such an overly dazzling company to exist. Therefore, Simon will inevitably split Igreat at the right time.

but not now.

Eaglet wants to conquer cities on a global scale, and in the next few years it will still need the current advantage of scale.

In the final agreement, Igreat agreed to open the homepage lock of IE browser. The new version of IE will no longer lock the Igreat portal, but will change to a mode similar to the Google Chrome browser in Simon’s memory. , The software opening page is a search engine tool. Below are six commonly used page boxes. Users can set up their favorite six websites as a through train.

In fact, the main page is increased from one to six.

Of course, the single home page mode is still retained, and only needs to be freely set by the user.

For ordinary people, this concession does not seem so important.

Only the industry knows that although Yigrete’s retreat did not open browser software patents as some people expected, it was tantamount to abandoning its monopoly on Internet interfaces. Next, everyone can do their best. Strive for your own traffic in a fair environment.

Although the final settlement agreement has not yet been signed, the industry is full of joy as the news spread.

Igreat also disagrees with Simon’s decision to abandon the Internet interface monopoly. He believes that doing so is self-destructing the Great Wall and will affect next year’s IPO. The Big Four who were persuaded by Simon before also believe that it should not be so urgent. Withdrawal, it is entirely possible to see the Ministry of Justice for another year or two, so that Igreat's advantages will be more deeply rooted.

Simon's attitude towards these objections is not to waste any more words, but to force the management to implement them according to their own requirements.

Once Microsoft had a super interface like IE, it was not impossible in the Internet field.

The advantages accumulated by Yigrete at this stage are sufficient.

Continue to maintain the Internet interface monopoly will only make the company itself slack.

There is competition to make progress.

Moreover, when most of the industry's peers focused on the hot portal business, few people noticed that this time, Igreat officially put the search engine business on stage.

In addition to Eaglet, Cisco’s promise is to ensure that the procurement of ISP equipment across the federal government cannot be monopolized by Cisco, and that a single equipment provider can occupy no more than 80% of the ISP equipment supply. Congress will pass a similar bill in the near future. Make clear limits.

As for AOL, the most important point is to abolish the exclusive agreement signed with the three major East Coast regional operators, and promise that no other similar exclusive agreements will be signed in the future.

These are the main terms.

The final settlement agreement will of course not be so simple.

In addition to the core main clauses, the settlement agreement also includes many details such as patent assignment and serial prohibition. The entire settlement agreement involves all aspects of the negotiation between the two parties, totaling 170 pages.

Simon arrived in San Francisco on December 8 and had a two-day meeting with the heads of the three companies. Finally, he adjusted some details with the representatives of the Ministry of Justice. The two sides formally announced on December 12 that the anti-monopoly had lasted for several months. Investigation and settlement

Of course, whether the agreement is signed, whether it is complied with, and whether it is strictly complied with is another matter.

The former Microsoft began to accept antitrust investigations by the Ministry of Justice in the early 1990s. After successive settlements and successive breaches of contract, it eventually developed to the point of being almost split.

The core terms of the three companies will not be discounted, this is a clear explanation.

There is room for manipulation in other details.

Striving to maximize the benefits is the nature of the enterprise.

Simon did not intend to interfere.

This reconciliation was already far from the bottom line of the Westeros system. If there is a conflict in the future, it is nothing more than throwing some chips.