Numlock News: February 26, 2024 • Planet Hollywood, Mezcal, Demon Slayer

Feb 26, 2024

By Walt Hickey

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Dune-ticipation

A muted February at the box office came to a close this weekend, with the Bob Marley movie winning for a second consecutive weekend with $13.5 million among the last new releases before Dune: Part Two dropped. That movie has had some real legs overseas, and has so far made $120 million globally on a $70 million budget. As the world awaits the second installment of Dune, a few other movies came to market with varying degrees of success, the best-performing of which was the anime film Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — To the Hashira Training, which made $11.5 million. Incidentally, because literally no other animation studio has bothered to put out anything for kids this winter, Migration has managed to quietly accrue $268 million globally over the past 10 weeks, not once placing higher than third in the weekend box office chart in any of those 10 weeks.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Car Wash

We’re experiencing a boom in car washes, which as it stands today is a $14 billion industry spread across 60,000 locations in the U.S. that has been seeing a 5 percent expansion annually, with the market expected to double by 2030. It’s an exciting time in the car wash world, as the largely automated process has seen a huge boost offering subscriptions to car owners rather than just a job-by-job business. Americans are also over washing their car themselves; the number of washes done professionally is up to a 79 percent market share as of 2021, up from 50 percent in 1996. Revenues average $1.5 million a location.

Patrick Sisson, Bloomberg

Mezcal

Tequila is an industrially-produced liquor, a spirit that is very much a product of industrialization and mass production, while mezcal remains a smaller, family-produced operation. That’s made mezcal desirable, which has of course provoked tequilization, as entrepreneurs try to find a way to scale up a beverage where the very appeal is that it’s not especially scalable. Tequila pulled off its hegemony by simply moving away from agave; in the 1970s, the minimum allowable level of agave sugars in tequila was dropped to 51 percent, and lots of tequila flavors these days come from additives to compensate. Over the course of the past decade, production of mezcal has risen from 1 million liters to 14 million liters — a fraction of the 650 million liters of tequila — and the way forward looks as if many of the things that make mezcal appealing will be rendered obsolete by massive players in the market. Prices for farmed agave have jumped from $50 per ton in 2012 to $500 per ton today. Even within mezcal there’s a range of difficulties: Cheap mezcal is made from the Espadín variety of agave, which matures in six to eight years, while premium stuff comes from the Tepeztate variety, which takes 25 years to mature and can only make a few bottles per plant.

Rowan Jacobsen, Bloomberg

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Near

The location data broker Near boasted that it had data on the locations of 1.6 billion people in 44 countries ahead of going public with a $1 billion valuation, just another sign of a market for consumer data that is red-hot. Anyway, Near went bankrupt like seven months later. This has become something of a serious issue, as the location data of 1.6 billion people in the wrong hands can have serious effects, and now a senator is asking the FTC to step in and intervene in the bankruptcy proceedings to ensure that the personal data of lots of people is not simply hawked to the highest bidder and is instead destroyed. This has precedent: In 2010, the FTC blocked the use of subscriber personal data in the bankruptcy of a magazine directed to gay men, as the data could be misused.

Jon Keegan, The Markup

Oscars

A new survey found that 37 percent of Americans want the number of awards given out at the Oscars to increase and just 10 percent want it to decrease. Well, good news for them: There’s a new casting Oscar coming, and with the new branch that certainly looks stunt-y, this is outstanding cover for the Academy to finally give us that stunts Oscar. Where precisely the room for new awards in the ceremony will come from is a bit of a mixed bag; 20 percent of Americans interested in the Oscars want the ceremony to be longer, while 21 percent want it to be shorter. Acceptance speech shortening — a bad idea! — was about split, but respondents were twice as likely to say they’d prefer host speeches to be shorter (a good idea!) than prefer longer.

Taylor Orth, YouGov

On that note, the Numlock Awards newsletter is heating up, be sure to check it out for Oscar forecasts and fun posts about the movies.

Planet Hollywood

In the annals of themed restaurants, Planet Hollywood is a stalwart, with the chain launched by Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis in 1991 and each location stuffed with movie memorabilia. The chain went under in the early 2000s, and the contents of those 100-ish prop-stocked restaurants have been languishing in a warehouse in Orlando for the past 20 years. That ends later in March, when 1,600 of the props from Planet Hollywood’s cache go up for auction, including the flag motif top hat and coat Apollo Creed wore in Rocky IV, a bullwhip from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the correct Holy Grail from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the embryo-smuggling Barbasol can from Jurassic Park, the sports almanac from Back to the Future and Leia’s blaster from Return of the Jedi, as well as what one auctioneer called “most of Titanic” from Titanic. The blaster is expected to be the top item, and is expected to sell for around $75,000, followed by the wood panel from Titanic that saved Rose ($40,000).

Samantha Davis-Friedman, Attractions Magazine

Snakes

Snakes evolved from lizards over 100 million years ago, and what followed was a vast and intense period of diversification and evolution. Today, there are roughly 4,000 species of snakes, one of the most diverse predators on the planet. A new study attributes this to a period of adaptation 125 million years ago that fostered all kinds of snakes able to exploit many different gaps in the ecosystem. Snakes were able to evolve three times faster than lizards were, which allowed them to evolve new features, diets and resilience in new habitats way quicker than their cousins.

Jack Tamisiea, Scientific American

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