Numlock News: October 27, 2025 • Demon Hunters, Haunted Houses, Chainsaw Man

Oct 27, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Pineapple, Or The Modern Prometheus

Dole has reported that 15 years of research and development have culminated in the Colada Royale pineapple, which the fruit corporation considers to be a game-changing innovation as it has been conventionally bred to be the ideal pineapple for a piña colada. The pineapple is green and gold on the outside but cream-colored inside, and it’s been bred to have notes of coconut and piña colada, as well as 2.5 times as much vitamin B6 as your standard pineapple. Novel varieties of fresh fruits are in high demand; when Fresh Del Monte rolled out its Pinkglow pineapple with a rosy interior, they were a smash hit.

Sarah Zimmerman, Food Dive

KPop Demon Hunters

It’s fair to say that the biggest surprise hit of the summer for kids when it came to movies was KPop Demon Hunters. As the hastily-assembled and homemade costumes this week will no doubt attest, the costume industry and the toy industry were actually caught flat-footed about the kind of hit they were dealing with. Last week, Netflix cut deals with both Mattel (for dolls and action figures) and Hasbro (for electronics, board games and stuffies) for licensing the KPop Demon Hunters property. A keen eye will probably observe that this means there’s absolutely no chance that the biggest kids movie of the year has any product on shelves for this holiday season, a blunder not seen since Frozen. Netflix said it approached licensing partners about Demon Hunters in 2024 and was politely blown off for the untested property. Given that it takes 18 months to bring a toy or game from concept to store shelves, that presents an issue for a movie that went big over the summer. It also means that from spring to Christmas 2026, we’re going to see a whole lot of KPop Demon Hunters merch arrive.

Tony Maglio, The Hollywood Reporter

Diamonds

In a surprise twist, Angola’s state diamond company Endiama has submitted a bid for Anglo American’s 85 percent stake in the De Beers diamond company. De Beers is a joint effort between Anglo American and Botswana (which owns 15 percent), so a regional rival making a play for much more than the anticipated minority stake is a shift. Angola is the leading diamond producer in Africa by volume, having just beaten out Botswana in 2024 for the first time in 20 years.

Cecilia Jamasmie, Mining.com

Boo

A new survey of Americans found that 60 percent reported experiencing at least one of 13 possible paranormal experiences, with 35 percent of respondents saying they experienced an unknown energy, 32 percent smelling an unexpected odor, 31 percent hearing an unexplained sound and 26 percent feeling an unexplained change in temperature. Ordinarily, I’m very tolerant of varied beliefs about stuff like this, but I do feel the need to remind everyone to please check your natural gas lines and contact your local utility if you experience any symptoms of a gas leak. These symptoms might include smelling an unexpected odor, hearing unexplained sounds or feeling an unexplained change in temperature. With 18 percent of Americans reporting that they have lived in a house they thought was haunted, it’s never too early to be vigilant about issues with a rapidly aging American housing stock that is haunted not by spirits by by persistent quality control issues with aging equipment, electrical infrastructure and pipes. Remember, there’s a lesson to be learned in most of the Scooby Doo ghosts just being landlords and people with a financial interest in the property.

Jamie Ballard, YouGov

Anime

For the second time this year, an anime title has taken the top spot at the box office, with Chainsaw Man The Movie: Reze Arc making $17.2 million in North America, beating expectations. It beat out a pair of domestic new releases, including Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (which made $9.1 million and came in fourth) and Regretting You (an adaptation of a Colleen Hoover novel that made $12.8 million). This is a weekend featuring a prestige Bruce Springsteen movie, an angsty anime movie and a sequel to Tron: Legacy; given that this is exactly what I would have greenlit when I was a teenager, I can decisively confirm that the millennials are firmly in control of Hollywood for better and for worse.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

There’s Nothing In The Rulebook

Hollywood’s animal actors are dealing with an employment crisis that their handlers feel may be permanent. Advances in computer-generated imagery, as well as scaled-back production resources following the pandemic and studio consolidation, mean that live animals are not as much a presence on film sets as they once were. The owner of Benay’s Bird & Animal Rentals estimated that the jobs are currently 40 percent of what they were pre-pandemic. The work has particularly dried up for wild animals more so than domestic pets. Additionally, while some filmmakers insist on using actual horses, it’s increasingly clear that equine work is seriously imperiled by the baseline capabilities of stock computer-generated image assets.

Katie Kilkenny, The Hollywood Reporter

Napoleon

In 2002, researchers excavated a mass grave of 2,000 to 3,000 people in Lithuania containing remains that researchers believe are of people who died during Napoleon’s retreat from Russia in 1812. A group of researchers selected 13 individuals for further study and were able to extract genetic material from the teeth of the skeletons to find two new enemies that appeared to have struck the French on their way out: Salmonella enterica and Borrelia recurrentis. Respectively, these are the bacteria that cause paratyphoid fever and a bacterium spread by body lice that causes relapsing fever. These are new plagues in addition to the typhus and trench fever long thought to have ripped through Napoleon’s forces.

Andrea Tamayo, Scientific American

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