Numlock News: June 5, 2025 • John Wick, Margaritaville, Vietnam
By Walt Hickey
Some People Claim That There’s A Lawyer To Blame
The late beach rock legend Jimmy Buffett parlayed his library of slacker anthems into a hospitality empire in the form of Margaritaville, and since his death in 2023, his stake in those assets has been placed in a trust for his wife. The estate — worth $275 million — has been in the makings of a legal battle this week, with Jane Buffett suing to remove a co-trustee for allegedly acting against her best interests. The trust owns 20 percent of the Margaritaville brand of resorts, which has paid out $14 million in dividends over the past 18 months. That said, according to the suit, the co-trustee would only pay out $2 million annually, and that’s from a firm that is paid $1.7 million annually.
Winston Cho, The Hollywood Reporter
Beekeeping Bookkeeping
Commercial beekeepers are in high demand from farmers who rely on the hives to pollinate their crops. As a result, hives are routinely shipped around the country by truck. When one of those trucks is involved in a collision like the one in Washington state last week, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of livestock (I refer, of course, to the bees) is at risk. Any given semi-truck might carry 400 to 480 hives, and the USDA values a honey bee colony at $129 and the woodenware hive that contains it at $230 each. Each truckload of bees is worth over $160,000, and that’s just to the beekeeper, not to mention the agricultural businesses that rely on them to produce a crop.
Claire Benjamin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Vietnam
Vietnam is in an ideal demographic moment where its working-age population significantly outnumbers dependents. From an economic perspective, it’s a phenomenal place for rapidly developing countries to capitalize and grow swiftly. The median age is 33.4 years old and 70 percent are aged 15 to 64, which is about as primed to grow an economy as you can get. The bad news is, this demographic pattern is set to end in less than 15 years, in no small part thanks to the country’s two-child policy. The policy has ensured Vietnam’s national fertility rate is down to 1.91 per woman in 2024, which is considered below replacement level. In an attempt to extend that window of superb working-age to dependent ratio, Vietnamese lawmakers have passed amendments ending the two-child policy.
Young
The average age of the Oklahoma City Thunder (weighted by playoff minutes) is 24.7 years old, and the Indiana Pacers are just 26.2 years old on minutes-weighted average. This means that if either team is victorious in the NBA Finals, it would be one of the youngest championship teams in decades. The 1977 winner, the Portland Trail Blazers, were slightly younger at 24.5 years old on average, and only the 1980 Los Angeles Lakers would be younger than the Pacers as well. On a related note, each team is comparatively cheap: the total Pacers payroll this year was $169.1 million, 18th in the NBA, and the Thunder came in 25th place with $165.6 million. Each team is under the luxury tax threshold, making this the first finals in the past two decades where neither team paid the tax.
Smart Gates
There are about 290,000 elephants in southern Africa, and in South Africa, all of them are contained in fenced areas. Specifically, they’re housed in 94 reserves, 76 of which are on private property or communally owned lands. That is a total of 38,000 square kilometers, which takes up under 3 percent of the country and is often fenced off from one another. One hope among conservationists is to implement a gating system, connecting these game preserves through corridors that avoid human-inhabited areas and facilitating migration between the reserves.
Streaming
While Netflix earns the envy of the studios when it comes to the health of its direct-to-consumer streaming business, there is indeed a company even Netflix must envy: YouTube. It has quietly racked up more and more market share on television over the past several years. In April, YouTube was responsible for 12.4 percent of all television viewing, which is well higher than Netflix’s 7.5 percent. It’s even the No. 1 distributor of television content, period, thanks to its television streaming service. people also watch lots and lots of actual television on YouTube; for example (and really I’m just pulling an example out of a hat here), your husband watching that evening’s episode of The View on YouTube while you try to write a newsletter in the other room.
Ballerina
This week, we will have a conclusion to one of the longest-running questions in Hollywood: how big do we need to make the phrase From The World of JOHN WICK on the movie poster to get people to show up to watch a movie called Ballerina? The movie, which takes place in the delightful assassin-verse built up across the John Wick action film franchise but conspicuously does not feature the eponymous hitman as its protagonist, will test the viability of Wick-adjacent future films. The film is depending on the legion of fans that only show up when Ana de Armas is in a trailer, along with the core Wick audience of action fans, stunt nerds and guys who would listen to Ian McShane read the phone book. The current projection comes in at $28 million to $30 million opening weekend, reportedly set between the third Wick film (Parabellum, which opened to $56.8 million) and the fourth (Chapter 4, which opened to $73.8 million). So, it remains to be seen what Ballerina can dance to, backward and in flats.
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Fast & Furious Presents: From the World of John Wick: Ballerina