Hollywood Hunter

After the New Year, the last Christmas box office week spanning from 1994 to 1995 soon ended.

From December 30 to January 5, the box office drop in the third week of "Suicide Squad" narrowed to 17%, and another $47.91 million was recorded. It was easy to maintain the weekly box office championship position. Three weeks after the release of this DC movie universe The cumulative box office of the hero masterpiece reached US$19.38 million.

The cumulative box office in the three-week period is close to US$200 million. Even if the movie market cools down quickly after the holiday, the total box office of "Suicide Squad" is enough to easily exceed US$300 million.

In the absence of competition for new films, it also coincides with the New Year. The total box office in North America from December 30 to January 5 is only 15% lower than that of Christmas Week. Other follow-up films have basically maintained the box office volume of Christmas Week. , And the film has achieved a downturn.

The 3D animated movie "Toy Story 2" still ranks second on the list, with a 13% drop at the box office and an additional US$ 16.29 million. The cumulative box office reached US$ 27.98 million, a gap of only US$ 30 million from the US$ 300 million threshold.

The third place is McCallary Calkin's "Rich Rich".

After the start of the first week of the $40 million holiday comedy at Warner Bros. Pictures, the company unexpectedly realized a 14% reversal the following week, recording $14.03 million, and a total of $26.35 million at the box office in two weeks.

Disney's holiday comedy "Santa" ranks fourth, with a drop of 11% at the box office in the third week of release, with a box office figure of 10.62 million US dollars and a cumulative box office of 38.97 million US dollars in three weeks.

Fifth place is "Street Fighter" jointly produced by MGM and Capcom.

Last week's second-ranked popular game adaptation of the action movie box office trend was the most disappointing. The box office fell by 36% the following week. The box office slipped directly to less than 10 million US dollars. The second week of the show was recorded with 9.01 million US dollars. The cumulative box office was 2312. Ten thousand U.S. dollars.

Outside the top five.

The sixth place, "Little Women", declined by 21%, and the third week of large-scale paintings received US$ 8.73 million, and the cumulative box office reached US$ 31.76 million.

The seventh "IQ Destiny" is probably due to the only love movie in the Christmas file, which achieved a 16% reversal the following week, surpassing last week's "Prince of the Forest", with an income of 7.77 million US dollars, a total of 14.36 million in two weeks US dollars.

The eighth-placed "Prince of the Forest" fell 12%, and the next week's opening accounted for 7.27 million US dollars, and the cumulative box office for two weeks was 15.54 million US dollars.

In addition to these films, following the "Disguised Geek" that entered the 100 million box office club last week, "Vampire at Night" was released at the box office for the eighth week with a total of 3.32 million US dollars. $370,000.

January 6, the first box office week after the New Year.

In terms of new films, this week's only two sporadic screens combined with less than 500 pieces of Duli Studio's film released, it is not worth mentioning.

However, in order to qualify for the nomination of the award season on December 23, the three screenings "Nir's Heart", "Da Zhi Ruo Yu" and "Burning Years" were opened on a large scale this week. All of them are more than a thousand pieces, and the number of screens of "The Burning Years", which had the best response during the screening, even reached 2005 pieces.

Daenerys Entertainment will launch its own new year's movie from January 13th, but this year's first more important new film will be the Hong Kong film "Red Fan District" started on January 27th. This is Jack Another attempt to sprint to Hollywood.

All in all, the past year has been a turning point for Hong Kong films from prosperity to decline.

Although there were "Hong Kong Movies", "Evil West Poison", "Chongqing Forest" and other Hong Kong film classics in 1994 that were enough to be recorded in history, due to serious over-investment, there were hundreds of Oriental Hollywood on the other side of the ocean this year. The failure to deliver the film on time has caused huge losses to many film companies and severely impacted the enthusiasm of investors. Hong Kong films have since begun to decline rapidly.

and,

Starting from 1994, the living space of Hong Kong films is getting smaller and smaller, and Hollywood will gradually dominate the vast Southeast Asian market.

It is against this background that filmmakers such as Jack Cheng and Bai Gewu entered the Hollywood again.

In addition to the "Red Fan District" that will be released on January 27, the white pigeon Wu's "Broken Arrow" in cooperation with Daenerys Entertainment has also been completed last year, and the schedule is February 10, Valentine's Day.Like David Finch's "Mental Game", which is scheduled to end at the end of the summer, "Broken Arrow" with a production budget of $50 million was placed in February, which is also the reason for too many Daenerys entertainment quality projects.

Even the higher quality Easter period, which is similar to the "Broken Arrow" period, has also been occupied by the serially popular comedy "Rebel Stars 3" by Daenerys Entertainment.

Simon personally wrote "This Man Comes From Earth". After participating in the Sundance Film Festival at the end of the month, it can only be placed in the more unpopular end of February. "Broken Arrow" also occupied a Valentine's Day.

In the context of the increasingly difficult local market, Simon’s main proposal at the first high-level meeting of Daenerys Entertainment at the beginning of the year was to maximize the expansion of overseas markets. In fact, Daenerys Entertainment has been in the past few years. In doing so, it will only pay more attention in the future, in order to make the most of the vast overseas market space and tap the commercial potential of a series of film projects produced by Daenerys Entertainment to share the risks brought by the differences in the local market schedule.

After New Year's Day, he returned to Los Angeles and was busy with Daenerys entertainment. Simon rushed to San Francisco on January 9.

The 20-hectare Igret Park in Mountain View, planned from the beginning of 1993, has undergone more than one year of development and construction, and will be officially put into use later this year. Previously, Igth could only rent office buildings throughout Silicon Valley. Reiter moved to a brand new office space in the first week after the new year.

Simon originally owned as much as 300 hectares of land in the mountainous area of ​​Mountain View in the name of Westeros, and Igret occupied only one-fifteenth.

In addition to Igrid, which has sufficient financial strength to build its own park, Simon also built an additional office area under the name of Westeros. This plan is also leased to the office area of ​​Silicon Valley New Technology Ventures. use.

As a result, when Igrid moved, Tinkerbair, Broadcast, Instagram and other companies with close relationship with Igrid also moved to the Mountain View site.

The residential areas in the north of the office park that have invested heavily in development in Linhai have also been opened earlier to employees of Igret or affiliated companies. Only leases are allowed for the time being, and the prices for employees of Igret are very low. The detached villas and three-storey apartments are mainly composed of 500 units, and a total of 1,000 units are enough to easily accommodate 5000 people.

With the rise of the new technology industry, real estate growth in the Bay Area is now ahead of other cities in the United States.

Perhaps the housing pressure is not too great for employees of technology companies in the Bay Area. However, even after ten or twenty years, even the most top technology company employees will not buy a house in the Bay Area. It's so easy, and Simon's memory even has long-term news that corporate employees like Google and Facebook have been living in RVs.

These properties built by Simon in the name of Westeros are mainly leased and cannot recover the huge amount of investment in the short term, but in the long run, not only the continuous appreciation of the property itself will bring huge profits to Simon, Providing cheap rental housing for employees will also be a major advantage for Igreat to compete with other technology companies in the future.

Of course, even if it is cheap rental, Simon will not suffer.

Because the cheapness here is only for the employees of related companies, if you want this kind of cheapness, whether it is Igrid or other companies that want to provide employees with similar discounts, you need to make up the difference in rent in the form of subsidies.

What's more, this business is not a loss for Igret or other park enterprises.

Because the competition for human resources in Silicon Valley is at a very fierce stage, housing subsidies are undoubtedly a major advantage for new technology companies to attract employees. Not only that, because this part of the property is very close to the office space, it can save employees' commuting time to the greatest extent. It can even promote employees to work overtime to a large extent.

In addition, although rent collection is less efficient than direct sales of property sales, Simon can use this part of the property as collateral to obtain loans from banks as long as needed.Due to the high growth trend of housing prices in the Bay Area, if the loans are just the annual increase in housing prices, it will be enough to offset the related interest expenses and achieve a surplus.

All in all, this business is very cost-effective no matter from what aspect.

Arriving in San Francisco, Simon also participated in the company's high-level meeting in the modern glass-fiber reinforced office building of the Igret Park all day on January 9. The main topics were the review of 1994 and the planning outlook for 1995.

Due to the overall outbreak of the new technology industry in the past year, Igreat’s annual revenues from a number of businesses that are monopolized in the industry have also shown a more rapid explosive growth from 1993, and Igreut has already started IPO In the previous audits, in order to increase investor confidence, this company will also publish its 1994 financial report next month. By then, many people are bound to be surprised.

Simon's requirements for Igrid's core are no longer rapid, but calm down and slow down the pace of further development of Igrid's core products.

Of course, another core issue is overseas expansion.

In the last words in the White House and Clinton and other core Washington, Simon did not forget, Washington also did not forget.

Overseas expansion does not conflict with Igreat’s strategy of slowing down and deepening its core products.

For portals, e-mails, search engines, and other businesses, it is not difficult to imitate more basic technologies. Not only in the United States, but also many new technology industry peers overseas have begun to launch similar products.Eaglet wants to maintain its own advantages in this competition, only to constantly improve and optimize its own products.

Users are actually very smart.

Whether it is a search engine or a social network, the quality of a product can be distinguished by using it a few times, and then it will naturally tend to use the best one.

In the past history, Yahoo actually launched the content search function very early. Why did it lose to Google afterwards? In addition to the serious mistakes in corporate strategy, the original poorness of Yahoo’s own search tools is also important for this company to quickly be overtaken by competitors. the reason.

In fact, relying on the accumulation of the past few years, the company's series of products have already had considerable advantages.Simon did not dare to take it lightly, and every time he met, he drove to inculcate the crisis awareness of the senior executives of Igret. In an era of information technology explosion, a little slacking, and it may be overtaken by competitors, especially now. The stage is still in the early stages of the development of the new technology industry, and Igret is far from being able to take it lightly.

After a busy day, I attended another circle meeting organized by John Chambers in the evening. Simon didn't return to his mountain villa in Woodside until ten o'clock in the evening.

After taking a bath to relax, I just discussed with Alice Ferguson, the former female housekeeper who returned with me tonight, a few words about the satellite map service that Igrid recently launched. Girl A came over to remind that Kiev called.

Celia Miller and Ken Dixon set out for Ukraine on January 2.

Things are not too smooth.

Hearing that Simon wanted to replace the governor of the Rovno region, Ukrainian President Leon Kuchma began to react very negatively, and unabashedly indicated to Celia that such a requirement of the Westeros system was too out of bounds.

Simon is also very welcome to this.

On the one hand, Celia continued to lobby Kuchma.

On the other hand, the arms trade company of the Westeros system directly ceased negotiations on the latest business with Ukraine.

Ukraine, which has inherited a large legacy of the Soviet Union, is a large arms country.

This is true.

Throughout the 1990s, Ukraine basically relied on the sale of arms to continuously rejuvenate the country.

However, there is actually not much arms that Ukraine can sell.

More basic individual weapons or old Soviet-made heavy weapons have little demand in other countries.It is impossible to sell high-end strategic missiles and nuclear weapons, at least not publicly.Coupled with parting ways with Russia, the production of many more popular helicopters or ships has been restricted, and the arms trade in Ukraine is actually still selling homes from the Soviet era.

Moreover, these arms sales are often difficult to fall into private pockets, and most of them still have to be placed in the treasury.

The Westeros system is similar to an intermediary arms trading company, but it has picked up a bridge for the export of low-end weapons that Ukraine originally had little demand for.

There is a lot of room for operation.

There are many low-end weapons in Ukraine, which are not needed in Europe, Asia, and North America. If you want to sell directly to Africa, which has the greatest demand, the country over there simply cannot afford it.The Ukrainian government is also unlikely to be able to barter for goods like arms trade companies in the Westero system. What Ukraine lacks is money, not resources. Any sense.

Therefore, the arms trade company of the Westeros system is very important.

Simon decisively let the arms trading company stop the negotiation of new transactions, and immediately made Kuchma aware of the seriousness of the matter. A large number of people in the Kuchma authorities can rely on this money bag. Compared with a governor, it seems that a governor It seems irrelevant.After all, Ukraine is not a big country like the United States. A governor is similar to a mayor on the US side.

After a few days of bargaining, Kuchma finally agreed to all the requirements of the Westeros system.

The time difference between Los Angeles and Kiev is ten hours.

Simon received a call from Celia. The local time in Kiev was already at nine o'clock on the morning of January 10. Celia had just had breakfast with Kuchma and got Mr. President to contact Rovno and go to Governor You. The warrant for the post of Miloslav will be rushed to the city of Rivne, the capital of Rivne Region, to formally initiate a cleaning program in the morning.