It was almost close to a year since Will had transmigrated into this alternate earth. Yet there were many unsolved things he had yet to get exposed to.
One of them was how a guy like him, with the same face, body and interests, existed in this alternate world too, and he had taken possession of such a guy.
And after seeing Micheal Elrod, who was exactly like Robert Downey Jr., Will concluded that this was more a parallel world than an alternate world.
Meaning people with the same faces, interests and habits from Will’s previous world can exist here too. But as this world’s history was a bit tweaked, so were people’s actual roles and situations too.
Or so seemed to be the conclusion that Will had come upon and had started to believe it too. This easily explained the situation with himself as he was transmigrated into an exact copy of himself instead of someone else, and the appearance of Tony Stark 2.0 had solidified this belief.
“Can I meet this Micheal Elrod guy? Obviously, if you don’t mind.”
Will asked Benjamin, who raised an eyebrow at his question as if thinking, ‘What is this guy up to now?’
“Of course it’s fine; I can arrange a meeting between you two. But like…what are ya up to?”
*Ahem*
Will coughed and said.
“Well, I had watched one of his movies recently, so I was interested in him. Nothing much.”
Benjamin, who heard this, was still curious but decided not to pursue the matter and simply agreed to let Will meet Micheal.
Micheal didn’t seem particularly talented or charming, and his contract with MCA will be ending soon anyway. There was no harm in him meeting Will.
Benjamin gave Micheal’s contact information to Will and told Will to take his name when Micheal asked how he got his contact number.
After that, Will had nothing more to do, so he left the MCA office.
***
[Congratulations on reaching the $200 million in the total box office in less than six months.]
[Achievement Unlocked: Meant for success.]
[Rewards:
* 10 million fame points
* Intermediate Instrumentalist ]
Will received the notification as soon as he sat in his car. His movie had finally crossed the $200 million mark as soon as the DVDs sale started last week.
As he received the achievement notification and rewards, he got excited. His system was barely a means of giving a head start to him; unlike the systems from the novels of his previous life, his system didn’t force him to do anything nor gave tasks or anything related to keep it going.
It would occasionally give out rewards to him if he did something exceptionally well. And even when he earned 65 million dollars, he didn’t get any rewards, coming to the conclusion that he is only rewarded when certain conditions are met or when he outplays his own achievements.
He has a convenient shop option through which he can buy various things that can make his career in Hollywood much easier, although they cost a hefty amount of money.
It was like buying talents with money. If the rich people in the world had a way to buy talents, they would buy them for sure, but unfortunately for them and luckily for Will, such a convenient system existed just for Will.
[Skill Upgrade]
[Intermediate Directing → Advance Directing]
[Cost - 640,000 fame points]
[Are you sure you want to upgrade this skill?]
[Yes] [No]
Although it was like spending 6.4 million dollars, Will thought it was a good investment, especially considering the next movie he had to direct. So he immediately agreed to upgrade the skill and knowledge and experience filled his brain.
It almost felt like a new eye had opened up for him to see normal things from a totally different perspective than he used to earlier.
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[Skill Upgrade]
[Beginner Acting → Intermediate Acting]
[Cost - 35,000 fame points]
[Are you sure you want to upgrade this skill?]
[Yes] [No]
Acting was something he had never thought of doing in his previous life, but ever since he had gotten the beginner acting skills, he couldn’t help but develop a certain level of liking and interest in acting; this was also one of the reasons he asked for a role in [17 Again], the other reason being closer to June.
Without thinking much, he invested the FP and knowledge of various expressions, poses, body languages, ways of talking and several other things got implanted into his brain and body.
Not only did the skills give him brain memory, but it also gave him muscle memory as if the talents he had just bought were practised since childhood.
“Hah….”
Will let out a contented sigh. He felt like he had just eaten the best gourmet in the world and was filled to the brim. That’s the type of satisfaction he was feeling.
He was still inside the car that was parked at MCA and hadn’t budged a slight inch.
He still had few things to do with the system, so he put it aside for a moment. He was hungry and wanted to eat something good, so he called June.
She didn’t pick up the phone. A few seconds later, a text message came from June.
[Sorry, Will. I am with a friend right now, and she's helping me look for an apartment to rent. I’ll catch up with you later. Cya.]
Will just chuckled at that. June and the other two male leads alike were facing some problems from the paparazzi, so Will decided to just go and eat alone. It was nice to have some quality and peaceful time for oneself once in a while.
He drove off to a 3-star hotel nearby MCA and, after parking his car, went inside to eat his lunch.
A female waitress came to his table and asked for his order while continuously staring at him and fidgeting around with a writing pad in her hand.
Will just asked to bring whatever was their best on the menu and was good for a light lunch, after that, he started playing Chocolate Crush on his phone.
After the food came, Will ate to his heart's content while savouring every bit of flavour.
As he asked for his bill, the waitress gave him a folder on which the bill was placed.
“I’ll pay with a card.”
Will waved his debit card in his hand as if telling the waitress to bring a swiping machine.
Soon after paying the bill, as Will was about to leave, the waitress came and stopped him.
“Hey…Errr…Well...can I get an autograph? I’m a big fan.”
The waitress showed her writing pad, Will smiled and took out the pen tuck on his blazer as he signed on the paper.
“What’s your name?”
“It’s Rose.”
Will wrote down ‘to Rose’ just below his signature and drew a heart.
***
After coming to his house and lying down on his comfy bed, Will summoned the system’s status screen.
[Name - Will Evans
Age - 21
Skills - {Advance Directing} {Intermediate Acting} {Intermediate Instrumentalism}
Fame Points - 9,330,000
Inventory - {Sherlock Holmes}]
A short status screen appeared in front of him.
He still had a considerable amount of fame points left which he could use to buy some other skills, but he didn’t wish to do so. He found out that the last level of each skill was the Grandmaster level.
Beginner → Intermediate → Advanced → Master → Grandmaster
This was the ranking that every skill followed, and after the advanced level, there were certain conditions to be met before he could upgrade a skill, for example, when he tried to upgrade his advanced level directing skill to master level, a system prompt popped up,
[You do not meet the requirements to upgrade and learn about this skills upgrade cost.]
[Upgrade requirements –
1. Have participated in at least one movie that gets nominated for oscar.
2. Your net worth should be greater than $200 million. ]
Reaching the net worth was possible after some time, but meeting the first condition would take time and effort, so he decided to save up the fame points for his next movie, [Sherlock Holmes].
After the lucky spin that he got from winning an award in the Annual Film Festival, he had gotten the movie script.
He was quite happy to get the script, but he had thought that he would need to keep this project on hold for quite some time to gather everything required for the project, the most important of them being the lead role himself.
Due to a weird stroke of fate, he had come to learn about an actor who had played the Sherlock Holmes role in his previous life, making it such an amazing blockbuster that it had won him the best actor award in Golden Globes Award while bagging many other awards for the movie.
To top it all off, he had played the role of Tony Stark, Iron Man. One of the most famous superheroes of the Marvel Universe, and Will was sure nobody could do it better than him.
Will had already watched all the movies Micheal Elrod (Robern Downey Jr. of this world) had starred in and concluded that he was the same guy with the same acting skills.
The only reason he wasn’t too popular was due to the types of roles he had played till now, making him unable to show his true potential to the world.
Will had planned to buy a cheap movie script from the system and direct [Sherlock Holmes] later due to two reasons. The first was a suitable lead role, and the second was funding.
Although he had gotten around $75 million from the overall income of the Blair Witch Project, it was still not enough to cast this movie.
Even in his previous life, the budget for [Sherlock Holmes] had already crossed $90 million. Many other factors would just increase Will’s overall spending.
The first was to get his own company. He didn’t want to look for others every time he made a movie, and having his own production company would save him a lot of money later on.
As he had already researched about Sherlock Holmes, the legend already existed, and one of the top 6 production house’s had already created a movie related to Sherlock Holmes in the 1990s.
He would need to buy the rights from them to make a movie taking the same concept, and he would need his own crew for everything, which would cost a lot, and the amount he had was nowhere near enough.
But after getting the 10 million fame points from the system, the future didn’t look as hazy as before. He had already spent almost 680k fame points on skills and was left with 9.3 million fame points.
Which can be converted into $93 million through the point exchange in the system. After combining his current bank balance and the fame points, he should be able to create his own movie company and direct [Sherlock Holmes].
The first step was to bag Micheal Elrod into his own company as his contract with the MCA was about to end.