Numlock News: May 19, 2025 • Final Destination, Hohenzollern, Nicole Kidman

May 19, 2025

By Walt Hickey

For the new two weeks, we’re celebrating Numlock’s seventh anniversary! The newsletter is still going strong seven years in, and that’s thanks to the many readers who pay to subscribe. For the next couple weeks, we’re doing one of the two big sales we do every year.

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This year, there’s a small catch. I’ve kept the price of Numlock at $5 per month or $50 per year for the past seven years. I have no immediate plans to raise prices, but I’m just going to put this out there: 2025 is the last year I can promise that new subscriptions can be had for this price. As a result, this is potentially the best time to subscribe, ever.

Final Destination

Final Destination Bloodlines, the sixth entry in the franchise, notched a franchise-best opening weekend of $51 million, winning the weekend and successfully reviving a franchise that had seemed all but dead ever since Final Destination 5 opened to $18 million all the way back in 2011. This is, if anything, something of a violation of the core premise of the Final Destination movies, which hold that it is altogether impossible to cheat death and that doing so comes at a calamitous cost. As a result, the next time a Warner Bros. movie bombs, I’m just going to assume that is merely the box office thanatotic debt being called due.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

DoorDash

There is a fine line between clever DoorDash pizza arbitrage schemes that reveal the comical inefficiencies of the sharing economy and clever DoorDash fraud schemes that may end up with the person in federal prison. A guilty plea last week from a former driver for the service shows that one recent scheme fell over the line into the latter. The driver pleaded guilty to wire fraud in a scam that cost DoorDash $2.5 million over the course of several months. The scheme involved fake customer accounts making expensive orders, manually assigning orders to specific driver accounts, marking the orders as “complete” to pay out to the driver accounts then switching back and forth from “in progress” to “complete” to bilk the company hundreds of times over. The man faces up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Wes Davis, The Verge

Telugu

India is the largest producer of feature-length movies in the world, making 1,500 to 2,000 films per year. While Hindi-language Bollywood is perhaps the best known, there are eight film-producing industries in the country, also making films in Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi and Punjabi. Every year the Hindi-language industry, which operates out of Mumbai, produces around 300 films, but the Telugu industry, which operates out of Hyderabad, is catching up — making between 200 and 250 films annually. RRR, which enjoyed international success three years ago, emerged from the Tegulu film industry. From 2019 to 2022, the Hindi-language industry’s releases saw ticket sales decline from 341 million tickets to 189 million tickets, while the Telugu-language industry’s releases saw ticket sales jump from 182 million in 2019 to 233 million in 2022.

Vishal Menon, The Hollywood Reporter

Hohenzollern

Admittedly a bit of a low-priority issue of the myriad complications Germany has had navigating its 20th century cultural history, but the German government and the states of Berlin and Brandenburg have cut a deal with the descendants of the Hohenzollerns, who were kings of Prussia, over thousands of long contested items, royal possessions, art, furniture and so on. European countries have long had to discern which items of their monarchs belong to the state and which to the various heirs. France and Russia made a rather notorious clean break, preferring the “finders keepers, losers decapitated” style of allocation, while on the other extreme, England continues to ensconce their ancestors’ landlords within an nontaxable estate for tourism and nostalgia reasons. Not all of Europe’s democracies were so decisive, and the matter of the Hohenzollern treasures in Berlin and Potsdam have been outstanding for over 100 years, ever since the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918. Under the new agreement, the Hohenzollern family will retain ownership of seven tobacco boxes and several items on a “C-List,” while most of the valuable items will become the direct property of the state, the balance of thousands of other objects will be transferred to a charitable foundation controlled by state entities.

Catherine Hickley, The Art Newspaper

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Order In

A new report from the National Restaurant Association found that 75 percent of restaurant traffic is now takeout orders — that is, delivery, pickup, and where relevant drive-thru — a fundamental realignment of the dining industry. Many restaurants have essentially had to change their entire business model, upending in-house dining experiences that have been efficient for years into entirely different, more cutthroat experiences that questions many assumptions about real estate and how to structure a restaurant. According to the NRA’s survey, 37 percent of adults in the U.S. order delivery and 47 percent order takeout at least once per week.

Nicolette Baker, Food & Wine

Kidman

In 2017, women directed only 4 percent of the top-grossing movies of the year. That year, Nicole Kidman made a public promise to work with a woman director every 18 months. The idea being that one way to get directors from underrepresented groups the funding and green light for a movie is for a star to sign on to their project, which can in the eyes of financiers reduce the risk of a newer or less-experienced filmmaker. To Kidman’s credit, she backed up her pledge and then some: she’s worked with 27 female directors across film and television since, a vastly faster clip than she originally promised, including both experienced filmmakers like Karyn Kusama and Susanne Bier, as well as lots of newcomers. In the eight years since, the percentage of top-grossing movies directed by women rose to 13.6 percent of films last year.

Zach Sharf, Variety

Horses

Modern horse racing has adopted the same logic of load management seen in human sports, with many owners and trainers looking to give their horses five to six weeks of rest between the high profile races. This has begun to present a problem for the Preakness Stakes, the middle leg of the Triple Crown, as winners of the Kentucky Derby may opt to give up on the possibility of a Triple Crown winner by skipping the Preakness and just competing in the final event, the Belmont Stakes. This probably increases the probability of a win, but it does seriously ding viewership: it’s a small sample size (Derby winners previously skipped the Preakness in just 2019 and 2022) but a year without a Triple Crown contender usually costs the network airing the Preakness about 2 million viewers. This has prompted debate in horse racing about shifting up the schedule a bit, with some arguing that more space in-between than the current two-week window would obviate the need to pull the Derby winner out of the race.

Jason Clinkscales, Sportico

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