Numlock News: September 4, 2025 • Reds, Pirates, Hunters

Sep 04, 2025

Movies

Inflation-adjusted, this was the worst summer for movies at the box office since 1981. It is in no small part due to studio tentpoles, which cinemas typically rely on for their largest revenue streams, failing to make the kind of impact that they have in recent years. Only two weeks of this summer saw box office grosses north of $300 million — the premieres of Lilo & Stitch and Superman — a feat that theaters accomplished for nine weekends in the summer of 2019. Of the 26 movies that made more than $20 million this summer, 20 of them were franchise movies. However, some of those movies still significantly underperformed their predecessors or failed to build a bigger audience.

Christine Zhang and Brooks Barnes, The New York Times

Reds

Elite Magic: The Gathering play has a balance issue. The color red dominates the competition even after Wizards of the Coast attempted to counterbalance the issue with the Edge of Eternities release and the ban of seven cards in June. At the recent Spotlight Series: Planetary Rotation event, Red decks dominated the Top 8, and the culprit is seen to be the new card, Izzet Soul Cauldron. The card was found in six of the top eight decks and represented 30 percent of the field, a card that abuses two under-playtested cards and allows a planeswalker to use their abilities multiple times. The problem? It’s a highly desirable card from a set that sold extremely well, and banning it would mean ticking off fans who paid $50 for the card on the secondary market (or $200 if they stocked up on four copies for a deck).

Jeffrey Dohm-Sanchez, ICV2

Complementary

A new study published in Nature Human Behaviour analyzed data on 14.8 million people in Taiwan, Denmark and Sweden, seeking to study people who had one of nine psychiatric disorders. It found that people with a given disorder are more likely than not to marry someone who has the same condition as themselves. While groundbreaking in its field, earlier reports of the phenomenon published in The Discography of The Mountain Goats offered even earlier insight to this reality.

Mohana Basu, Nature Magazine

Drawn and Quartered

The Cairo-based streaming piracy network Streameast was shut down by the anti-piracy coalition Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, folding on August 24. I’m just hearing about this for the first time, obviously. But apparently, this service offered unauthorized access to Europe’s vast and confusing array of soccer leagues and was mainly used by fans who didn’t have it in them to shlep to a bar on Saturday mornings. Allegedly, and I’m just reporting what they’re telling me, it says right here that the network used to also have NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB games, as well as Formula One.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Hunted

A new survey found that while 30 percent of Americans have gone hunting, many more have strong feelings about what we should be allowed to hunt. Turkeys (71 percent allowed), deer (69 percent) and wild hogs (68 percent) all come in substantially as possible targets. However, wolves (just 28 percent), mountain lions (26 percent), whales (seven percent) and bald eagles (four percent) come in conspicuously lower. That last one pretty much confirms the polling rule of thumb that about one in 20 Americans love messing with pollsters. This is only the start of the scholarship on the issue, of course. The survey did not get into more complicated ethical questions related to hunting, such as “Can you hunt a consenting human on your private island if you sort of offer them a deal?” “Is it okay for an alien creature known a the Yautja to hunt an elite paramilitary unit acting on an off-books mission in the jungles of Central America?” “Expanding on that, does your opinion change if the hunt instead takes place in a heat wave in Los Angeles?” “Finally, do you think it is okay for a Yautja to hunt a Xenomorph — referred to in their culture as kiande amedha or ‘hard meat’ — as part of their rite of passage?”

Jamie Ballard, YouGov

InSight

A new analysis of data from the now-dead InSight lander on Mars suggests that the planet may indeed possess a dense inner core. It would slow down seismic waves that passed through the core by 50 to 200 seconds observed in some data. That would be a significant shift in the thinking around Mars’ core, as it would conflict with two studies published in Nature two years ago, which both suggested that the layer of molten mantle rock lies above the core, heating it into a liquid state.

Paul Voosen, Science

Loss

The average insured property loss from natural events is now an estimated $152 billion per year, but what’s especially interesting about that number is which events are fueling the growth. Over the past five years, insured non-crop losses averaged $132 billion per year, and over the previous five years, it was $104 billion. The thing is, the big, monster, eyeball-grabbing once-a-year meteorological catastrophes are not driving up the costs. Rather, it’s something the industry calls “frequency perils.” In other words, severe thunderstorms, winter storms, fire and floods that affect smaller areas but add up big time, accounting for an estimated $98 billion out of that $152 billion, up 12 percent year over year.

Insurance Journal

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