By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Deadpool

Deadpool & Wolverine smashed expectations and records this past weekend, earning $205 million at the domestic box office — well above estimates heading into the weekend — which is good enough to be the best-ever launch for an R-rated film. Worldwide, the numbers are massive: It’s made another $233.3 million overseas, which is a $438.3 million global cume. It is now the biggest July opening of all time, and furthermore the biggest opening globally since Avatar: The Way of Water. Fun fact, it is also the first R-rated movie released by Disney, and, by my own reckoning, the largest-ever opening in the history of cinema for a movie starring a Canadian.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Team USA

Team USA has a $50 million to $60 million annual high-performance grant system that funnels money toward national governing bodies of sports with a high return on investment in Olympic medals. For instance, it’s plowed money into gymnastics given the historical success of the U.S. in the sport, has recently started putting money toward weight lifting following some interesting victories in the Rio and Tokyo games, and has made investments into rugby, climbing, surfing, skateboarding and breaking as those have entered the Olympics and gained prominence. That goes in the other direction, too; Team USA doesn’t even bother funding team handball, badminton, table tennis or pentathlon, as there’s no real opportunity for the U.S. in those sports. Take, for example, sailing’s fall from Team USA’s graces: It got $3.1 million in the years leading up to Tokyo, but after getting zero medals there — and just a bronze since 2008 — that funding was cut to $2.1 million over the past two years.

Eben Novy-Williams and Lev Akabas, Sportico

Wu-Tang

Lawsuits are flying over the one-of-a-kind Once Upon a Time in Shaolin album from the Wu-Tang Clan, which started as a clever release stunt but has deteriorated into legal squabbles after its original owner spent some time as a guest of the government. Bought by convicted pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli in 2015 when the musicians published just a single copy on one CD for $2 million at auction, the album came with a number of stipulations, including that it could not be released to the general public until 2103. After a conviction for securities fraud, the album was forfeited to the government to pay for restitution. It was then auctioned in 2021 for $4 million by a collective called PleasrDAO, which would go on to acquire the copyrights for $750,000 in 2024. Last month PleasrDAO sued Shkreli, seeking an injunction to bar him from leaking the album from copies he had made, while last week Shkreli’s lawyers argued that he was within his rights to make copies.

Bill Donahue, Billboard

Solitaire

Skillz Inc. released Solitaire Cube in 2016, a major hit in the tournament game business, but the company’s revenues peaked at $384 million in 2021 and have since declined to $150.1 million last year. It’s suing a number of rivals, accusing some of them of stealing its game technology, including Avia, which made Solitaire Clash, and Papaya, which made Solitaire Cash. Skillz is alleging that bots dominate its rivals, and that the cash prizes that ought to go to human players are sucked up by armies of bots that crowd tournaments and divert winnings away from competitors. This is big money: Avia said in 2023 that it’s paid out $1.4 billion in prizes to gamers.

Cecilia D’Anastasio, Bloomberg

Fires

Active fires in the American West have burned over 2 million acres, with one fire — the Park fire in Northern California — expanding to 353,194 acres, in some areas at a rate of 5,000 acres per hour, and zero percent contained as of Saturday. There are 2,500 people working to contain the fire. So far this year, there have been 27,427 fires affecting 3.7 million acres, which is fewer fires than last year but around four times the affected area. The Park fire is the result of arson: A man pushed a burning car 60 feet down an embankment into a gully, which sparked the blaze, easily one of the stupidest possible causes of a 550-square-mile conflagration.

Kate Selig, Alan Blinder and John Yoon, The New York Times

Biomass

In 2009, the European Union classified biomass as renewable energy, a decision that had the unintended side effect of causing lots of impoverished communities throughout the American South to have miserable air quality issues a decade later. At that point, the Southeast U.S. was producing 300,000 tons of wood pellets per year; by 2017, that rose to 7.3 million tons, mostly bound for Europe to produce green energy. Roughly three dozen plants in the region supply 80 percent of the pellets produced in the U.S., most of which are bound for commercial-scale energy production overseas. The environmental impact of grinding up and pelletizing those trees is tough, and producers have been fined for violating air emissions limits and emitting fine particulate matter that can cause or exacerbate breathing difficulties in the communities nearby.

James Pollard, Julie Watson and Stephen Smith, The Associated Press

Gold

Opposition party leaders in Argentina are attempting to locate about 2 million troy ounces of gold valued at $4.5 billion that — at least until recently — was in the Central Bank. The Milei administration has admitted that the gold reserves have been transferred abroad, but declined to say where precisely. The minister of the economy has said the gold was moved outside of the country to deposit it and earn interest on it, and it’s thought to be in London or Basel. It’s got economists worried that transferring the reserves of the central bank out of the country for a little bit of interest undermines their very purpose, not to mention the costs of insuring it potentially exceeding the benefits, as well as opening it up to seizure by the country’s creditors.

Javier Lorca, El País

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