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Numlock News: January 11, 2024 • Centenarians, Saltburn, Wyndham

Jan 11

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By Walt Hickey

Anyone But You

The romantic comedy Anyone But You has pulled off a rare trick and is the odd kind of movie to actually grow its ticket sales week over week for two consecutive weekends. Despite bringing in only $6 million in ticket sales on a $25 million budget in its first weekend, the movie began to hit its stride, is now sitting pretty at $60 million worldwide, and will likely end up with something north of $100 million. It’s a good sign for rom-coms, which have had a rough go at the box office, and an indication that it’s still very possible to build up a head of steam through audience-driven social media virility.

Lucas Shaw and Thomas Buckley, Bloomberg

Tub-thumping

The release of Saltburn, a film set in the heady summer of 2007, has sent a number of pop hits from the 2000s back up the Billboard charts. Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s 2001 song “Murder on the Dancefloor” has charted for the first time ever this week, reaching No. 98 on the Hot 100 following the film’s release on December 22 on Prime Video. Other songs featured prominently in the film have seen a burst of streaming success, with MGMT’s “Time to Pretend” up 96 percent between December 21 and January 4 to 1.1 million streams, “Perfect (Exceeder)” up 289 percent to 1.4 million streams, and even some songs that remain popular bangers — “Low” and “Mr. Brightside” — got a bit of a boost.

Kyle Denis, Kristin Robinson and Andrew Unterberger, Billboard

You Can Check Out Anytime You Like, But

Just six companies in the United States control 80 percent of branded hotels, and two companies have been circling one another — Choice Hotels and Wyndham — and threatening to bring that down to five companies. Choice, which owns Radisson, Quality Inn and Econolodge brands, is attempting a hostile takeover after a merger proposal went nowhere. The hotel industry has experienced lots of consolidation — heck, Wyndham already owns Ramada, La Quinta, Days Inn, Super 8, and Howard Johnson — and the worry is that even more consolidation will be bad not just for consumers who will have less competition if one successor company controls 20 percent of the hotel market, but also for the actual people who own and run the hotels. The business is a bit odd, with individual owners having hotels and then franchising out the brand from one of these massive corporations. Those franchisees are extremely skittish about this merger, where 16,500 hotels and 46 brands will be run by a single entity.

Pat Garofalo, Boondoggle

Centenarians

Thanks to advances in medical science, more and more people are making it to age 100 and over in the United States. In 1950, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that just 2,300 Americans were aged 100 and up, a figure that by 1990 had risen to 37,300 and by 2020 was all the way up to 80,100. This year, there are an estimated 101,500 people in the United States aged 100 and up — 0.03 percent of the overall U.S. population — and over the next several decades that number is expected to jump steeply. In 2054, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that there will be 421,700 people in the United States aged 100 or higher, and that they’ll then be 0.1 percent of the U.S. population. Why it is some people are able to live so long remains a mystery, but recent research from the Numlock Institute for Centenarian Studies suggests that across the board, first and foremost the single most significant behavior correlated with living to age 100 is that the people who do so overwhelmingly lived to age 99. So, try to do that.

Katherine Schaeffer, Pew Research Center

Trees

A new study published in Nature looked at 1,003,805 trees across 1,568 locations in tropical forests around the world, from Africa to South America to Asia, finding 8,493 unique tree species. They were trying to figure out the distribution of different species of trees, and found that in general there are a few very common species of trees that are very common across all the tropical forests of the world. The estimate is that among the 800 billion tropical forest trees on the planet, just 1,053 species of trees account for half of all the trees. Beyond that, the other 400 billion trees are from 46,000 different species, and lots of trees are really rare. The rarest 39,500 species were responsible for 10 percent of all trees, and those are the ones that are most imperiled by climate changes and deforestation.

Michael Lucibella, University College London

Post Office

In the United Kingdom, post offices are run similarly to franchises, with postmasters and postmistresses self-employed and operating the facilities. A new controversy has exploded in the wake of a television drama about a scandal where hundreds of postmasters were convicted of theft when in fact it was faulty accounting software causing errors. From 1999 to 2015, there were 983 convictions against people managing post offices in the U.K. over missing money from accounts, and many were driven to bankruptcy or jail, if not worse. Those convictions have been called into question as glitches in the software become better understood, and now Parliament is considering legislation to pay compensation and overturn the convictions.

Max Colchester and Joanna Sugden, The Wall Street Journal

Alabama

College football coach Nick Saban has announced his retirement from the University of Alabama. Given his career record of 292-71-1 across four universities and six championships, his impact was registered well beyond the football field. Over the course of his run as head coach, Alabama’s athletics budget has soared to $195.9 million, the third-highest among public schools in America. The fruits of victory have registered on campus, as well: Fall enrollment was 25,580 when Saban first began coaching the Crimson Tide in 2007, and as of 2022 that figure stands at 38,645, up 51 percent.

Jacob Feldman, Sportico

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