After the New Year, the box office week of the last popular period spanning 1994 to 1995 came to an end soon.
From December 30 to January 5, the box office decline of "Suicide Squad" narrowed to 17% in its third week of release, earning another US$47.91 million, easily maintaining its weekly box office championship. After three weeks of release, this DC movie universe has The cumulative box office of the heroic masterpiece reached US$197.38 million.
The cumulative box office in three weeks is close to 200 million U.S. dollars. Even if the movie market cools down rapidly after the festival, the total domestic box office of "Suicide Squad" is enough to easily exceed 300 million U.S. dollars.
In the absence of competition from new films, and it coincides with the New Year, the total box office in North America during the box office week from December 30 to January 5 dropped only 15% compared to the Christmas week. Other subsequent films basically maintained the box office volume during the Christmas week. , and there are also films that have achieved reverse decline.
The 3D animated film "Toy Story 2" still ranked second on the list, with a box office drop of 13% and another US$16.29 million. The cumulative box office reached US$270.98 million, only US$30 million away from the US$300 million threshold.
Third place went to Macaulay Culkin’s Richie.
After Warner Bros. Pictures' $40 million holiday comedy had a disappointing start in its first week, it unexpectedly achieved a 14% reversal in the following week, earning $14.03 million, and its total box office in two weeks was $26.35 million. Unfortunately, compared to the huge cost of this movie, the reverse decline the next week did not change Warner Bros.'s loss ending on this project.
Disney's holiday comedy "The Santa Clause" ranked fourth, with a box office drop of 11% in its third week of release, with a box office figure of US$10.62 million, and a cumulative box office of US$38.97 million in three weeks.
Fifth place is "Street Fighter" jointly produced by MGM and Capcom.
The box office trend of this action movie adapted from a popular game, which ranked second last week, was the most disappointing. The box office dropped by 36% the next week, and the box office fell directly to less than 10 million US dollars. In the second week of release, it earned 9.01 million US dollars, and the cumulative box office was 23.12 million US dollars. Ten thousand U.S. dollars.
Outside the top five.
"Little Women", which ranked sixth, fell by 21%. It earned US$8.73 million in its third week of large-scale opening, and its cumulative box office reached US$31.76 million.
"IQ Love" ranked seventh, probably because it was the only romantic movie in the Christmas season. It achieved a 16% reversal in the next week, surpassing last week's "The Jungle Book", with a revenue of 7.71 million US dollars, and a total of 1,436 in two weeks. Ten thousand U.S. dollars.
The eighth-placed "The Jungle Book" dropped 12%, earning US$7.27 million in the second week after its opening, and its cumulative box office in two weeks was US$15.54 million.
In addition to these films, following "The Man in Disguise" which entered the 100 million yuan box office club last week, "Interview with the Vampire" made a box office of 3.32 million US dollars in its eighth week of release. It also achieved a local box office of over 100 million, with a cumulative box office of 100 million. Zero $370,000.
January 6th, the first box office week after New Year’s Eve.
In terms of new films, there are still only two sporadic independent studio films released this week with a total screen count of less than 500 yuan, which is not worth mentioning.
However, the three films that were screened on December 23 in order to qualify for award season nominations and received favorable reviews, "Neil's Heart", "Wise Fool" and "The Year of Love", all opened on a large scale this week, with the number of screens They are all over 1,000 yuan. The number of screening screens for "The Years of Love", which received the best response during the screening period, even reached 2,005.
Daenerys Entertainment will start releasing its own movies for the new year on January 13. However, the first more important new film this year is the Hong Kong film "Red Zone" which opened on January 27. This is Jack Another attempt to rush to Hollywood.
Speaking of which, the past year can be described as a turning point from prosperity to decline for Hong Kong films.
Although 1994 saw the emergence of Hong Kong film classics such as "Journey to the West", "Ashes of Time", and "Chungking Express" that will go down in history, due to serious over-investment, there were hundreds of films in Eastern Hollywood on the other side of the ocean that year. The film was not delivered on time, causing huge losses to many film companies and seriously affecting the enthusiasm of investors. Hong Kong films began to decline rapidly.
Moreover, this also has the result of the continuous impact of Hollywood blockbusters.
Since 1994, the living space of Hong Kong films has become smaller and smaller, and Hollywood has gradually dominated the vast Southeast Asian market.
It was against this background that filmmakers such as Jack Cheng and Bai Gewu chose to enter Hollywood.
In addition to "Red Zone" which will be released on January 27, Baige Wu's "Broken Arrow", which he collaborated with Daenerys Entertainment last year, has also been completed and is scheduled to be released on February 10, during Valentine's Day. Like David Fincher's new film "Psycho", which is scheduled to be released at the end of the summer season, "Broken Arrow" with a production budget of US$50 million was placed in February, also because Daenerys Entertainment has too many high-quality projects.
Even the Easter schedule, which is similar to the "Broken Arrow" schedule and is more high-quality, is also occupied by Daenerys Entertainment's consecutive hit comedy series "Tokyo 3".
"The Man from Earth", which Simon wrote himself, is expected to participate in the Sundance Film Festival at the end of the month, and can only be placed in the even more unpopular schedule at the end of February. "Broken Arrow" will at least occupy a Valentine's Day.
With the local market becoming increasingly difficult to develop, the main proposal Simon proposed at the first Daenerys Entertainment high-level meeting at the beginning of the year was to maximize the expansion of overseas markets. In fact, Daenerys Entertainment has been doing this for the past few years, but it will pay more attention in the future in order to use the vast overseas market space to maximize the commercial potential of a series of film projects produced by Daenerys Entertainment and share the local burden. Risks arising from differences in market schedules.
After returning to Los Angeles after New Year's Day and busy with Daenerys' entertainment, Simon rushed to San Francisco on January 9th.
The 20-hectare Eagle Park in Mountain View was planned since the beginning of 1993. After more than a year of development and construction, it was officially put into use after the year. Previously, Eagle could only rent office buildings scattered throughout the Silicon Valley. Ruite Company moved into its new office space in the first week after the New Year.
Simon originally allocated as much as 300 hectares of land in the coastal area of Mountain View City in the name of the Westeros Company, and Ygritte only occupied one-fifth of it.
In addition to Yigrit, who has sufficient financial strength to build his own campus, Simon has also built an additional office area in the name of Westeros Company. This office area planned to be leased to new technology startups in Silicon Valley was also planned to be leased to new technology startups in Silicon Valley at the same time at the beginning of the year. Put into use.
Therefore, when Yigrit moved, companies such as Tinker Bayer, Broadcast, and Instagram that were closely related to Yigrit also moved into this office park in Mountain View.
The residential area that has invested heavily in development by the sea in the north of the office park has also been opened to employees of Yigrit Company or affiliated companies earlier. For the time being, only leasing is allowed, and the price for employees of Yigrit Company is very low. The residential area is characterized by its unique There are mainly single-family villas and three-story apartments, each with a number of 500 units. The total of 1,000 housing units is enough to easily accommodate 5,000 people.
With the rise of the new technology industry, real estate growth in the Bay Area is already 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 now, but in ten or twenty years, even employees of the top technology companies will not be able to buy a house in the Bay Area. So easy. In Simon’s memory, there are even news about employees of companies like Google and Facebook living in RVs for a long time.
The properties that Simon built in the name of the Westeros Company are mainly for leasing, and the huge initial investment cannot be recovered in the short term. However, in the long term, not only the continued appreciation of the properties themselves will bring huge profits to Simon, Being able to provide low-cost rental housing for employees will also become a major advantage for Igret to compete with other technology companies in the future.
Of course, even if it is a cheap rental, Simon will not suffer a loss.
Because the 'cheapness' here is only for the employees of the relevant companies. If you want this kind of cheapness, whether it is Yigrit or other companies that want to provide similar benefits to their employees, they need to make up the rent difference in the form of subsidies.
Moreover, this business is not a loss for either Yigrit or other park companies.
Because the competition for human resources in Silicon Valley is at a very fierce stage, housing subsidies are undoubtedly a highlight for new technology companies to attract employees. Not only that, because these properties are very close to the office space, they can save employees’ commuting time to the greatest extent. It can even encourage employees to take the initiative to work overtime to a great extent.
In addition, although the efficiency of collecting rent is very low compared to selling the property directly, Simon can use this part of the property as collateral to obtain a loan from the bank as long as needed. Due to the high growth trend of housing prices in the Bay Area, if you take out a loan, just the annual increase in housing prices itself will be enough to offset the related interest expenses and achieve a surplus.
All in all, this deal is a very good deal no matter how you look at it.
After arriving in San Francisco, Simon spent the whole day on January 9th attending the company's all-high-level meeting in the modern office building with a fiberglass structure in the Ygritte Park. The main topics were the review of 1994 and the planning and outlook for 1995.
Due to the overall explosion of the new technology industry in the past year, Yigret, which has a monopoly position in many businesses in the industry, has also shown a more rapid and explosive growth in annual revenue than in 1993. Now Yigret has begun to launch In order to increase investor confidence in various audits before the IPO, the company will also announce its 1994 financial report next month.
At that time, many people will be surprised.
Simon's requirements for the core management of Yigrit are no longer to make rapid progress, but to calm down and slow down to further develop a series of core products of Yigrit.
Another core issue is overseas expansion.
Simon has not forgotten what he said to Clinton and other core Washington officials last time in the White House, and neither has Washington.
Overseas expansion does not conflict with Igret's strategy of slowing down and focusing on core products.
It is actually not difficult to imitate the more basic technologies of portals, e-mails, search engines and other businesses. Not only in the United States, many new technology industry peers overseas have also begun to launch similar products. If Igret wants to maintain its advantage in this kind of competition, it can only continue to improve and optimize its products.
Users are actually very smart.
Whether it is a search engine or a social network, everyone can tell whether a product is good or bad by using it a few times, and then they will naturally tend to use the best one.
In the past, Yahoo actually launched a content search function very early. Why did it lose to Google later? In addition to serious mistakes in corporate strategy, Yahoo's own search tools were primitive and clumsy. This company was quickly overtaken by competitors. important reason.
In fact, relying on the accumulation in the past few years, a series of products of Yigrit Company already have considerable advantages. Simon did not dare to take it lightly at all. Every time they met, he would rush to instill a sense of crisis in the top management of Yigrit. In an era of information technology explosion, if you slack off a little, you may be overtaken by competitors in the blink of an eye.
Especially since we are still in the early stages of the development of the new technology industry, Yigrit is far from being able to take it lightly.
After a busy day and attending an inner circle party organized by John Chambers in the evening, Simon did not return to his mountain villa in Woodside until after ten o'clock in the evening.
After taking a shower and relaxing, I had just discussed a few words with Alice Ferguson, the former housekeeper who returned with me tonight, about Ygritte's recently launched satellite map business. Girl A came over to remind me that there was a call from Kiev.
Celia Miller and Ken Dixon set off for Ukraine on January 2.
Things didn't go too well.
Upon hearing that Simon wanted to replace the governor of the Rivne region, Ukrainian President Leon Kuchma began to react very negatively, and even unabashedly told Celia that such a request for the Westeros system was too out of bounds.
Simon was not polite about it either.
On the one hand, Celia continues to lobby Kuchma.
On the other hand, the arms trading company in the Westeros system directly stopped negotiating the latest business deal with Ukraine.
Throughout the 1990s, Ukraine basically relied on arms sales to continuously restore a little vitality to this economically depressed country.
However, there are actually not many arms that Ukraine can sell to the outside world.
There is little demand from other countries for more basic individual weapons or old-fashioned Soviet-made heavy weapons. High-end strategic missiles and nuclear weapons are impossible to sell to the outside world, at least not to the public. As a result, the production of many popular helicopters or ships has been restricted.
Moreover, these arms sales are often difficult to reach private pockets, and most of them still have to be transferred to the state treasury.
The Westeros system is similar to an intermediary arms trading company, but it has built a bridge for the export of low-end weapons that Ukraine originally had little demand for.
The most critical point is that there is still a lot of room for maneuver.
Ukraine has a lot of low-end weapons that Europe, Asia and North America don't need. If they want to be sold directly to Africa, which has the greatest demand, countries there simply can't afford them. It is impossible for the Ukrainian government to barter like the arms trading companies in the Westeros system. What Ukraine lacks is money, not resources. To obtain oil, diamonds and the like that are thousands of miles away, there is nothing for Ukraine. any sense.
Therefore, the arms trading companies in the Westeros system are crucial.
Simon decisively asked the arms trading company to stop negotiating new deals, which immediately made Kuchma realize the seriousness of the matter. A large number of people in the Kuchma government relied on this money bag. In comparison, a governor seemed It seems irrelevant. After all, Ukraine is not a big country like the United States. A governor is about the same as a mayor here in the United States.
After bargaining for several days, 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. It was already nine o'clock in the morning in Kyiv on January 10, local time. Celia had just had breakfast with Kuchma and got the letter from the President to remove Governor Rovne from office. Warrant for the position of Ry Miloslav. After finishing the call with Simon and finally confirming a series of operational details with her boss, Celia will rush to Rivni, the capital of Rivne Oblast, in the morning to officially launch the purge plan.