Numlock News: April 24, 2023 • Dragon, Peaches, Brazilians

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Box Office

The Super Mario Bros. Movie made another $58.23 million at the domestic box office in its third week of release, bringing its global cume all the way to $871 million is what will likely end up being a billion-dollar grossing film. That’s incidentally the best third weekend for an animated film and the seventh-best third weekend ever. Opening to second place was Evil Dead Rise, which made $40.3 million globally on just a $15 million budget, which is excellent for a film that was originally going to get dumped off to a streaming service.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Outdoor

Marketers are increasingly looking to billboards and other outdoor signage as a growth area for ads, as people’s ability to skip ads on the internet drives interest elsewhere. Globally, out-of-home advertising is a $31.6 billion industry, and about $9 billion of that is in the U.S. Of specific interest to marketers — and ire of citizens — are digital billboards, which have the advantages of being dynamic, bright, easily changeable, and you can put multiple ads on them. Such out-of-home digital places now account for about a third of the entire out-of-home ad market in the U.S., up from 17 percent in 2015. That’s big enough to provoke a backlash, like a fight currently happening in San Diego over whether the city can install outdoor digital kiosks despite a citywide ban on new billboards.

Megan Graham, The Wall Street Journal

Dragon

A 45-foot-tall animatronic dragon at Disneyland burst into flames on Saturday night in front of a thousand visitors who were watching the Fantasmic fireworks show. Usually the dragon just belches some flame while fighting Mickey, but instead for some reason erupted into flames, forcing an evacuation. At press time, Mickey was arguing with the DM over whether he would have to share XP for the encounter after landing the crit while the DM threw away ten pages of backstory written for what was intended to be a full character arc.

Rachel Uranga, Los Angeles Times

Peaches

In further Mario-related news, Jack Black has bagged his first-ever solo Billboard Hot 100 charting with “Peaches,” the song he wrote and performed for the film, in which he plays Bowser. The song’s 5.8 million streams and 6,000 downloads in week one propelled the song to No. 83 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. Black previously appeared on the Hot 100 as one half of the band Tenacious D, which got “The Pick of Destiny” to chart to No. 78 after releasing their film Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny.

Xander Zellner, Billboard

Starry

Sprite utterly dominates the lemon-lime soda market, with a 73 percent marketshare that dwarfs competitors like 7UP (14 percent) and Sierra Mist (7 percent), so much so that Pepsi killed Sierra Mist earlier this year. They’re starting from scratch with a new beverage named Starry that’s gunning for Coca-Cola’s Sprite, its eternal nemesis. This is but the latest in a long, futile war over the lemon-lime space, with ancestors of Starry including not just Sierra Mist but also Pepsi products Slice, Teem and Storm.

Brett Pulley, Bloomberg

Brazilians

In the 2019 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census, there were 14,000 Brazilians counted as Hispanic or Latino. In 2020, there were 416,000, and then in 2021 there were 16,000. What gives? The 2020 result was due to a coding error, and a rather interesting one, because it revealed that while most Brazilians say they’re Latino, the federal government does not consider Brazilians Hispanic or Latino, because the term is only applied to people of “Spanish culture or origin” and folks with ancestry of Brazil — as well as Belize, the Philippines, Haiti, Jamaica, Guyana, the Virgin Islands and Portugal — who say they’re Hispanic or Latino are recategorized by the census as being not Hispanic or Latino during back coding owing to their Portuguese or other non-Spanish colonization.

Jeffrey S. Passel and Jens Manuel Krogstad, Pew Research Center

Chromebooks

A new report from the Public Interest Research Group Education Fund calls out Google for making it hard to repair or replace parts in Chromebooks, inexpensive computers which were bought in massive quantities by schools particularly around the start of the pandemic. Those laptops were bought three years ago, and many of the Chromebooks are arriving at the end of their life span and are showing their age by being less repairable than Windows laptops. Indeed, Google guarantees eight years of automatic updates, a clock that starts ticking upon certification, not delivery, so it’s common for the expiration date to be four to five years from arrival. PIRG estimated that doubling the lifespan of the 31.8 million Chromebooks sold in 2020 alone could cut emissions by 4.6 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent as well as a $1.8 billion savings for taxpayers.

Monica Chin, The Verge

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