By Walt Hickey

Herding Cats

Cats are having a moment in Hollywood, appearing in central roles in films like The Marvels, A Quiet Place: Day One and Argylle, as well as television shows and more. This is a bit of a sea change, as dogs have been somewhat notoriously more reliable on-screen presences than their feline counterparts. Historically, the reason should be obvious to anyone with even the faintest grasp of the temperaments of the respective beasts: Namely, cats do not have any respect for the will of humans, while dogs will do incredible feats for the vague promise of a little bit of hot dog. The reasons for the renaissance of cats on-screen are several, but two practicalities stand out. One, CG animation is now affordable enough to fix cats that are not good enough actors for a shot; two, animal handlers are getting better at working with cats. The state of the art has evolved substantially in the past several years, with one trainer needing 12 to 14 weeks to prepare a cat (and at least two understudies) for a film, lately to more reliable levels of success.

James Hibberd, The Hollywood Reporter

Coyotes

After its ownership repeatedly failed to secure a long-term home in Arizona, the Arizona Coyotes have been sold to the owner of the Utah Jazz and will move to Salt Lake City. The Coyotes’ hockey operations and players were sold for $1.2 billion, where they’ll be rebranded and relocated in time for the 2024-25 season. The franchise has been sold, but the Coyotes’ name, logos and trademarks have not. They’ll play in the Jazz’s Delta Center until a downtown hockey arena is built. The Coyotes have struggled seriously in Arizona, departing their arena in Glendale in 2022 because of a lease dispute, then playing at Mullett Arena on the campus of Arizona State University as an interim — but seemingly indefinite — solution since then. A $2.1 bullion attempt to build on a plot of land in Tempe at some cost to taxpayers was rejected in a referendum from the city’s voters, and a recent attempt to build a $3 billion arena and retail complex in North Phoenix has been scuttled.

Barry M. Bloom, Sportico

Super Fan

Musical acts have begun to zero in on finding ways to turn their biggest and most committed fans into bigger spenders. This is far from new — musicians have always made just some of their money from the record, but then lots more from touring, merch sales, and so on — but lately as the revenue from streaming has become slower-growing and more cutthroat and zero-sum across the industry, artists are really trying to get in with their superfans. That’s had some managers and artists looking to a peculiar source: the Grateful Dead. Despite only having one hit single, no band quite like the Dead have managed to cultivate and please their most hard-core of fans. In 2023, the Dead & Company tour made $114.7 million, which is more than the most recent BTS tour made ($113.6 million). One source of revenue envied by the rest of the industry is their ambitious reissues, such as the 2006 release of a 73-CD set of their 1972 European tour, followed by an 80-CD set of a show from each year of the 30-year run.

Robert Levine, Billboard

Civil War

The Alex Garland film Civil War, a provocative modern spin on the It Can't Happen Here style of alt history, made an expectations-crushing $25.7 million in its opening weekend, becoming the first A24 movie ever to top the charts in North America as the studio experiments with a wide-release strategy. As I understand it, the film is an unofficial adaptation of the “I feel bad for our country. But this is tremendous content” tweet by Darren Rovell. The movie, which starred Kirsten Dunst, cost $50 million to make, the most expensive movie in A24’s history, but sales of foreign market rights moved the needle toward profitability before it even opened stateside.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Promotion

Wrexham AFC, the Welsh soccer club purchased by Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds in November 2020, has secured promotion up to the next league of soccer yet again, the first time in the 159-year history of the organization that it’s achieved back-to-back promotion. Last year the team earned promotion out of the fifth tier of English soccer up into League Two, which is fourth-tier soccer. The top three teams of League Two earn promotion, and with a 6-0 win over Forest Green over the weekend, Wrexham is guaranteed to get the bump up to League One, the third-tier league behind only EFL Championship and the top Premier League. Revenue for the team this year was up 75 percent to $13 million, well higher than the $2 million to $4 million before the actors bought the club.

Kurt Badenhausen, Sportico

Roguelike Deckbuilders

Two of the hottest trends in gaming right now are roguelikes, which is any game where death is frequent by design while randomization makes it fun, and deckbuilders, which is where you get to upgrade card decks over time and play adversaries. The intersection of these two has simply exploded lately: Steam, the game store, has 2,599 deckbuilding titles in general and 861 roguelike deckbuilders in particular, an explosion of a genre that barely existed several years ago. The trend started with the smash hit Slay the Spire in 2019, and legions of imitators, competitors and twists on the format have cropped up since. Making a deckbuilding roguelike is also somewhat cheaper to build and maintain compared to other styles of games, and have a lot of appeal among streamers, which helps to boost their popularity.

Kevin Purdy, Ars Technica

Give Chase

Police chases are controversial because the danger presented to motorists, pedestrians and cyclists on the road must be balanced against the danger presented by a fugitive on the loose. Several states tightened up restrictions of when and when not it’s permissible for police to engage in a car chase, but lately areas including Florida, D.C., San Francisco and Washington state have loosened up the kind of situations in which police can chase. The data doesn’t particularly favor that call. Milwaukee rolled back restrictions in police chases in 2015; in 2010, there were just 68 pursuits, but by 2022 that jumped fifteenfold to 1,028, all while the percentage of people caught following a pursuit declined from 91.2 percent in 2010 to 38 percent in 2022. According to federal statistics, at least 3,336 people were killed in police pursuits from 2017 to 2022, and more than half of them were passengers or bystanders.

Amanda Hernández, Stateline

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