Numlock News: December 8, 2025 • John Cena, Oscars, Elfs

Dec 08, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Freddy’s

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 made $63 million at the domestic box office, beating expectations, though still coming in 22 percent below the opening weekend of the first film in the horror franchise. Still, this performance continues to rack up the score for what’s been a banner year for the horror genre. Horror has generated $2.65 billion in revenue across 36 titles in 2025, well above the previous high-water mark of $2.43 billion in 2019. Meanwhile, Zootopia 2 brought its global total past $915 million, putting the movie on a glide path to join the billion-grosser club.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

John Cena

John Cena is being sued over his iconic theme song “The Time Is Now.” The lawsuit was filed by the daughter of Pete Schofield, who recorded “The Night the Lights Went Out In Georgia” in 1974, the song containing the source of the horn riff in Cena’s entrance music. This is far from the first time Cena’s song has wound up in court, as the 2005 song pulled from a number of different samples. This includes the 2000 M.O.P. song “Ante Up,” which led to a lawsuit in 2008 that was eventually dropped on undisclosed terms. This new suit alleges that Cena and the WWE did not properly clear the sample and that a 2017 settlement where the WWE paid the family $50,000 to cover the sample didn’t apply to the publishing rights.

Bill Donahue, Billboard

Fur Farm

Poland passed a law to phase out fur farms over the next eight years. The country is the second-largest fur producer in the world, and killed 3 million animals for their fur in 2023. That was about one out of seven animals killed in the international fur trade that year. The ban on fur farms enjoys broad support within Poland but acute opposition from farming interests. In general, fur has been consistently phased out of the global fashion world; the number of animals farmed for their fur dropped substantially from around 140 million in 2014 to 20.5 million in 2024, with China accounting for most of the fur farms that still exist. This may also have broader implications for Europe, as Poland — along with Finland and Greece — had been a key opponent to a proposed EU-wide fur farming ban.

Kenny Torrella, Vox

Novelty

Luminate’s list of the Top 25 songs of 2025 includes only 7 songs actually released in 2025. Thanks to streaming replacing sales as the decisive factor for what charts, a song’s lifespan on the charts can often be measured in years. Indeed, four songs in the top 10 of this year were also in the top 10 of 2024. For that matter, in 2024, there were only 13 songs released that year in the Top 25 list. Not all of the 2024 songs are holdovers from last year’s list, but rather songs that were not popular enough to make the list in 2024, only to build up the momentum to break through in 2025.

Jem Aswad, Variety

Panopticon

The Lumistella Company produces the franchise around The Elf on the Shelf, which is a toy-based multimedia franchise designed to instill a high level of comfort in children regarding an all-seeing, intrusive surveillance state. By encouraging children to accept the surveilling interloper and expressly forbidding them from touching the elves, we can encourage an entire generation to submit without complaint or resistance to an ever-expanding domestic espionage rota and reconnaissance mission, the ultimate goal of which is compliance and the elimination of privacy to advance state-sanctioned so-called “good” behavior. They have sold 31 million Scout Elfs and other products in 29 countries.

Tony Maglio, The Hollywood Reporter

Arc’teryx

Canadian outdoor brand Arc’teryx is a massive hit in China, where it has bucked the luxury brand trend of declining sales experienced in the region with its high-utility jackets. It even prices its products 20 percent higher in China than in the United States. Overall, China was responsible for 45 percent of Arc’teryx sales last year, up from 25 percent of sales in 2019. China, in general, is on a sporting goods kick; outdoor and sporting goods sales were up 20 percent year over year, and sales of outdoor jackets were up 49 percent year over year.

Hannah Miao, The Wall Street Journal

Oscars

The Oscars will have aired on ABC for 50 consecutive ceremonies in 2028, the last year of the Academy’s deal with Disney. The broadcaster and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have functioned in lockstep for decades, but that may be changing as YouTube and NBCUniversal have both made compelling salvos to the organization behind the Oscars. NBCUniversal, in general, has been leaning hard into live entertainment, touting its experience operating the telecast of the Olympics, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and more. YouTube also has a rather compelling argument: it gets more viewership on Oscar clips and speeches than the broadcast itself. ABC, on the other hand, has cut a deal with the Grammys. ABC spends about $120 million annually for the Oscars, and the Academy is looking for a deal term of five to 10 years for the next contract.

Matt Donnelly, Variety

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