Numlock News: July 28, 2025 • Anteaters, Roblox, KPop Demon Hunters
By Walt Hickey
Welcome back!
Fantastic
The Fantastic Four: First Steps made $118 million domestically in its opening weekend, slightly beating expectations of $100 million to $110 million. It added an even $100 million overseas for an opening weekend total of $218 million. The movie has good word of mouth and high critic scores, which Marvel must hope it can keep going over the coming weeks. Premium large format screenings were responsible for 46 percent of ticket sales in general. IMAX alone was responsible for 13.6 percent of them in particular, yet another sign that premiumization is just going to become a bigger and bigger part of these large studio tentpole releases. Intriguingly, 42 percent of ticket buyers were under the age of 25, which would indicate that Marvel is still drawing new and young fans this late into the MCU.
High Fructose Corn Syrup
One key reason that American carbonated sugar water typically uses high fructose corn syrup and not cane sugar is federal policies designed to protect the American sugar business and artificially inflate the price of sugar. USDA guarantees a minimum price to sugar processors, and it assigns a maximum production limit to each processor and imposes a tariff rate quota on imported sugar to prevent oversupply. USDA also requires that 54.35 percent of domestic production allotment be derived from beet processors and 45.65 percent from sugarcane processors. Almost all the sugar cane comes from Florida and Louisiana, while the bulk of the beets comes from Minnesota, Idaho and North Dakota. The end result is world price of sugar sitting at 21 cents per pound last year, while the United States price was 38 cents per pound. This system and that price difference are the reasons for American beverage companies switching to high fructose corn syrup around the same time the government sugar program adopted its current form in 1981. Incidentally, about 3 percent of the U.S. corn crop goes to high fructose corn syrup.
Anteaters
A new study published in the journal Evolution found that in the 66 million years since nonavian dinosaurs went extinct, termite and ant-eating mammals have evolved no fewer than 12 different times. On one hand, this is fascinating — step aside, crabs, nature has a new favorite form to spontaneously evolve into yet again. But on the other hand, “natural selection favors animals that can eat the largest biomass on Earth” is kind of what you’d expect, given that the combined weight of termites outweighs the weight of all living mammals by a factor of ten. A competing study published in the fake journal Intelligent Design found that God just really feels like He whiffed it on ants, and has repeatedly tried to walk that one back.
Roblox
The video game Roblox is passed to look exactly like what the metaverse was supposed to be. The company hit the milestone of 30 million concurrent players earlier this year, pulled $3.6 billion in revenue as of last year and accounted for no less than 2.4 percent of the world’s video game activity by internal estimates, with eyes on getting that to 10 percent. It has gone from a video game to a platform for video games. What is interesting though, is that while the player base is growing, the real key demo for Roblox keeps on growing out of it. Only 19 percent of Roblox users are over the age of 25, while about 37 percent are under the age of 13.
KPop Demon Hunters
The Netflix-distributed movie KPop Demon Hunters has been on a tear since its release on June 20. It has made it to the top 10 list in every one of the 93 countries that the streaming service tracks and racked up 106 million views within just five weeks. The movie is not only on the approach to break into the all-time English-language top 10 but also on pace to become the most-watched animated movie in Netflix history. Songs from the film have also become bona fide streaming hits in their own right.
Jeff Yang, The Washington Post
Items
A new analysis of thirteen hamburger fast food restaurant menus found that the median number of items on a menu is 58 SKUs, a benchmark held by the very middle of the middle, McDonald’s. The menus that has the most going on included Jack in the Box (85 items) and Sonic (80 items), the menus with the least included Five Guys (22 items) and the lowest of the bunch at In-N-Out (15 items, of course not including the “not-so-secret menu.”
Erin Kilbride, Philip Daus, and Bo Bo, QSR Magazine
Read Into This What You Will
One of the surprise bookstore hits of the year so far is Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, which came out as a trade paperback all the way back in February 2017. Amid a surge in demand, it was released as a hardcover edition earlier this spring. Over 1.4 million copies of On Tyranny have been sold since 2017, making the book a smash hit, and 250,000 copies were sold in the first half of this year alone. The book is on its 47th printing, and has had four new print runs since early November 2024.
Claire Kirch, Publishers Weekly
If you subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! It’s fun, and supporters keep this thing ad-free. This is the best way to support something you like to read:
Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.
Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.
Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.
Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Dark Roofs · Geothermal · Stitch · Year of the Ring · Person Do Thing · Fun Factor · Low Culture · Romeo vs. Juliet · Traffic Cam Photobooth · Money in Politics ·
Sax Solo · Terra Nova · Didion · Me, But Better · Flow · Four Nations · Tabletop · Fortnite · Sleep · Climate Insurance ·
Work/Life Balance · Self-Driving · Geoglyphs · Nvidia · McDonald’s · No Such Thing · Nationalized Sports ·
Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018
🤞🏽 for the next spontaneous anteater evolution to be in my yard!
This is so specific: "USDA also requires that 54.35 percent of domestic production allotment be derived from beet processors and 45.65 percent from sugarcane processors."
How did they arrive at that proportion?