I’m in Hollywood

Speaking of which, George has already decided on the cast of Queen Amidala, and you happen to know him.

The next morning, Eric drove to Firefly Studios, from the top of Beverly Hills to Playa Vista, just after Century City, Elizabeth took Eric's car to go to work.

Star Wars has been delayed until now due to the establishment of Amberlin Films. It is finally determined that it will start in April. As the distributor, Elizabeth is now solely responsible for this project. She has been busy with this matter recently, although the film In terms of production, Fox could not get involved, but most of the studio shooting was determined to be filmed on the Fox studio. On the way to Century City, the two couldn't help but chat about this topic.

Eric has no interest in the Star Wars series, and he is not too interested in whether the heroine candidate is still Natalie Portman. However, listening to Elizabeth's enthusiastic tone, he still follows her curiously: Who what?

Elizabeth leaned towards Eric, and said, with the corners of her mouth bent, Guess what, let me give you a hint. It's a 16- or 17-year-old girl who you personally discovered to enter Hollywood.

Eric heard her say this, and it was roughly determined that the trajectory of history still overlapped with the past.

But this is not surprising. Starting from This Killer is Not Too Cold, Natalie Portman has been the best child actress in recent years. Except for the wonderful performance in This Killer is Not Too Cold, Natalie Portman Tully also starred in films such as the acclaimed The Wire and Everybody Says I Love You, not to mention that she is still Jewish, which makes this advantage even more powerful. As one of the important symbols of American film culture, Queen Amidala in the Star Wars series, whether intentionally or not, in Hollywood where Jews gather, this group of people will definitely be more inclined to push a Jewish girl to play this role .

Although he thought so, Eric deliberately guessed: I think about it, eh, Kirsten Dunst?

Elizabeth blinked, raised her eyebrows suddenly, and said sourly, Who is Kirsten Dunst, why don't I know?

Uh, Eric touched his nose subconsciously, and said, That little girl in Interview with the Vampire, don't look at me like this, okay? I've only seen her a few times. I don't know what she looks like now.

Elizabeth just wanted to come to Interview with the Vampire, she snorted softly, and said, Okay, I won't let you guess, maybe some woman will come out to anger me, it's Natalie Portman, you The girl we met on Long Island a few years ago, everyone was happy.

Well, a very clever little guy, Eric also nodded.

Chatting casually, the car entered Century City and quickly drove into the Fox studio. Elizabeth subconsciously adjusted the Hermes scarf around her neck, turned to Eric, and raised her chin slightly: Hey, can you see the traces?

Eric stretched out his hand to help her tidy up, blocking the exposed trace of red marks, and said with a smile: Even if you don't block it, who would dare to say anything nonsense.

Elizabeth threw him a roll of eyes: Okay, I took off the silk scarf, and you accompany me to the meeting.

Eric felt that he didn't have such a thick skin, and immediately changed his words: Forget it, I think it's better to cover it up.

You bastard, Elizabeth cursed angrily.

The car stopped, the driver got out of the car and opened the car door, Elizabeth leaned over and kissed Eric, picked up her satchel, and said, You don't have to get out of the car, I'll just go over by myself.

Eric nodded and kept watching Elizabeth walk into the office building, and then ordered the driver to drive.

In Casino Royale, except for the full CG shot of the plane diving at the airport, there are not many shots that need special effects processing. Therefore, the progress of post-production is still relatively fast.

Returning from San Francisco, in the next period of February, the special effects scene of Casino Royale was completed, and the film entered the final editing stage, which can be said to be a crucial step in determining the quality of a film.

Throughout late February, Eric turned his attention to other things and devoted himself entirely to the editing of Casino Royale.

At the same time, after determining the final plan, Firefly Electronics officially launched the promotion of the mp3 player fireflyer. Although it can be predicted that fireflyer will have a very broad market prospect around the world, however, Bill Olsen and other management The layer still decided to open up the North American market first for the camp.

With the support of a large number of media resources of the Firefly system, fireflyer's exquisite and compact figure soon appeared on major TV, Internet and print media advertising platforms in North America. Firefly Electronics also made great efforts to cooperate with Yahoo portals in the region, and proudly took out 10,000 prototypes in The Yahoo portal holds promotional activities. As long as the user activates the Yahoo Music Box account, they can get a lucky draw opportunity every day to win the opportunity to try fireflyer for free. Buy songs from the Yahoo Music Store.

Although the activity of giving away 10,000 fireflyers for free and a large number of gift certificates directly brought a huge marketing cost of 3 million US dollars to Firefly Electronics and Yahoo Portal, the effect is also very obvious, because it only needs to bind the user's personal credit card information on the yahoopay tool and To achieve activation, no substantive consumption behavior is required. In just one week, the number of new users of yahoopay exceeded 700,000, and the total number of users was close to the 5 million mark. Before that, the promotion channels of yahoopay were mainly Cooperate with online payment websites such as Amazon, which is supported by Firefly Investment Company. Because e-commerce is just emerging, users are also concerned about the security of online payment tools. Since its release more than a year ago, the number of users of yahoopay is only more than 4 million. Compared with the number of Internet users in North America, which has exceeded 50 million, this ratio is far from satisfactory.

With the further promotion of fireflyer, fireflyer quickly attracted the attention of a large number of users. At the end of February, Firefly Electronics, according to a survey result of Yahoo portal, showed that the monthly shipment of fireflyer in North America in April is likely to reach 100,000, and , which is a conservative estimate.

On the other hand, at the end of February, Yahoo also produced its first decent annual financial report since its establishment five years ago.

In 1996, the number of Internet users in the world exceeded 80 million. As the world's largest Internet market, the number of Internet users in North America doubled compared to 1995, reaching 50 million.

With the explosive development of the Internet industry in North America, Yahoo Networks, which occupies more than 70% of the market share of Internet online services, relies on its main businesses such as portal sites, online mailboxes, search engines, and personal homepages with a large number of users. Achieved operating income of $194 million, thanks to the success of the Yahoo Advertising Alliance, 90% of which came from Internet advertising.

Although, in order to achieve rapid expansion in North America and overseas countries such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, Japan, and even Brazil in Latin America, Yahoo invested as much as 335 million US dollars in operating expenses in 1996. A loss of more than $140 million. However, compared with the revenue figure of less than 25 million US dollars in 1995, the performance growth rate of up to 776% in one year still surprised many people.

At the same time, although it is predicted that the growth rate of Yahoo's performance in the next year will slow down significantly compared with last year, the company still gives a conservative growth forecast of 200%. As long as this number can be reached, Yahoo is likely to achieve profit and loss from next year. Balance, or even obtain a small profit, which is undoubtedly very beneficial for Yahoo's listing.

In order to pave the way for Yahoo's listing in the next two years, after the annual financial report data was released, Yahoo did not hesitate to publish relevant data information on the homepage of the portal website. This also caused a huge stir in the industry. Anyone knows what an annual growth rate of over 700% means. The Nasdaq market is particularly sensitive to this data performance. Internet technology stocks that have already been listed are affected by Yahoo! Stimulated by the annual financial report, the stock price has risen. Wall Street was also quite excited, raising its valuation to $9 billion after Yahoo released its annual earnings report.

Eric, who is in Los Angeles, was also very surprised when he saw this financial report. He thought that the time of Yahoo's revenue explosion would be delayed by at least a year or even longer. It seems that because Yahoo appeared earlier, it has changed too much. many things.

While reading Yahoo's overseas expansion materials, Eric will inevitably think of his former hometown. Seeing that Yahoo has no development plans for there, he can't help but be puzzled, so he made a special inquiry.

As a result, according to some scattered data, until the end of 1996, the number of Internet users in China was only 200,000, and the number of domestic personal computer sales in the whole year was only over 700,000. Correspondingly, worldwide, the number of Internet users in 1996 has exceeded 80 million, and the global personal computer shipments in 1996 also reached 70.9 million units. The sales of personal computers in the United States alone exceeded 26 million.

Well, Eric has seen a simple page of information, and put it aside for the time being, and it is hard to think of a year in his heart.

After Yahoo announced its annual financial report, two IT companies, Cisco and America Online, which are heavily owned by Firefly Investments, also announced their annual financial statements. Compared with Yahoo, which has just started to break out, the performance of these two companies is much more solid and bright. , even the slightly weaker AOL, has had a full-year turnover of $1.8 billion.

Turning our attention back to Hollywood, on February 27, the tenth week of Titanic was released, and the single-week box office still reached 25.3 million US dollars. At the same time, the cumulative box office officially broke through the 400 million US dollars mark, reaching 417 million US dollars.

Because the single-week box office of Titanic remains firmly above $20 million, the agency predicts that Titanic will break the $460 million created by the previous Star Wars in its twelfth week of release. North American box office records, and even go a step further, during the Oscars at the end of March, Titanic will exceed $500 million at the box office and become the first North American film to reach $500 million at the box office.

In overseas markets, with the release of Titanic in some unimportant overseas countries and regions, the film's overseas release ticket warehouse has expanded to 27, although France, Germany, and Japan, which are more important overseas ticket warehouse countries, have to wait until Titanic was released before and after the most influential Oscar ceremony, but due to the increase in the number of overseas ticket warehouses, the overseas box office growth rate of Titanic also began to increase. ⑧±Miao(.*)pen⑧±Ge⑧±, o

The most surprising thing to everyone is the Brazilian market, which has performed very ordinary at the box office in the past.

Although it is the country with the largest box office in Latin America, under normal circumstances, it is already a very good achievement for a Hollywood movie to achieve a box office of 10 million US dollars in Brazil, even if it is Jurassic Park, which set a global box office record a few years ago. , Brazil's total box office is only more than 14.9 million US dollars. Therefore, Firefly did not classify Brazil as a ticket warehouse country that needs special attention. Therefore, on February 7, Titanic landed in Brazilian theaters.

Immediately, the box office performance of Titanic in Brazil also exceeded everyone's expectations. In just two weeks, the Brazilian box office of Titanic exceeded 10 million US dollars. This data is far beyond Firefly's Brazilian branch expected that, although Titanic had already shown signs of a box office miracle in North America, the Brazilian branch still only predicted that the box office of Titanic in Brazil was likely to be the same as that of Titanic in that year. Jurassic Park is comparable, grossing around $15 million.

After breaking through US$10 million in two weeks, even the head office no longer ignores the Brazilian box office prospects of Titanic. With Katzenberg's personal intervention, the film's production in Brazil has rapidly increased by 50%. Around the world, and increased publicity efforts, then, in the third week of its release, the box office of Titanic in Brazil did not drop but increased. The box office in a single week reached 6.9 million US dollars, and the cumulative box office reached 17 million US dollars, easily breaking the Titanic in that year. The box office data of Titanic is less than 15 million, because Titanic completely surpasses the box office curve of common sense, and no one knows how much the film's box office potential in Brazil is.

Playa Vista, Los Angeles, Firefly Studios.

After more than half a month of intense work, the preliminary fine-cutting of Casino Royale has been completed. At this time, all the senior management of MGM and the main creator of the film are gathered in the viewing room of the later center of Firefly Studios to watch the film samples. .

The sample film has not yet produced the opening and closing subtitles, and the total length is 150 minutes. Eric plans to further compress the footage to achieve a film length of about 140 minutes, which is the most suitable length for popcorn movies. When the time is right, like Titanic, which lasts more than three hours and can still achieve box office miracles, there is only one in Hollywood history after all.