Debuted right after graduating from high school

"The most successful Marvel superhero movie has arrived! Iron Man's opening weekend box office surpasses $2.33 million!"

"The director calls this the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Fan Wumian has won again, and Marvel's valuation has soared to $20 billion!"

"A summer of fun! Iron Man is here to keep you company."

With the release of "Iron Man," the outside world is flooded with related news.

When Fan Wumian acquired Marvel Entertainment, the movie had already been filmed and entered the post-production stage. In fact, the success of "Iron Man" had little to do with him.

Seeing the immense popularity of this film, Fan Wumian had to admit that the ceiling for mainstream and niche themes is indeed different, and Hollywood's big-budget commercial special effects films are more likely to attract people to the cinema.

Judging from the global box office results of its opening weekend, "Iron Man" will easily become the highest-grossing film under Fan Wumian's management worldwide. Since the related topic topped the trending topics list on Tencent Weibo, it has not dropped down for two or three consecutive days.

Many men are naturally interested in the protagonist, Tony Stark, a business tycoon and tech fanatic, not to mention his glowing chest and cool mecha suit.

Countless girls across Asia had no idea who Robert Downey Jr. was, the actor who played the male lead. They were simply influenced by the influence of Fan Wumian's fans and went to the cinema to support their idol. After watching the movie, they found that the plot was surprisingly good, exciting and thrilling.

Initially, the company relied on spending a lot of money on promotion, and after word of mouth grew, it became a widely circulated phenomenon. By Monday, the box office performance was still quite good, and some media outlets had already promoted it as "potentially becoming the first film in China to break 5 million yuan at the box office."

Behind this is also the favorable factor that, influenced by Fan Wumian and Hengdian Wanxian Film and Television Group, countless investors have built and renovated thousands of new cinemas across the country; otherwise, it would be difficult for the scale of the movie-going market to increase significantly.

Most of these new cinemas have also begun to adopt digital cinema systems, which greatly reduce distribution costs because they do not require copies, and are not easily worn out, allowing for repeated screenings.

Fan Wumian acquired Marvel Entertainment not long ago, and it remains to be seen whether the company's latest valuation can reach $20 billion.

However, as Marvel Studios' first film, Iron Man was undoubtedly a success. The Feile brand obtained the merchandise rights in advance and has already started selling clothes with the "Arc Reactor" and Iron Man patterns, attracting a large number of movie fans to buy them.

In addition, products such as hats, shoes, and model toys are also sold through multiple channels, including Fei Le. Unfortunately, similar to the situation in the previous life, "cam version" videos quickly began to circulate online, and the number was so large that it was impossible to block them all.

Their works are released one after another, putting pressure on their competitors, especially many middle-aged and elderly directors who are stuck in the last century and only know how to shoot rural themes. Almost no one is looking to work with them anymore.

Times have indeed changed. Even Director Feng, who just achieved success with "Assembly", has started to think about how to innovate. After much deliberation, he set his sights on "Legend of the Master Warrior", a novel on Qidian.com, wanting to create a big-budget interstellar mecha film.

Unfortunately, despite making a lot of noise and using almost all his connections, no one was willing to invest.

People believe that science fiction films have a good market, but they don't believe that Director Feng can make such a big production, especially one with a total estimated investment of over 3.5 million RMB. The risk is just too great.

Even Feng Xiaogang's former employer, Huayi Brothers, advised him to be down-to-earth and stop thinking about unrelated things.

This infuriated Director Feng.

When Fan Wumian wanted to sign Wang Baoqiang, he said he owed him a favor, which Director Feng had never made him repay. Now it has finally come in handy.

When Director Feng approached him with the idea of ​​adapting "The Legend of the Master", Fan Wumian was stunned for a while and was not very optimistic about Director Feng's ability to make such special effects blockbusters.

Moreover, although the favors owed at the time were not insignificant, they were not worth the 3.5 million RMB that Director Feng was willing to lose.

Fortunately, Director Feng is aware of his shortcomings and said he wants to go to the upcoming "Thor" project to learn how to shoot special effects blockbusters. He also promised that he would listen to Fan Wumian when the project starts.

Therefore, after considering it for a short while at the dinner table, Fan Wumian decided to help Director Feng pay the money. At worst, he would keep a close eye on the selection of the script, assistant director, and producer, and nothing too serious would happen.

In the second half of this year, several big projects will be launched, including "Lucy", "Ghost Blows Out the Light", "Hulk", and "Captain America". Fan Wumian no longer expects to make a fortune from movies. He mainly just wants to find something to do to pass the time.

Both are businesses, but managing an entertainment company is much more interesting than managing other companies. Just watching the actresses constantly rushing headlong into the fire makes Fan Wumian feel it's all worthwhile.

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There is one month left until the Olympics.

Every corner of Yanjing City was cleaned spotlessly, with red banners and flowers everywhere, and even the roads were frequently sprayed with water to clean them.

The surrounding highly polluting enterprises are all under supervision, and the sky is incredibly blue. Occasionally, sitting in the "Little Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests" pavilion made of Phoebe zhennan wood and looking up at the scenery outside the window can be very pleasing to Fan Wumian.

After so many years of reform and opening up, China has indeed achieved a qualitative change from quantitative change. It holds more than $1.8 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, which the United States still cannot cut off. Recently, the US has started to come and "borrow" money. Fan Wumian also attended some events as a member of the business team. During this time, he also talked with Yahoo about the topic of acquiring Alibaba's equity.

In March and April of the first half of the year, Microsoft, for the sake of its long-term strategy, still chose to use approximately $450 billion to acquire all of Yahoo's shares. However, for reasons unknown, Yahoo's board of directors either made a blunder or simply refused.

However, there is still a chance to discuss the issue of trading Alibaba's equity separately.

Two or three years ago, Yahoo invested in Alibaba by paying only $10 billion in cash, plus merging Yahoo China and Alibaba Group, thereby holding approximately 39% of Alibaba's shares.

With the current economic downturn, Alibaba's stock price has continued to fall on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Fan Wumian has offered a $70 billion acquisition price, which is equivalent to an overall valuation of $175 billion.

Two or three years ago, Yahoo acquired these shares for only about $17 billion, meaning the return on this investment was as high as 310%, which was enough to satisfy Yahoo's management.

However, with a series of setbacks in the US market, including the acquisition of Bear Stearns by Morgan Stanley and the recent government bailouts for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, rumors of an economic recovery have begun to circulate.

These statements are clearly a "bull trap," and many investors are positioning themselves to attract American retail investors and international speculative funds to take over their positions, making it easier for them to cash out and run away.

Yahoo's board of directors seemed to have believed it as well, and was making sporadic contact with Fan Wumian's people, seemingly wanting to observe recent market trends. This suited Fan Wumian's wishes perfectly, since if nothing unexpected happened, Wall Street giants like Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers should have completely collapsed around September, and the long-awaited financial tsunami was about to hit.

As expected of Yahoo's board of directors, their luck and judgment are indeed terrible. If they had made just one right decision, they wouldn't have fallen into ruin. They always seem to have a strange kind of self-confidence.

When Google launched the Android operating system and began integrating its browser and other products into it, Yahoo was beyond saving. Fan Wumian had already prepared to short the stock when the opportunity arose.

If Yahoo eventually agrees to sell him its Alibaba shares, Fan Wumian thinks he might be able to recoup some of his investment by aggressively shorting Yahoo.

With only half of 2008 gone, his personal finances and asset management company earnings had already netted him seven or eight billion US dollars. Recently, mainstream American media even transferred the title of "Wall Street Bear King" from John Paulson to Fan Wumian.

John Paulson made a huge profit in the first half of the subprime crisis, but he did not invest heavily in the stock market. His average return this year has been limited, less than two-fifths of the average return of the WM-Rogers hedge fund.

Many investors who firmly believed that a financial crisis would still occur continued to entrust their funds to WM Rogers hedge fund management, causing the assets under management to surge to over $480 billion.

Paulson & Co., which works closely with Goldman Sachs, is only slightly larger overall.

Taking advantage of the sluggish market, Fan Wumian went on a buying spree, snapping up shares of several Silicon Valley tech companies. He had already bought 19% of Apple's total share capital, and of those, he was just managing the shares for clients, earning commissions and management fees in the process.

On June 9th, Apple launched the second-generation iPhone 3G, which for the first time supports the App Store, allowing users to purchase software and games online for $9.99 each.

However, the initial effects were not immediately apparent, and the stock price, after rising for only a few days, was dragged down by the overall market and fell.

Fan Wumian seized the best opportunity to buy Apple stock at the bottom, and has been using the new funds flowing into the WM-Rogers hedge fund to continue to increase his holdings of Apple stock.

Of the $100 billion that Fan Wumian managed for China Investment Corporation, $25 billion was invested in Apple.

In addition, he spent a large sum of money to secure the exclusive distribution rights for Apple in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong from Jobs for a total of 10 years. After 10 years, the distribution fee would double and could be renewed for another 10 years.

Fan Wumian's team was responsible for promotion and sales, and could also take an additional 45% of the software and advertising revenue. It can be said that in order to expand the untapped market in Asia, see results as soon as possible, and promote the iOS operating system, the seriously ill Jobs began to work hard.

Because of the information gap, Fan Wumian had a huge advantage. He knew very well where Apple would go in the future, but Jobs did not. Faced with Android, an open platform that had won over many allies, Jobs hoped to use Fan Wumian's influence to seize a large enough market share in advance.

Steve Jobs was very good at R&D, but he couldn't see the market size clearly. In addition, there were Fan Wumian's own people on the Apple board of directors, which gave him a lot of room to maneuver and successfully secured the exclusive distribution rights.

With funds under management reaching hundreds of billions of US dollars and personal wealth exceeding 200 billion US dollars, Fan Wumian handles countless things that seem impossible to others with ease.

On the morning of July 10th.

After waking up in the courtyard house in Yanjing, Pu Jiajing skillfully prepared breakfast and documents for Fan Wumian.

When Fan Wumian got up, she said it as an amusing story:

"After Weinstein left Miramax, he started a new company and continued doing business. It seems he wants you to repay a favor by asking you to help an actress named Jennifer Lawrence get a role in a new Marvel movie."

Fan Wumian was brushing his teeth, muttering with a smile:

"If it weren't for Weinstein, I wouldn't have become so successful so quickly. In a way, he really gave me a chance. But that guy has some issues. I don't want to get too close to him. I'll give Jennifer Lawrence a supporting role so that she won't be too busy after she becomes famous and ruin my upcoming filming schedule."

Aquaman understands Aquaman best.

In his view, Weinstein was probably just trying to appease Jennifer Lawrence by asking him for a small favor.

Just like Zuo Ziyan's Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the beginning of the year, and "The Invisible Guest" winning the Oscar for Best Screenplay, it was only after communicating with Weinstein that the other party took the initiative to show goodwill and make concessions that these achievements were truly made possible.

There will be many more opportunities to interact in the future. By giving Jennifer Lawrence a supporting role, Fan Wumian is both giving Weinstein face and not affecting the original arrangements. Considering Jennifer Lawrence's current status, this is already enough to make her happy.

To be precise, the fact that Jennifer Lawrence in her previous life was able to get Weinstein to willingly invest a lot of resources to win her the youngest "Best Actress" Oscar makes Fan Wumian quite curious about what kind of magic Jennifer Lawrence possesses.

But the other person was really not his type, so he just gossiped about it. Just like with Kim Kardashian, he regretted it afterwards, thinking that he was really hungry at the time and could eat anything.

They quickly turned their attention to Pu Jiajing, who was without makeup.

He had only glanced at her a few times when he saw Pu Jiajing quickly cover her face with her hands and ask warily:

"What are you trying to say? Shut up. I came to see you right after the event last night and forgot my makeup bag."

Fan Wumian was both amused and exasperated, realizing that her past tendency to nitpick at her seemed to have triggered a stress response, so she simply comforted her:
"I was going to say that your skin looks really good lately, fair and rosy, and you look beautiful even without makeup."

Pu Jiajing smacked her lips and sighed:
"That's rare. You've changed a lot lately. You're not as impetuous as before. Have you started to settle down after making a fortune?"

"Pretty much. It's mainly because I don't have any big ambitions anymore, so I have to be more laid-back."

Fan Wumian rinsed his mouth and washed his face, then continued speaking to her:
"I'm currently considering setting some long-term goals, such as researching controlled nuclear fusion, developing new drugs, and clean energy. Maybe I can benefit society as a whole in my lifetime."

Before the accident, he had seen news about progress in targeted cancer drugs and the national team's development of nuclear fusion reactors. He thought that the money he would make from investing in new energy and electric vehicles would be enough to support the research and development of these projects, so there shouldn't be any major problems.

(End of this chapter)