"브로콜리" in English means broccoli.
Coincidentally, the Broccoli family, which held half the copyright to the 007 series, had originally built its fortune selling vegetables.
Albert Broccoli, the man who discovered the 007 IP, was a strong-willed character. To demonstrate his absolute control over the 007 series, he had more than once declared in media interviews that during his vegetable-selling days, if the price could not be negotiated, he would rather dump all the vegetables than sell them.
The same attitude applied to 007. Until MGM fell under Simon's control, the Broccoli family had never yielded an inch in front of MGM.
The fundamental reason lay in the fact that for decades the 007 series, as a big-budget franchise, had turned a profit on every single film without a single loss.
Hollywood was conservative to its core.
When Westerns were popular, everyone rushed to make Westerns. When buddy movies rose, a wave of buddy movies appeared. When teen horror films sold well, the market was immediately flooded with teen horror films.
In the end, it all came down to the enormous risks in the film industry.
Before any studio green-lit a project costing tens of millions of dollars, the decision was never as relaxed as outsiders imagined.
Therefore, following already successful film models became the safest choice for most studios.
In other words, they followed trends.
It was the same as Hong Kong cinema across the ocean, except Hollywood's trend-following was relatively benign and backed by the solid North American market, allowing it to survive and remain dominant.
Because of that conservatism, the never-loss-making 007 series had become MGM's most treasured "broccoli."
Simon, however, was the one who least lacked fresh vegetables, so he had no problem if the seller chose to dump their produce when the price could not be agreed upon.
When Sherry Lansing approached the Broccoli family with Simon's conditions, the family, long accustomed to dominance, naturally refused to compromise.
Simon did not drag things out. He directly instructed Sherry Lansing to announce that the 007 series was indefinitely shelved.
After MGM issued the statement, the Broccoli family's reaction aside, the only other MGM shareholders capable of checking Simon showed concern at first but ultimately offered no significant opposition.
To name just one example, MGM's two box office hits from last year were A Few Good Men and 007: GoldenEye. A Few Good Men earned 117 million dollars domestically with a global expectation of 200 million, while 007: GoldenEye was projected to reach only slightly over 80 million domestically, also with a global expectation of 200 million.
Yet even with Tom Hanks, Robert De Niro, and Demi Moore starring, the overall production and distribution budget for A Few Good Men was still less than half that of 007: GoldenEye.
Although it was a co-production between Daenerys Entertainment and MGM, the cost advantage meant A Few Good Men actually delivered far greater returns to MGM than 007: GoldenEye.
After all, the 007 series required MGM to fund both production and marketing, while the Broccoli family only covered production. Yet because they controlled half the copyright and participated in production, the Broccoli family took away a large share of the film's revenue.
In the past, when MGM was unstable, the 007 series could absolutely serve as a stable project to prop up performance.
Now that MGM was turning around under Simon's control, this life-support series was no longer indispensable.
After A Few Good Men, the second collaboration between Daenerys Entertainment and MGM, A Time to Kill, had already been launched last year with a confirmed summer release. Since the decision had been made to revive MGM, more cooperation between the two sides would surely follow.
Comparing the returns of A Few Good Men and 007: GoldenEye, along with MGM's obvious changes over the past year, it was completely obvious which side the MGM shareholders would stand on once Simon made his decision.
When MGM announced the 007 hiatus, Simon himself was not in Los Angeles but in San Francisco.
January 23, a Thursday.
The long-prepared Amazon online mall officially went live on the Ygritte portal.
This was also the first subsidiary brand launched by Ygritte Company. Before this, every business division had operated under the Ygritte name.
In the just-ended 1991, the number of American World Wide Web access users had ultimately reached 13.17 million, of which America Online alone accounted for 7.68 million.
13.17 million World Wide Web access accounts, calculated at an average of 1.6 active individual users per account, brought the total number of American web users to 21.07 million. This already equaled 10 percent of the U.S. population at the time, and precisely the 10 percent with the highest education and strongest spending power.
More than 20 million web users, and the segment of America with the strongest consumption ability at that, meant the entire United States and the entire information industry could no longer ignore the rise of the World Wide Web.
In fact, the flood of capital and companies pouring into the internet industry from the second half of last year, as well as the federal government's growing emphasis on internet development, already made the explosive growth trend of this emerging field obvious.
Influenced by the internet industry's explosion, even the personal computer sector had benefited greatly.
The previous year, due to economic downturn, industry forecasts had predicted global PC shipments would remain around the 1990 level of 20 million units.
In reality, 1991's full-year PC shipments ultimately reached 23.87 million units, a growth rate exceeding 19 percent. A large portion of those users bought computers specifically to experience web surfing, while another portion upgraded from old DOS machines to the latest high-spec graphical operating system PCs for a better online experience.
All in all, the rise of the internet industry had become an unstoppable trend.
Although it launched three years earlier than the Amazon in Simon's original memory, the new Amazon, backed by the Ygritte portal, essentially possessed more than 20 million potential users the moment it went live. Moreover, Ygritte's increasingly perfected online payment tool Ypay provided the Amazon online mall with a mature payment solution.
In Simon's plan, Amazon would focus exclusively on book sales for the next three years.
At this stage, choosing online book sales as the starting point for physical e-commerce offered far too many advantages.
Current internet users all possessed high levels of education and therefore often had greater demand for purchasing books.
Unlike daily necessities, compared with physical bookstores, an online mall could offer vastly more variety of books, which was more than enough to motivate users to try online book buying.
In addition, simplifying the range of physical goods sold could minimize the complexity of e-commerce operations to the greatest extent.
At the same time, the Amazon online mall could help the Ygritte team accumulate experience in everything from e-commerce website operations to actual warehousing and logistics.
Although no special press conference was held this time, before the online mall opened, Ygritte Company had already launched advertising and marketing across network, television, radio, newspaper, and other media platforms.
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 mall's delivery area was limited to the two core metropolitan regions on the East and West Coasts, with the Great Lakes area in the north and the vast central and southern regions of the United States still unreachable, from nine o'clock in the morning onward, driven by the mall's heavy promotional activities, the number of orders broke 100,000 in just 31 minutes.
By five o'clock in the afternoon, after eight hours of operation, the total number of orders reached 870,000.
However, as everyone knew, evening was the peak period for online consumption.
Simon flew back to Los Angeles as usual after work that afternoon.
The next morning at nine o'clock, after twenty-four hours of operation, statistics showed the Amazon online mall had ultimately achieved 1.32 million orders, sold 1.56 million books, and generated 32.76 million dollars in transaction value.
This seemingly simple set of figures felt no less than miraculous to far too many people.
Not to mention selling over a million books in a single day, in the entire world probably no physical bookstore could even achieve single-day sales exceeding 100,000 copies.
Therefore, the appearance of the Amazon online mall, like the Ypay and Ystore launched by Ygritte Company the previous year, proved the feasibility of internet-based physical e-commerce almost within a single day.
As soon as the first-day sales figures for the Amazon online mall were released, not only traditional physical book retailers but even comprehensive retail giants like Walmart had to quickly turn their attention to the internet platform and convene emergency meetings to discuss the necessity of launching online stores.
Traditional media had already clearly felt the strong threat from internet media platforms over the past year or more, so their public opinion had inevitably been full of nitpicking toward the internet.
Even so, after the first-day sales data for the Amazon online mall was published, most media outlets began proclaiming that the e-commerce era was about to arrive.
On the other hand, for Ygritte Company the seemingly dazzling first-day figures of the Amazon online mall also meant far too many challenges.
To quickly build the online mall's reputation, Ygritte Company had invested 20 million dollars in promotion expenses in just the past half month.
The facts proved that level of promotion had clearly been excessive.
The 1.32 million orders on the first day immediately meant enormous computational pressure on the Amazon online mall's servers.
According to data compiled by the Ygritte portal, although only 1.32 million orders were completed on the day the mall opened, during the evening peak the actual highest number of simultaneous users once broke 5 million.
After two years of continuous data center expansion, the Ygritte portal could handle such user traffic. However, the access cap preset for the Amazon online mall was exactly 5 million.
If not for some emergency contingency plans prepared in advance, the Amazon online mall could have suffered a crash on its very first day.
Ygritte's secretly developed cloud computing project had already entered the substantive testing phase, but large-scale formal application would still require at least another year of continuous adjustment and refinement.
Lacking flexible data computing environments, the Amazon online mall would still have to use the traditional fixed-capacity data computing and storage model in the short term, which would undoubtedly create significant cost pressure.
Of course, as long as the online mall could get off to a good start, all these costs were definitely worth it.
The most critical issue was still the logistics and delivery pressure behind those orders.
The mall team's best prior prediction had only been to achieve the groundbreaking feat of one million orders on opening day.
In reality, it had been "overloaded" by 30 percent.
Delivering the books involved in these 1.32 million orders one by one, even relying on America's extremely developed postal system and with the operating area still temporarily limited, was an even more daunting challenge for the Amazon warehousing and logistics system, which was still completely in the exploration stage.
Therefore, after the first day, the mall team's first decision was to pull all removable advertisements from every platform.
They really could not promote any further.
At the same time, the mall team began contacting various express delivery companies outside of USPS, essentially prepared to complete the first batch of massive orders at any cost.
Everyone understood that first impressions were extremely important.
If users tried online shopping for the first time and had to wait half a month to receive the books they wanted, it would seriously damage their enthusiasm for future online consumption.
Finally, to help the mall team through the difficult period, Simon also sent Nancy Brill over.
Blockbuster's rich experience in warehousing and logistics could still provide considerable help to the mall team.
The petite female executive was not polite either. She directly asked Simon for the title of special advisor to Ygritte Company, of course the paid version.
As for logistics and delivery, a single-day total of 1.32 million online shopping orders was a first, so the housekeeper Alice Ferguson, who was solely responsible for mall operations, had to figure it out herself.
Of course, the entire Ygritte senior management team was offering ideas and strategies to handle the matter.
Simon also bluntly declared that if they messed it up, she could obediently come back and be his housekeeper.
The Westeros system's early layout in the internet industry had reached the final critical stage, and e-commerce was the top priority in Simon's plan. He had no patience to tolerate any failure.
In the midst of busyness, another weekend passed in the blink of an eye.
This year's eighth Sundance Film Festival opened on January 16.
After Run Lola Run, even though no more super box office dark horses had appeared, Sundance had been thriving in recent years.
The development of independent films in Hollywood had also become increasingly vigorous under the impetus of Highgate Pictures' series of successful films.
Before this edition of Sundance opened, Robert Redford had hoped that Simon, the biggest name to emerge from Sundance, could attend.
Redford would not even mention asking Simon to serve as a Sundance juror. Simon clearly had no time for that now, and Sundance truly could not afford him.
However, the chair of this year's jury was Kathryn.
He had been too busy during the opening ceremony to free up time, but the closing ceremony happened to fall on January 26, a Sunday.
Simon quietly arrived in Park City, Utah, on Saturday.
Janet had to look after the child and did not come along.
Because Kathryn was already there, the female assistant who had personally overseen the construction of several wooden cabins in Park City in the hope of turning them into a private love nest felt a little resentful but did not follow this time either.
It was still January. Los Angeles was as spring-like as ever, while Park City was covered in ice, snow, and silver-white splendor.
Such an enclosed atmosphere was indeed perfect for spending time alone with the person one liked.