Chapter 691 There are too many variables

Chapter 691 There are too many variables

A 25% premium was offered to a comics, film and television company with bleak performance, a debt of $ to $ million, a recent drop in stock price, and no previous production experience. This figure is already quite sincere.

It is probably like when the real estate market is booming and at a high point, someone's house is only worth 100 million, but someone offers it for 125 million, which is very tempting for the seller.

At the same time, Fan Wumian also promised the Marvel board of directors that there would be no layoffs for three consecutive years, and that salaries would increase by at least 5% each year for the next three years. This move also won the support of many management and grassroots employees.

Acquiring a high-profile public company is a daunting proposition.

Last night, Disney executives wanted to disrupt the situation, but fortunately the two parties had other cooperative relationships, and the other party informed Fan Wumian in advance.

The two sides verbally reached some cooperation, and he promised that if "Iron Man" was successful, he would give some shares to Disney in the future and help the other party get a share of the "Thor", "Hulk", "Captain America" ​​and other series.

Of course, Disney can only enjoy the movie box office dividends, peripheral copyrights and derivative products, and Fan Wumian has no intention of letting go.

Disney, which is wealthy and loves to buy everywhere and has grown through mergers and acquisitions, is undoubtedly the most threatening competitor in Fan Wumian's eyes. If he remembers correctly, Marvel was acquired by Disney in its previous life for more than 40 billion US dollars. It is necessary to pay some price, take out attractive enough bait, and find a way to deal with it in advance.

However, "Iron Man" has just been completed, and the market is generally not optimistic about the newly established "Marvel Studios", believing that they do not have the ability to develop a large-scale special effects superhero movie. What Disney really cares about is just the adaptation rights of some popular comics.

Since Fan Wumian is willing to cooperate, Disney executives may save trouble by allowing him to acquire Marvel Entertainment and earn some box office revenue in the future.

In January last year, Disney Group spent US$1 billion to acquire Pixar Animation Studios from Apple founder Steve Jobs, and it will take some time to digest and integrate the business.

Sony Pictures, which has just started to make a profit, as well as Paramount, 21st Century Fox, Time Warner and other companies, either have dismal performance or are seriously damaged, and they seem to have no interest in Marvel Entertainment.

The $10.5 billion offered by Fan Wumian is not a small amount of money. If someone raises the price and snatches the money from him, and then makes another money-losing movie like "Hulk", the loss may be very huge.

"Spider-Man" seems to be very popular, but there are also many superhero movies that have failed.

For example, "Fantastic Four", starring Hollywood beauty Jessica Alba, had a production cost of US$1 million, plus publicity and promotion costs, and ultimately earned US$3.3 million at the global box office, barely breaking even.

Movies like Daredevil, Elektra, Ghost Rider, Catwoman, and Superman Returns all underperformed.

The status of superhero movies before Marvel became popular and superhero movies after Marvel became popular are completely different. If someone was really optimistic about Marvel, the stock price would not be so bleak, and it would not be the turn of Fan Wumian, an outsider, to reap the bargain.

Upon learning that disagreements were beginning to arise within Marvel, Fan Wumian still did not dare to have too much expectations, because there were too many variables.

Marvel's conservatives are likely to win and vote on the board of directors to reject his plan for a full acquisition.

Even if Marvel Entertainment is willing to be privatized and delisted, other competitors may emerge and raise the acquisition price, forcing Fan Wumian to further increase the acquisition budget. In the end, he will either spend a lot of money in vain, or work hard to make a wedding dress for others.

In addition, there were employees rebelling and making some weird demands, shareholders making trouble and opposing the acquisition, etc. In short, as long as there was a problem in any link, his acquisition would be difficult to go forward.

This led to Fan Wumian being very Buddhist. He was mentally prepared in advance that it would be great if he could acquire the company, but it would also be okay if he couldn't. After all, there were investment projects with super high returns everywhere. From an investment perspective, the rate of return that Marvel could bring was actually not as good as that of incubating some start-ups in Silicon Valley.

It was simply because he was interested in this industry and there was an opportunity to buy at the bottom and get bargains that Fan Wumian felt that Marvel Entertainment was a little special.

If the acquisition plan is completely scrapped, he can also pay attention to Netflix. As the most popular streaming platform in the past, Netflix has incubated countless popular American dramas. Recently, the company has announced that it will soon build an online video platform.

However, the timing of announcing the good news was too bad, and the words had little weight for the time being, so that after Netflix announced its streaming plan, its stock price just rose by a few points, but was dragged down by the depressed market and quickly fell back.

Previously, Netflix was mainly engaged in the video rental and sales business, which was equivalent to an online audio and video product store. Most investors doubted its ability to build an online video platform.

Some analysts also believe that Netflix cannot obtain a large number of film sources from film and television companies like the popular Tudou, not to mention Youtube, which was acquired by Google and has much more funds and resources than Netflix.

Even Google's YouTube doesn't dare to easily get involved in the long video field, so people will certainly not have confidence in Netflix.

Only Fan Wumian knew that in the previous life, Netflix executives successfully broke a new path by producing their own film and television dramas.

But the problem is that many things have been changed by Fan Wumian.

Giants such as Paramount, Disney, and Sony Pictures have all sent people to Tudou to learn from it, and are very interested in the video website business. This leads to a question mark as to whether Netflix can replicate its previous success. If it plans too early, it may fail and make a fool of itself.

Recently, Fan Wumian even had the idea of ​​bringing together Disney, Paramount, and Sony Pictures, with Tudou providing part of the funding and technology, to jointly establish a streaming media platform in Silicon Valley.

The problem is that all three companies have huge film library resources, and it is difficult for him to get much of a share from them. If he only owns 10% of the shares, wouldn't that be like a high-level employee?
Therefore, Fan Wumian temporarily put this idea aside and planned to wait and see for a while, and make a decision after making more money from the subprime mortgage crisis and having more say.
With a business like his, he always encounters messy and troublesome things every day.

After some time to calm down during the filming of the new drama, Fan Wumian gradually came to terms with things. He once again recruited several powerful think tanks through a headhunting company, all of whom joined his family office. They were specifically responsible for making suggestions for the companies under his control and resolving minor troubles so that he could calm down and enjoy life.

A few days ago, Fan Wumian unexpectedly learned that a large number of stock investors had set up a forum to discredit him, saying that he was spreading negative news and frantically selling shares through fund companies. Some stock investors even hired lawyers to sue him for causing them to lose tens of thousands of dollars.

This also made Fan Wumian see things more clearly, and he decided to respect the fate of others in the future.

Many people make money by relying on the dividends of economic development, but they themselves do not have the cognitive level corresponding to wealth. The wealth that comes from the wind will surely be blown away by the wind.

All I can say is that most people are pretty good, but there are a lot of idiots out there, which really makes people unhappy.

Even though Penguin Weibo is a platform created by Fan Wumian himself, he still feels that the threshold for Internet access is too low. The Internet information age has given many psychopaths the opportunity to speak out, which often makes him very angry. For the sake of his own physical and mental health, he should try to keep his distance.

Fortunately, Fan Wumian himself is a major shareholder of Penguin Group.

After discovering that the atmosphere on the Penguin Weibo platform was becoming increasingly violent, causing dissatisfaction among many users, he made a special phone call to the president of the subsidiary, demanding that he rectify the increasingly complex Weibo community atmosphere and prevent bad money from driving out good money.

The specific approach is to continue to make adjustments in algorithm recommendations to ensure that negative information and bad speech are difficult to spread, ban a number of accounts that have been complained and reported a large number of times, and at the same time only allow accounts that have been registered with real names to leave comments, and one ID card or mobile phone number can only apply for one account, etc.

This may cause some temporary impact, but it will be beneficial to long-term development. By raising the threshold and review mechanism, some emotional and bad users can be driven to other platforms, which will help create a good online community ecological environment and retain a large number of high-quality users.

The person in charge of the Penguin Weibo project quickly formulated some rectification strategies, including recruiting thousands of back-end reviewers to promptly handle illegal information reported by users, and recruiting some volunteers to serve as "Weibo Sheriffs" to help maintain the community atmosphere. Their work content includes voting to review other reported information to see if it is suspected of illegal activities (End of this chapter)