By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Baba Yaga

John Wick: Chapter 4 made $73.5 million at the domestic box office this past weekend, beating already sky-high projections for the latest incarnation of the Keanu Reeves assassin thriller franchise. The movie also opened to No. 1 in every one of the 71 markets it opened in, making $64 million overseas for a remarkable $137.5 million global opening that blew the $9.7 million hauled in by the next runner up, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, out of the water.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Passports

American passports are in very, very high demand right now, according to the Department of State, with the record 22 million passports issued in 2022 already on pace to be broken. Right now, the State Department gets about a half-million requests for a new passport every week, up 30 percent to 40 percent over the rate last year, and given the already standard processing time of 10 to 13 weeks, many people with summer travel aspirations whose documents are not yet requested may be in for an unpleasant surprise. Typically, there’s a busy season for passports that starts around March and ends at the end of the summer, but following the pandemic the cycle has broken and it’s always busy.

Kaitlyn Radde, NPR

Rejection

Data from Cigna reveals that the doctors they keep on staff to approve or deny claims are really, really fast at denying claims. One medical director declined 60,000 claims in a single month, and doctors are given authority to reject claims from insured people without even opening a patient file. Over the course of just two months, Cigna doctors denied 300,000 requests without even glancing at a file, spending an average of just 1.2 seconds per case. Even within the company, some now former executives had doubts about the program’s legality.

Patrick Rucker, Maya Miller and David Armstrong, ProPublica

Lebanon

The government of Lebanon made a last-minute decision to delay the beginning of daylight savings time for a month, and it has thrown the country into chaos. The country, which has a single time zone and is at most 88 kilometers across, has nevertheless been torn temporally asunder. Christian politicians and institutions are rejecting the move, which is timed to the end of Ramadan. The decision will take Lebanon out of sync with Europe, which its daylight savings time system is typically linked to. The state airline announced that all departure times from Sunday to April 21 would, in keeping with the mandate, be advanced an hour, while the two cell phone networks texted everyone and basically encouraged them to set their clock manually to avoid a change at midnight. The Education Minister said the decision was not even legally valid, so Monday is bound to be a fascinating day at school.

Abby Sewell, The Associated Press

You Sheep

Many Americans are utter cowards willing to just give up and let a crap change happen, a new survey found, with a bunch of sheep not only content to allow an additional arbitrary surcharge on one of life’s pleasures to emerge but are in fact enthusiastic about paying the fee. Less than, like, five years ago, if you bought a movie ticket you just sat in any open seat in a theater. Then, cinemas realized that people enjoyed having a degree of certainty about their seats, and with the rise of digital ticketing allowed theatergoers to reserve seats. This was all well and good. Then, AMC Entertainment Holdings, a meme stonk that hermit crabbed into one of the two remaining exhibitors in America, decided to start upcharging for seats it identified as better, and some morons are accepting that slop and calling it tasty. Fully 36 percent of Americans think that movie theaters should have a variable pricing model for better seats, while 51 percent looked themself in the mirror this morning and said goddammit my life has value, and responded no, that is not appropriate. And while I am furious at this unconscionable and immoderate violation of the fundamental equality of man, as one of the perverts who likes to sit right up against that screen, I concede I actually do stand to save like a couple bucks per showing for movie tickets personally here.

Saleah Blancaflor, Morning Consult

Shark Weak

A group of scientists reported the first discovery of a goblin shark in the Mediterranean sea based on a photograph taken by a Greek man in August 2020. The initial success story — citizen science, published in no less than Mediterranean Marine Science — has been somewhat clouded by a comment paper published by a group of shark researchers essentially saying that’s probably not a goblin shark, and in fact there’s some decent evidence it’s just a plastic toy, one that bears a remarkable resemblance to a plastic goblin shark toy produced by the Italian toy manufacturer DeAgostini. The original authors doubled down, though they amended the estimates of the shark’s size from 30 inches down to just seven inches. According to the comment paper authors, seven inches is not even a viable goblin shark embryo, and this week the original paper was retracted.

Annie Roth, The New York Times

Boo!

Horror movies have had a great couple years, being one of the last remaining reliable financial bets in Hollywood. The industry has pivoted to the spooktacular, and through the end of this year there are 29 further horror movies scheduled for release, according to Comscore. This is abnormally high, as previously studios might go months between horror movies. Horror audiences are loyal, and successful films can really out-earn their budgets: Last year the $17 million budgeted Smile was originally going to be dumped off on some streaming platform, but was instead put into theaters last minute, bringing in $217 million and scoring the first-time writer-director an multi-year deal.

Robbie Whelan, The Wall Street Journal

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