Broccoli means broccoli in English.
Coincidentally, the Broccoli family, which holds half of the copyright of the 007 series, also started by selling vegetables.
Albert Broccoli, who discovered the 007 IP, was a man with a strong personality. In order to show his absolute control over the 007 series, Albert claimed in interviews with the media more than once that when selling vegetables, if the price could not be It was agreed that he would rather dump all the vegetables than sell them.
As for 007, until MGM was controlled by Simon, the Broccoli family never made any concessions in front of MGM.
The fundamental reason is that for decades, as a large-scale production series, 007 has made profits in every film, and no one has ever suffered a loss.
Hollywood is actually very conservative at heart.
Western movies are popular, and everyone rushes to make western movies; buddy movies are on the rise, and a large number of buddy movies are born one after another; youth horror movies are a hit, and a bunch of youth horror movies immediately appear on the market...
In the final analysis, it is because the risks in the film industry are too great.
Before any studio decides on a project that can easily cost tens of millions of dollars, it is far less easy than outsiders imagine.
Therefore, following the already successful film model has become the best choice for most studios.
In fact, it is just following the trend.
Just like Hong Kong films across the ocean, it's just that Hollywood's follow-up is relatively benign, and Hollywood has the most solid backing of the North American market, so it has continued to exist and remain strong.
Because of his conservative nature, 007, who has never suffered a loss, has become the most valued 'broccoli' of MGM.
However, Simon is the one who is least in need of fresh vegetables, so he doesn't mind if the seller throws away his own vegetables if the price cannot be negotiated.
When Shirley Lansing contacted the Broccoli family according to the conditions set by Simon, the Broccoli family, which was accustomed to being strong, was naturally unable to compromise.
Simon did not drag his feet and directly asked Shirley Lansing to announce that the 007 series was shelved indefinitely.
After MGM's announcement, not to mention the reaction of the Broccoli family, other MGM shareholders, who were the only ones who could exert checks and balances on Simon, did not react much after some concern.
Not to mention anything else, it was just MGM's two blockbuster movies last year, "A Few Good Men" and "007: GoldenEye." The North American box office of "A Few Good Men" is US$117 million, and the global expectation is US$200 million. The estimated North American box office of "007: GoldenEye" is only over US$80 million, and the global expectation is still US$200 million.
However, even with the participation of Tom Hanks, Robert De Niro, and Demi Moore, the overall production and distribution budget of "A Few Good Men" is still less than half of that of "007: GoldenEye".
Although it is a joint project between Daenerys Entertainment and MGM, due to its cost advantage, the revenue that "A Few Good Men" brings to MGM is actually far greater than that of "007: GoldenEye".
After all, MGM is responsible for raising the production and publicity budget for the 007 series, and the Broccoli family is only responsible for the production. However, at the same time, because they control half of the copyright and participate in the production, the Broccoli family has to take away the profits of the film. a big part.
If it were MGM that was turbulent in the past, the 007 series could definitely be used as a stable project to support performance.
Now, MGM is turning to recovery under Simon's control, and this life-threatening series is indeed not indispensable.
You know, after "A Few Good Men", Daenerys Entertainment and MGM's second project "A Time to Kill" was launched last year, and the schedule has been confirmed for this summer. Now that it has been decided to revive MGM, there will definitely be more cooperation between the two parties.
Comparing the earnings of "A Few Good Men" and "007: GoldenEye", as well as the obvious changes at MGM in the past year, it is completely self-evident which side MGM shareholders will stand after Simon's decision.
When MGM announced that 007 was shelved, Simon himself was not in Los Angeles, but in San Francisco.
Thursday, January 23rd.
The long-prepared Amazon online store is officially launched on the Yigrit portal.
This is also the first subsidiary brand launched by Yigret. Before this, each business department was named after Yigret.
In the past year of 1991, the number of users accessing the World Wide Web in the United States finally reached 13.17 million, of which the number of AOL users reached 7.68 million.
There are 13.17 million World Wide Web access accounts. Based on the average number of 1.6 active individual users per account, the number of World Wide Web users in the United States reaches 21.07 million, which is equivalent to 10% of the total population of the United States in this era, and it happens to be the United States. The 10% with the highest level of education and the strongest spending power.
There are more than 20 million Internet users, and they are the group with the strongest consumption power in the United States. The entire United States and the entire information industry can no longer ignore the rise of the World Wide Web.
In fact, since the second half of last year, funds and companies have poured into the Internet industry, and even the federal government has attached great importance to the development of the Internet industry. It is not difficult to see the overall explosive development trend of this emerging field.
Affected by the explosion of the Internet industry, even the personal computer industry has benefited a lot.
In the past year, originally due to the economic downturn, the industry predicted that global PC shipments would remain at the level of around 20 million units in 1990.
But in fact, the annual PC shipments in 1991 finally reached 23.87 million units, an increase of more than 19%. A large number of users purchased computers to experience Internet surfing, and some users pursued a better Internet experience. And replace the old DOS system computer with the latest high-configuration graphics operating system PC.
All in all, the rise of the Internet industry is an inevitable trend.
Although it was launched 3 years earlier than Amazon in the original time and space, the new Amazon, because it is backed by the Ygrit portal, already has more than 20 million potential users as soon as it goes online. Not only that, Ypay, Ypay, Yigret’s increasingly perfect online payment tool, also provides a mature payment tool for Amazon’s online mall.
In Simon's plan, Amazon will focus on book sales for the next three years.
At this stage, choosing online book sales as the beginning of physical e-commerce undoubtedly has many advantages.
Today's Internet users have a high level of education, so they often have more needs to purchase books.
Unlike other daily necessities, online shopping malls happen to be able to provide a richer variety of books than physical bookstores, which is enough to ensure users' motivation to try online book shopping.
In addition, simplifying the types of physical goods sold can simplify the complexity of e-commerce operations to the greatest extent.
At the same time, the Amazon online mall can help the Yigret team accumulate experience in aspects from e-commerce website operations to actual warehousing and logistics.
Although there was no special press conference this time, before the opening of the online mall, Yigrit Company had already launched advertising and marketing on various media platforms such as the Internet, TV, radio, newspapers, etc.
Simon arrived in San Francisco on the morning of January 23.
At nine o'clock in the morning, the Amazon online mall officially opened.
Although in the short term, the delivery area of Amazon's online mall is limited to the two core metropolitan areas on the east and west coasts, and the Great Lakes region in the north and the vast central and southern regions of the United States are not covered, but starting at 9 a.m., efforts will be made in the online mall to Driven by promotional activities, the number of orders in the online mall exceeded 100,000 in just 31 minutes.
As of 5 p.m., the online mall was open for eight hours, and the total number of orders reached 870,000.
However, as we all know, the peak time for online consumption is in the evening.
Simon flew back to Los Angeles as usual after get off work that afternoon.
At nine o'clock the next morning, it was open for 24 hours. According to statistics, the number of orders realized by Amazon's online mall finally reached 1.32 million, the number of books sold was 1.56 million, and the transaction volume reached 32.76 million US dollars.
This seemingly simple set of data is no less than a miracle for too many people.
Let alone selling more than 1 million books in a single day, probably no physical bookstore in the world can even sell more than 100,000 books in a single day.
Therefore, the emergence of Amazon's online mall, like Ypay and Ystore launched by Yigrit last year, proved the feasibility of Internet physical e-commerce almost within a day.
With the announcement of the first-day sales results of Amazon's online mall, not only traditional physical book retailers, but also comprehensive retail chain giants such as Wal-Mart, had to quickly turn their attention to the Internet platform and held emergency meetings to discuss the launch of online books. The necessity of stores.
For more than a year, traditional media have clearly felt the strong threat of Internet media platforms, so they can't help but have many nitpicks about the Internet in terms of public opinion tendencies.
However, even so, after the sales data on the first day of the opening of Amazon's online mall were released, most media still began to preach that the e-commerce era was coming.
On the other hand, for Igret, the seemingly glorious data on the first day of the opening of Amazon’s online mall also means too many challenges.
In order to make the online mall famous as soon as possible, Yigret has invested US$20 million in publicity expenses in just the past half month.
Facts have proved that this kind of propaganda is obviously excessive.
The number of orders reaching 1.32 million on the first day first means the strong computing pressure on the Amazon online mall server.
According to statistics from the Yigret portal, although the online mall only achieved a transaction volume of 1.32 million orders on the day it opened, in the evening of that day, the actual maximum number of simultaneous users exceeded 5 million.
After the continuous expansion of the data center in the past two years, the Igret portal is able to host such user visits at the same time. However, the Amazon online mall has an access limit set in advance of exactly 5 million.
If some emergency plans had not been prepared in advance, the Amazon online mall might have experienced a downtime on the first day of opening.
The cloud computing project developed secretly by Yigrit has entered the substantive testing stage, but if it is to be officially applied on a large scale, it will take at least the next year to make continuous adjustments and improvements.
Lacking a flexible data computing environment, in the short term, Amazon's online mall will still need to use the traditional fixed-volume data computing and storage model, which will undoubtedly cause great cost pressure.
Of course, as long as the online mall can get off to a good start, the effort will definitely be worth it.
The most critical thing is the logistics and distribution pressure involved behind the scenes of these orders.
The mall team’s best prediction in advance was only to achieve one million orders on the first day of opening.
In fact, it is 'overloaded' by 30%.
If you want to deliver the books involved in these 1.32 million orders one by one, even if you rely on the extremely developed postal system of the United States, your operating area is temporarily limited, but for Amazon's warehousing and logistics system, which is still in the exploratory stage, Definitely a tougher challenge.
Therefore, after the first day, the first decision made by the mall team was to remove all ads from various platforms that could be withdrawn.
It really can’t be promoted any more.
At the same time, the mall team began to contact other express delivery teams outside the USPS (United States Postal Service), almost intending to complete the first batch of huge orders at any cost.
Everyone knows that first impression is very important.
If a user uses online shopping for the first time and has to wait half a month to get the book he wants, it will definitely seriously affect the user's enthusiasm for subsequent online purchases.
Finally, in order to help the mall team tide over the difficulties, Simon also sent Nancy Brill away.
Blockbuster's rich experience in warehousing and logistics can still provide great help to the mall team.
The small female executive was not polite and directly asked Simon for the title of special advisor of Ygritte Company, which was of course paid.
As for logistics and distribution, it was the first time that online shopping orders reached 1.32 million in a single day. Alice Ferguson, the housekeeper responsible for the operation of the mall, had to figure it out herself.
Of course, the entire Yigrit senior team is making suggestions to deal with this matter.
Simon also said unceremoniously that if he messed up, he would come back and be his housekeeper.
The Westeros system is in the final critical stage of the early stage of the Internet industry, and e-commerce is the top priority in Simon's plan. He does not have much patience to tolerate a loser.
In the midst of busy work, it’s another weekend in a blink of an eye.
This year’s eighth Sundance Film Festival opens on January 16.
After "Run Lola Run", Sundance has been prosperous in recent years, even if there has not been another super-grossing dark horse.
The development of independent films in Hollywood is also becoming more and more vigorous, driven by a series of successful films from Gomen Pictures.
Before the opening of this Sundance, Robert Redford hoped that Simon, the biggest celebrity from Sundance, could attend.
Redford would never mention Simon being a Sundance judge. Simon certainly doesn't have the time now, and Sundance really can't afford it.
However, the chairman of the jury this time is Catherine.
I was too busy to spare time during the opening ceremony, and the closing ceremony happened to be on Sunday, January 26th.
Simon quietly arrived in Park City, Utah, on Saturday.
Janet wanted to see the baby and didn't come with her.
Because Catherine was already here, the female assistant who was personally responsible for building several wooden houses in Park City in the hope of using them as dating retreats, although she was a little resentful, did not follow her again.
It was still January, and Los Angeles was spring-like all year round as usual, but Park City was covered in ice and snow.
Such a closed atmosphere is indeed very suitable for spending time with the people you like.