"Speaking of which, George has already decided on Queen Amidala's cast candidate, and it just so happens that you still know him. Pen | fun | pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ”

The next morning, Eric drove to Firefly Studios, from the top of Beverly Hill to Preavista, passing through Century City, and Elizabeth rode Eric's car to work.

"Star Wars Prequel" has been delayed until now due to the establishment of Amberlin Pictures and other reasons, and it is finally confirmed that it will start shooting in April, as the distributor, the project is now under the full responsibility of Elizabeth, who has been busy with this matter recently, although Fox is not involved in the production of the film, but most of the studio shooting is still determined to be filmed on Fox sets. On the way to Century City, the two couldn't help but talk about this topic.

Eric really didn't have any interest in the Star Wars series, and he wasn't too interested in whether the heroine was still Natalie Portman, but listening to Elizabeth's excited tone, he still followed her and asked curiously: "Who?"

Elizabeth leaned towards Eric, curled the corners of her mouth, and said, "Guess what, to give you a hint, it's a sixteen or seventeen-year-old girl, and you once personally discovered her to enter Hollywood." ”

When Eric heard her say this, he was roughly sure that the trajectory of history still coincided with the past.

But this is not surprising, starting from "This Killer is Not Too Cold", Natalie Portman is the most outstanding child star in recent years, in addition to the wonderful performance in "This Killer is Not Too Cold", Natalie also participated in the critically acclaimed "The Line of Fire", "Everyone Says I Love You" and other films, not to mention, she is also Jewish, this advantage is even stronger. As one of the important symbols of American film culture, Queen Amidala in the "Star Wars" series, whether intentionally or unintentionally, in Hollywood, where Jews gather, this group of people will definitely be more inclined to push a Jewish girl to play the role.

Despite this, Eric deliberately guessed, "I think, huh, Kirsten Dunst?"

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

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

Elizabeth thought about "Interview with the Vampire" at this time, snorted lightly, and said: "Okay, don't let you guess, maybe some woman will come up to anger me, it's Natalie Portman, the girl you met on Long Island a few years ago, everyone is quite satisfied." ”

"Well, a clever little fellow," Eric nodded.

Chatting casually, the sedan entered Century City, and soon drove into the Fox set, Elizabeth subconsciously adjusted the Hermes silk scarf around her neck, turned to Eric, and raised her chin slightly: "Hey, can you see the traces?"

Eric reached out to help her tidy up, blocking a trace of red marks that appeared, and said with a smile: "Even if you don't cover it, who would dare to say anything." ”

Elizabeth gave him a roll of the eye: "Okay, I took off the silk scarf, and you accompany me to the meeting." ”

Eric felt that he was not so thick-skinned, and immediately changed his words: "Forget it, I think it's better to cover up." ”

"You bastard," Elizabeth scolded in disgust.

The car stopped, the driver got out of the car and pulled the 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 by myself." ”

Eric nodded, and watched Elizabeth walk into the office building before telling the driver to drive.

In "Casino Royale", except for the scene of the airport plane dive, which uses full CG, there are not many shots that need special effects processing, so the progress of post-production is relatively fast.

Returning from San Francisco, the special effects scenes for Casino Royale were completed for the rest of February, and the film entered the final editing stage, which can be said to be a crucial step in determining the quality of a film, and throughout the end of February, Eric stopped focusing on other things and devoted himself to the editing of Casino Royale.

At the same time, after determining the final plan, Firefly Electronics officially launched the MP3 player Fireflyer's publicity offensive, although it can be predicted that Fireflyer will have a very broad market prospect in the world, however, Bill Olson and other management still decided to explore the North American market step by step for the camp.

With the support of a large number of media resources of the Firefly system, Fireflyer's delicate and small figure soon appeared on major North American TVs, On advertising platforms such as the Internet and print media, Firefly Electronics also cooperated with the Yahoo portal with great fanfare, and took out 10,000 prototypes to hold promotional activities on the Yahoo portal website, users only need to activate the Yahoo Music Box account, they can get a lucky draw opportunity every day to win a free trial of Fireflyer, and at the same time, users also have the opportunity to get Yahoo Music Store gift certificates of different denominations for purchasing songs in the Yahoo Music Store.

Although the free 10,000 Fireflyer and a large number of gift certificates directly brought a huge marketing cost of $3 million to Firefly Electronics and Yahoo Portal, the effect is also very obvious, because only the user's personal credit card information needs to be bound and activated on the YahooPay tool, and there is no need to make substantial consumption behavior, in just one week, the number of new users of Yahoopay has exceeded 700,000, and the total number of users is close to the 5 million mark, before thatThe promotion channels of YahooPay are mainly in cooperation with online payment sites such as Amazon, which are supported by Firefly Investment Company, because e-commerce has just sprouted, and users have concerns about the security of online payment tools, and since its release more than a year ago, the number of YahooPay users is only more than 4 million, compared to the number of Internet users in North America that has exceeded 50 million, this proportion is far from satisfactory.

At the end of February, Fireflyer according to a survey conducted by Yahoo Portal showed that Fireflyer's monthly shipments in North America in April were likely to reach 100,000 units, and this is still a relatively conservative estimate.

On the other hand, at the end of February, Yahoo also came up with its first decent annual financial report in its five years of existence.

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

With the explosive development of the Internet industry in North America, Yahoo Network, which occupies more than 70% of the market share of Internet online services, has achieved an operating income of $194 million for the whole year by virtue of its main business such as portal websites, online mailboxes, search engines, and personal homepages with a large number of users, and 90% of its revenue comes from Internet advertising business.

In 1996, Yahoo spent $335 million in operating expenses in all aspects of North America, as well as in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, Japan, and even Brazil in Latin America, but its annual results still showed a loss of more than $140 million. But compared to the revenue figure of less than $25 million in 1995, the performance growth rate of up to 776% in one year still surprised many people.

At the same time, although Yahoo's performance growth in the next year is predicted to slow down significantly compared with last year, the company still gives a conservative growth expectation of 200%, as long as this figure can be reached, from next year, Yahoo is likely to achieve breakeven, or even a small profit, which is undoubtedly very beneficial to Yahoo's listing.

In order to pave the way for Yahoo to go public in the next two years, Yahoo did not hesitate to publish relevant data information on the homepage of the portal after the annual financial report data was released. This has also caused a huge stir in the industry, and anyone knows what it means to have an annual growth rate of more than 700%, and the Nasdaq market is particularly sensitive to this data, and the listed Internet technology stocks have risen on the spurred by Yahoo's annual earnings report. Wall Street was also quite excited, raising Yahoo's valuation to $9 billion after the release of its annual earnings report.

Eric, who is in Los Angeles, was also very surprised to see this earnings report, he thought that Yahoo's revenue explosion would be delayed by at least a year or even longer, it seems that too many things have changed because of Yahoo's early appearance.

While reading Yahoo's overseas expansion materials, Eric inevitably thought of his former hometown, and saw that Yahoo did not have any development plans for there, and he couldn't help but wonder, so people made a special inquiry.

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

Well, Eric looked at a simple page of information, and then put it away for the time being, and it was difficult for him to rise up in his heart.

After Yahoo announced its annual financial report, Cisco, AOL, two IT companies with a large number of shares held by Firefly Investment, have also announced their annual financial statements, compared with Yahoo, which has just begun to break out, the performance of these two companies is much more real and bright, even if it is a slightly weaker AOL, the annual turnover has reached 1.8 billion US dollars.

Turning his attention back to Hollywood, on February 27, the tenth week of the release of "Titanic", the single-week box office still reached $25.3 million, and at the same time, the cumulative box office officially broke through the $400 million mark, reaching $417 million.

Because the single-week box office of "Titanic" is still firmly above $20 million, the agency predicts that "Titanic" will break the North American box office record of $460 million created by the former "Star Wars" in the twelfth week of release, and even, further, during the Oscars at the end of March, the total box office of "Titanic" will exceed $500 million, and become the first film in North America to reach a box office of $500 million.

In the overseas market, with the release of "Titanic" in some irrelevant overseas countries and regions, the film's overseas box office has expanded to 27, although France, Germany, Japan, these more important overseas box office countries will have to wait until the Oscars with the highest influence of "Titanic" will be released, but because of the increase in the number of overseas box offices, the overseas box office growth rate of "Titanic" has also begun to increase.

One of the most surprising to everyone is the Brazilian market, which has performed very ordinarily at the box office in the past.

Although it is the largest box office country in Latin America, under normal circumstances, Hollywood movies can achieve a box office of 10 million US dollars in Brazil, which is already a very good result, even if it is "Jurassic Park", which set a global box office record a few years ago, the total box office in Brazil is only more than 14.9 million US dollars, therefore, Firefly does not classify Brazil as a box office country that needs special care, therefore, on February 7, "Titanic" landed in Brazilian theaters.

Immediately, the box office performance of "Titanic" in Brazil also exceeded everyone's expectations, and it only took two weeks for the Brazilian box office of "Titanic" to exceed $10 million, which was far beyond the expectations of the Firefly Brazilian branch Qual, the total box office is around $15 million.

After breaking through $10 million in two weeks, even the head office no longer ignores the Brazilian box office prospects of "Titanic", with the personal intervention of Katzenberg, the scale of the film in Brazil has increased rapidly by about 50%, and increased publicity, and then, in the third week of release, the box office of "Titanic" in Brazil has increased instead of falling, with a single-week box office of $6.9 million and a cumulative box office of $17 million, easily breaking the "Titanic" that year The box office data is less than 15 million, because "Titanic" completely exceeds the box office curve of common sense, and no one knows how big the box office potential of the film is in Brazil.

Playavista, Los Angeles, Firefly Studios.

After more than half a month of intense work, the preliminary editing of "Casino Royale" has been completed, and MGM's executives and the main creators of the film have gathered in the viewing room of the post-production center of Firefly Studios to watch the movie samples.

The sample film has not yet made opening and ending credits, the total duration is 150 minutes, and Eric plans to further compress the footage to reach a length of about 140 minutes, which is the most appropriate for popcorn movies, like "Titanic" that lasts more than three hours and can achieve a box office miracle, there is only one in Hollywood history after all. (To be continued.) )