Numlock News: December 23, 2024 • Moxie, Malls, Grand Marnier
By Walt Hickey
Sonic
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 beat expectations and made $62 million domestically, easily lapping Disney’s call-it-live-action-but-it’s-CGI Mufasa which had a bad miss and made just $35 million. Sonic scored the best launch for a PG-rated movie in December in 20 years, while Mufasa saw Disney successfully distract one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation for several years on a mirthless studio effort. Mufasa won the international box office by default, as Sonic drops worldwide next week.
Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter
Moxie
A few weeks ago, the startup Embodied announced it will fold, and that all of its appliances would be bricked. This is an annoying thing that happens to a lot of companies, but for Embodied its buyers were understandably ticked: it sells $800 robots named Moxie that are designed to provide emotional support for kids ages 5 to 10, and it’s hard to explain why we should have had advanced right-to-repair legislation years ago to an emotionally vulnerable child who just had a friend unplugged forever. In its last weeks, the company responded to the backlash by attempting to develop an open-source solution to keep the Moxie bots running, by developing an option to run the bots without the existence of the company.
Malls
Over the past decade, the number of malls has decreased sharply, from 1,318 malls in the United States in 2014 to just 1,141 malls in the country as of this year. The mall enjoyed its dominance for the decades following the 1970s, serving as a major incubator of brands and a crucial meeting spot, until they weren’t anymore. Now, some dead malls are getting a new life as housing or community spaces, and the live malls look fundamentally different from the mall at its most hegemonic: in 2000, apparel made up around 75 percent of the average mall’s occupancy, entertainment made up 5 percent, and food and beverage made up 5 percent. In 2022, that was down to 45 percent apparel, up to 15 percent entertainment, and food pretty much flat. The future is doing alright: foot traffic is actually decent, mostly up year over year since the start of the pandemic actually.
Nia Warfield, Sherwood News and John Kell, Sherwood News
GLPs
GLP-1 agonist drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and Victoza accounted for 5.4 percent of all prescriptions in the United States in September 2024. That’s a remarkable chunk of prescriptions in such a short time: that figure was just 1 percent at the start of 2021 and up from 3.5 percent in September 2023. They’ve got a pretty solid potential consumer base, as 70 percent of Americans are overweight or obese, but the next potential booster for the GLP-1s could be new uses and efficacies discovered over their increased use; one just got approved to treat sleep apnea, and there’s evidence that GLP-1s could have potential in treating addiction or even Alzheimer’s disease.
Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review
Grand Marnier
International liquor brand Campari acquired the company that produces Grand Marnier in 2016, and is getting around to pitching people on drinking it. It’s a slightly unique liqueur which is made up of 51 percent cognac and the rest orange liqueur. While the liqueur market has generally been pretty humming, sales by volume rose 8 percent from 2019 to 2023, rising alongside cocktail culture’s increased trendiness. Grand Marnier isn’t enjoying that boost, though: in 2023, sales dropped 16.5 percent. To attack that head on, the brand is courting musicians and setting up appearances at events like the Grammy Awards and the NBA All-Star weekend.
Katie Deighton, The Wall Street Journal
Airplane Movies
The business of what airs on airplanes is a brisk one, with small teams at the airlines making major decisions on what gets added to the library. Delta has a team of four that decides what gets onto 165,000 screens on 840 jets, Southwest has a single person picking what makes it onto their media servers, United has a team of eight picking what goes on in the 500 planes where it has seat-back screens. Churn and keeping it fresh is important: American carries 1,500 titles overall and averages 500 movies, and tends to add 200 new titles a month. The best airline movie, according to the very people who analyze every iota of data they get from the screens? Crazy Rich Asians has remained popular for years and gets the most complaints when airlines yank it.
Matt Stevens, The New York Times
Storm
There’s a massive storm ripping in the North Pacific Ocean right now that’s generating some particularly wild sea conditions. According to the National Weather Service’s Ocean Prediction center, wave heights are being measured as hitting 65.77 feet (20 meters), based on measurements captured by an altimeter instrument from the Sentinel-6A satellite. These would be some especially rough seas: the current record for significant wave height measured by a buoy — which again, this is not — is now just 19 meters, measured in 2013 during a storm between Iceland and the United Kingdom.
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If I had one of those soon-to-be-bricked robots and were offered an urgent OTA update, I'd be very cautious, remembering what Sony did to the Dash media players a while back: they sent an OTA that deliberately bricked the devices and only then announced the cessation of support. A homebrew community sprung up and quickly produced replacement firmware. Still, it took some technical savvy to install, and many, if not most, of the Dash devices were rendered permanently useless.
I'm not saying the Moxie company is doing this with their important OTA update. Still, given the circumstances, I would wait to apply the OTA until I see reports of how others are receiving it.
I think the last movie I watched on a plane was on L1011 from Atlanta to Frankfurt.