Numlock News: September 9, 2024 • Art Forgeries, Grand Canyon, Hurricane

Sep 09, 2024

By Walt Hickey

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Beetlejuice

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice made $110 million domestically this weekend, at the high end of estimates, good for the second-largest September opening after It. It’s doing especially well among women (54 percent to 58 percent of moviegoers) and made more than a third of its money in Imax and large-format screens. This also makes it one of the rare sequels that opened to more money in its first weekend than the first film made during its entire run at the domestic box office.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Albums

It’s a weird moment in music, as illustrated by some of the shenanigans that went down a week ago when the top spot on the Billboard 200 was decided by less than 1,000 units. Travis Scott’s Days Before Rodeo was up against Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet. The Carpenter album managed 233 million on-demand streams compared to Scott’s 40.6 million, but Scott managed to sell 300,000 digital downloads. While Carpenter would have handily won the week, when all was said and done Carpenter pulled 362,000 equivalent album units, only narrowly beating Scott’s 361,000 units. One strategy pulled by the Scott squad? On the last day of the tracking week, they released six different digital variants for $4.99 each, the minimum price for chart eligibility, a strategy that was parried by Carpenter’s team releasing three $4.99 versions of her album and scoring a swift 45,000 digital downloads to snatch the win back. The digital album strategy paid off, and as album charts stop actually charting albums and just track things that sort of feel close enough to albums, such strategies are increasingly viable.

Elias Leight, Billboard

Automat

In Germany pretty much all shops are forced to close on Sundays, a longstanding law that dates back to 1956. The idea is that workers and shoppers need a day off, but to get around it, automated mini-markets are popping up and lobbying the states to allow them to open 24/7, which has been pretty successful in parts of the country. In the past four years, the German supermarket chain Tegut has opened 40 Tegut Teos, offering about 950 items in each, including perishables, and requiring only around 25 hours of human labor per week for restocking and cleaning. The Teos that are open make 30 percent of their weekly revenue on Sundays, indicating that yeah, there’s interest in buying stuff on weekends.

Celine Imensek, Bloomberg

Hurricanes

This year was flagged by forecasters as poised to be a rough one when it comes to hurricane season, thanks to warm sea temperatures and a coming La Niña climate pattern. That said, it’s been pretty dead out there, but forecasters are cautioning that while the seas appear to be in a lull, we’re not out of it yet. By one metric, accumulated cyclone energy, which tracks the overall activity of storms in the Atlantic, this year’s ACE score remains 50 percent above the average season across 1991 to 2020.

Meghan Bartels, Scientific American

NASCAR

NASCAR introduced the charter system in 2016, which gives the sport similarity to other leagues with franchises and owners behind them. On its face, NASCAR is not like other sports, because NASCAR itself and many of its tracks are privately owned by just two families. In order to incentivize people to race within that private company, the charter system was created, which kicked 25 percent of future media revenues to the teams that regularly competed. The current charter deals expire at the end of the season, and 13 groups have signed new agreements, leaving just two organizations — Front Row Motorsports and 23XI Racing — as holdouts. The latter organization is co-owned by Michael Jordan, and he’s ticked because he doesn’t think the charters are actually good deals for owners. Charter slots sell for $20 million to $40 million, and NASCAR recently made a $7.7 billion media deal for the seasons through 2031.

Jacob Feldman, Sportico

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Transcanyon

The Transcanyon Waterline brings potable water to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, and it was built in 1970 with a 30-year design life. Naturally, nobody ever replaced it, and since 2010 there have been at least 85 breaks along the 12.5-mile line. A long-term fix is projected to be in place by 2027, and that’s after decades of issues. A 2015 estimate found that the waterline has had between five and 30 breaks in the past 30 years, each of which cost around $25,000 to fix on average. It’s one part of a much larger issue: The Grand Canyon has a backlog of $823 million worth of maintenance and repairs.

Michael Phillis and Suman Naishadham, The Associated Press

Forgeries

For years, David Voss led a forgery ring that produced thousands of fakes of the work of Norval Morrisseau in what is considered to be one of the largest art frauds in history. Last Thursday in Ontario, he was sentenced to five years in prison for fraud after pleading guilty to uttering forged documents and forgery in June. The estate of Norval Morrisseau suffered damages estimated to be near C$100 million, and the cooperation of the forgers has led to 1,800 paintings being identified as counterfeits, with 500 fakes pulled from the market. There are still believed to be lots and lots of counterfeits out there, leaving the estate with the exhausting and expensive task of spending likely decades assessing the art.

Hadani Ditmars, The Art Newspaper

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