Chapter 907 Actually I Just Arrived

"Rainbow Media's assets mainly include Bravo Channel, which is wholly owned, New York Sports? 21 Channel, which holds 70% of the shares, Orlando RB Channel, which holds 50% of the shares, F Color Music Channel, which holds 45% of the shares, and Huahua, which holds 40% of the shares. Gongzi Channel, through asset evaluation, the total market value of this company is about 1.8 billion US dollars. ΔBasic Cable insists on selling up to 600 million US dollars of shares to MGM. At the same time, we will also obtain the right to operate the bravo channel. "

In the office, Amy Pascal, who came from Century City, reported to Eric the final result of the negotiations with Basic Cable.

Eric looked at the preliminary transaction plan in his hand, and always had a feeling that something strange was mixed in. He raised his head and smiled and asked Amy, "Playboy Channel?"

Resisting the urge to roll her eyes at Eric, Amy explained: "This is a paid cable station created by the Basic Cable Company in cooperation with the Playboy Group in 1986. It mainly provides adult programs such as pornographic movies."

"Oh, okay," Eric nodded, and did not continue this embarrassing topic for the lady, and said: "That's it, but the other TV stations are fine. After the transaction is completed, you should convince the management of Rainbow Media as soon as possible. layer to sell their stake in the Playboy Channel."

Amy hesitated for a while, and said: "Eric, the profitability of the Playboy Channel is still very good. Moreover, Rainbow Media only holds shares, and the operating rights of the TV station have always been in the Playboy Group, which will not affect us. What effect."

"You may be mistaken, Amy, I didn't ask you to sell the shares of the Playboy Channel because of the company's reputation. Now that there are more and more free Internet services, the physical pornography industry will definitely go to the next few years. Declining, if you don’t sell it now, this asset will definitely shrink significantly in the future.”

"Well, I will remember it," Amy nodded, and continued: "There is also an agreement with Morgan Stanley on the issue of bonds, and they will assist MGM in the next month. For the US$500 million corporate bond, many foundations, including State Street Global, have already expressed their intention to subscribe, and our financing scale is not large, so it will definitely go smoothly.”

Having said that, Amy looked at Eric with more complicated emotions in his eyes.

MGM originally planned to raise $1 billion in bond financing. But because Eric took away the production rights of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and the global sales of "Casino Royale" brought a lot of cash flow to MGM. In the end, the company only needed to issue half of the bonds for Expansion plans for TV business.

Although the outside world is generally optimistic about MGM's steady expansion strategy, most of the media praised MGM's decision to abandon the high-risk "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, but Amy felt vaguely that losing the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy The production rights of the trilogy, as well as the film and television copyrights of Toil King's other two works "The Hobbit Adventure" and "The Silmarillion", are definitely a very heavy loss for MGM.

Amy even affirmed in her heart that Eric did this as a punishment for MGM's swaying attitude from shareholders to management in the Pierce Brosnan incident.

It's just that she didn't understand how serious this punishment was until the first part of the "Lord of the Rings" series was released.

Eric felt some changes in Amy's eyes, but he didn't bother to think about it. He closed the transaction plan in his hand and continued: "Since you won two TV stations at once, have you considered the detailed business strategy? ?”

"Yes," Amy replied, "the original market positioning of e! Entertainment and bravo has some overlap. My plan is to clearly distinguish the content positioning of the two TV stations. e! Entertainment focuses on entertainment and fashion. , the audience is determined to be young men and women around the age of 18, so the content needs to be more avant-garde. In this regard, I think the reality show idea of ​​"Beverly Girls" is very good. In addition, the management has already started preparing an e! Entertainment The news station, which specializes in broadcasting gossip news in the entertainment and fashion circles,

We also intend to continue to move forward with this plan. As for bravo, we intend to focus on the audience of housewives. In this regard, bravo has already laid a good foundation. What we need to do is to continue to develop suitable TV programs to consolidate the market position of bravo TV station in this audience group. "

"Housewife," Eric repeated a word in Amy's words just now, and the name of a TV series, "Desperate Housewives", popped up in his mind almost instantly.

For a network geared towards housewives, "Desperate Housewives" is a tailor-made show.

The reason why the former ab TV station is more and more known as a women's station is mainly due to the influence of the high-rated drama series "Desperate Housewives". Now, the Firefly Group already has a TV station for urban women, and now there is another Bravo TV station for housewives, so Eric will definitely not let ab develop in the direction of women's TV.

In this case, it is perfect to put the big killer of "Desperate Housewives" on bravo.

Amy didn't hear the words spoken in Eric's mouth clearly, and asked suspiciously: "Eric, what did you just say?"

Eric came back to his senses, shook his head, and didn't intend to say this idea for the time being: "I just came up with some ideas, and they are not mature yet. I will tell you in a few days, and you should focus on taking over and integrating the two. A TV station."

In the past, he only watched a few episodes of "Desperate Housewives" intermittently. It is unrealistic to reproduce the whole story. All he can do is to rewrite the script according to the general concept of this TV series. It is hard to predict whether it will be popular with the audience. However, this is actually good. After all, if the original version of "Desperate Housewives" is broadcast on a cable station like Bravo, which is far inferior to ab TV, it still feels a bit pity. Now it is equivalent to remaking a TV series, and it doesn't matter if it succeeds or fails.

Amy nodded. The matter was almost finished. She was about to leave when she remembered something again and said, "By the way, Eric, regarding "Beverly Girls", Ms. Jenner has already selected four girls , the script is almost finished, are you?"

Eric looked at his schedule on the computer monitor, nodded and said, "If I'm free in the past few days, someone will call her."

After sending Amy away, Eric asked Peter Jackson to have dinner at the restaurant on the Titanic at noon.

Peter Jackson has been preparing for the "Lord of the Rings" series for so many years, and finally entered the official production stage. Unexpectedly, he encountered a sudden change in the producer. Recently, he has been very nervous, for fear that the project will be inexplicably yellow again.

Eric naturally would not allow this to happen, so he deliberately came forward to appease the other party.

Except for the next "Reaper 2", Firefly Group has no other films to be released in the summer, and Eric's energy has also begun to turn to other projects under the company.

"Iron Man" plans to start filming early next year, and has recently begun casting. Although the preparatory progress of "Spider-Man" is very slow, the casting work has also started. Although the Firefly Group has no fewer than ten films in various stages of production at the same time, Eric originally needed to pay attention to these two masterpieces of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

However, since the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy was brought over, Eric had to devote a large part of his energy to this project.

The former "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, with a production cost of less than 300 million US dollars, leveraged a huge box office of 100 million US dollars worldwide, and the rate of return was even higher than that of "Titanic". Eric naturally needs to treat it with caution.

In order to make the whole project run more smoothly, while transferring the production rights to Firefly, Eric also simply pried over the production team that MGM had initially built, and continued to cooperate with Peter Jackson in the preparation of the film.

For the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, the biggest difficulty in the early preparations was actually the casting.

Due to the grand story background, the characters in the trilogy are also extremely numerous, which means that the plan to invite well-known actors to participate in the performance is basically not feasible.

Although he is very optimistic about this project, Eric has no intention of increasing the budget for it. Therefore, most of the characters in the movie will adopt second- and third-tier newcomers. Although the most indispensable thing in Hollywood is actors, it is not so easy to pick out the right candidate in the vast crowd. In addition to asking for the two roles of Queen of Elf and Princess Arwen, and intending to hand them over to Nicole and Diane Kruger, Eric did not intend to intervene too much in the casting, but only set the salary for Peter Jackson Budget constraints, and then hand over these tedious affairs to the other party with confidence.

The casting of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy is relatively easy to say. The benefits of having many characters mean that even if one or two characters in the film fail to be cast, it will not affect the quality of the entire film. After his 16th birthday, Stewart Runkel also agreed to sign a six-part contract with Marvel, leaving only "Iron Man" in the end.

After rejecting Tom Cruise, Marvel Entertainment eo Avi Arad has set his sights on Matthew McConaughey. The unrestrained temperament of this actor does echo the image of Iron Man Tony Stark. However, after starring in "Seven Deadly Sins" and "Contact Time and Space", Matthew McConaughey has been promoted to the front line of Hollywood. Unwilling to sign a long-term contract with Marvel, Eric still inexplicably doesn't like the actor, so he didn't continue talking with him.

Therefore, as a big production with a production cost of over 100 million U.S. dollars, the selection of the leading actor is usually limited to a small circle, and finally turned into an audition for all Hollywood actors.

Although Firefly's harsh long-term contract conditions were announced, it was inevitably ridiculed by some media, and even turned into pessimism about the prospects of the entire project, but as Eric said during the Brosnan incident, he wanted to get this For the role, it can still be arranged from Malibu to Burbank.

Firefly Studios.

The time has come to the last day of July, and today happens to be Friday.

Kris Jenner drove into Firefly Studios, parked the car in the parking lot, but didn't get out of the car in a hurry, took out the makeup mirror and took care of her makeup before opening the car door. She got the news last Wednesday that Eric would take the time to read the script of "Beverly Girls", but she didn't expect to get the news for more than a week. However, she didn't dare to complain in the slightest.

Recently, due to the box office hit of "Casino Royale", followed by Brosnan's replacement, Eric's personal influence has further climbed to an unattainable level in Hollywood. For this kind of big man, Kris Jenner, who is instinctively in awe of power, feels that even if she waits for a month, it doesn't seem to be a big deal. As long as she can maintain some relationship with the other party, it is enough for her to be in her small circle. Ri elated.

During this period of time, her life was indeed very beautiful. For the project of "Beverly Girls", she moved back to Los Angeles with her whole family. She originally thought that some old friends would be alienated because of her absence in the past few years. But when they learned that she would personally run the reality show project conceived by Eric Williams, those people all jumped up one by one, much more eagerly than when she was in Los Angeles.

All the way to Eric's office door, politely greeted Eric's secretary outside, who asked her to wait for a while, and Kris Jenner sat obediently in the reception room outside.

"Don't blame me for not reminding you for the last time, Bridget, if you get this role, everyone will call you Pepper when they see you again." After a while, the door of Eric's office opened, a man and a woman Walking out of it, the man is naturally Eric, but the girl is Bridget Fonda who once played the leading role in "Ghostly Love", Kris Jenner remembered that since "Ghostly Love" After "Unfinished", the other party doesn't seem to have any good works in recent years. However, hearing Eric's tone faintly, she seems to be getting some important role again, and it is still enough to change an actor's popularity among the audience. The important role of the impression in the mind.

She couldn't help but feel a little envious. She had fantasized about becoming an actress back then, but unfortunately she never had such a chance.

Brigitte Fonda also noticed Kris Jenner sitting in the reception room, nodded to her, said a few words to Eric, and left politely.

Eric watched the other party leave, and then waved to Kris Jenner: "Sorry, Ms. Jenner, I kept you waiting, please come with me."

"It's okay, actually I just arrived too," Kris Jenner hurriedly got up, picked up her satchel and walked over. (To be continued.) 8