By Walt Hickey

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Disney

Disney has announced it’s plowing tens of billions more into its Experiences unit, which in 2023 was responsible for 69 percent of Disney profit. The company has long been in the business of exploiting its films, preferring to play the long game and squeeze dollars out of its most devoted fans over the course of decades, not opening weekends, but it’s rarely been so stark as to where the real engine of the Mouse is. Previous panels at D23 from the parks division have been a bit pie in the sky, with construction-starting kinds of announcements, but this year the company announced a whole new land in the Magic Kingdom based entirely on Disney’s villains, as well as an entire section of Frontierland devoted to Cars. This is a bold move, devoting an entire new attraction to the scourges of the world and the forces conspiring to take over the entire planet, ill effects be damned, and the other one about Disney villains.

Robbie Whelan and Jacob Passy, The Wall Street Journal

Blake and Ryan

Deadpool & Wolverine made another $54.2 million domestically in its third weekend, bringing its global cumulative earnings up to $1.029 billion. Coming right up behind it was It Ends With Us, starring Blake Lively, which beat expectations with a solid $50 million opening domestically with another $30 million from overseas. The adaptation of the Colleen Hoover novel was originally only expected to bring in around $23 million domestically, so this is a pretty solid hit. It’s believed to be the first time that two movies grossed more than $50 million each on the same weekend in August, which is usually when the summer blockbuster season begins to slow down, and it’s all the more interesting that a husband-wife duo are lead stars in both.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Auction

A huge sale at Sotheby’s auction house took place last week, with the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi buying… Sotheby’s, or at least a part of it. The total investment led by the ADQ wealth fund is $1 billion, but beyond that — including any insight into how much of Sotheby’s they now get to own beyond “a minority stake” — is unknown, including the overall valuation of the auctioneer.

Kabir Jhala, The Art Newspaper

Funko

Bobblehead producer Funko, a reliable bellwether of the state of the pop culture merchandising industry, reported their first quarterly sales increase since the third quarter of 2022. Overall, global sales were up 3 percent year over year to $247.7 million, even as sales in the United States slopped another 5 percent to $163 million. It’s the result of slashing SKUs, or the number of individual products made, by 30 percent, as the company realized predicating their business model on producing bobbleheads of the most ancillary characters of even the most fringe franchises might not be the best strategy. One way they improved margins was by hawking “aged inventory” in dollar stores and closeout stores, a worrying sign considering one can only spend so long juicing margins in the “unwanted Funkos” aisle of Dollar Tree before the brand takes a bit of a hit.

Milton Griepp, ICv2

Planes

Germany is the third-largest economy in the world, but its air travel is disproportionately far lower than would otherwise be expected, with 2023 seeing new lows in capacity levels. In 2023, there were 225 million seats in flights to and from Germany. That’s down from 232 million seats in 2012, and well off the peak of 283 million seats in 2019. Some of that is the war in Ukraine, as flights to Russia and Ukraine numbered 23,000 in 2019 and had 4 million airline seats but now are down significantly due to flight restrictions and sanctions. Meanwhile, lots of carriers are pulling out of Germany, with low-cost carriers like RyanAir and EasyJet reducing capacity by 70 percent and 67 percent, respectively, owing to high German aviation taxes. Frankfurt Airport is a big example of this, with 59 million passengers in 2023, down 16 percent from the 70 million in 2019.

Ashab Rizvi, Skift

Wolverines

Wolverines, the animal, are a candidate for reintroduction to Colorado. A plan under consideration would rehome 45 wolverines, 30 females and 15 males, from Canada and Alaska to Colorado. While reintroducing predators can get a bit dicey when it comes to negotiating with ranchers, lots of the established opposition to reintroducing predators is cool with wolverines because they don’t actually kill livestock. A benefit to establishing a Colorado Rockies community of wolverines would also be hedging against future bad winters in the Canadian Rockies, and could help them thrive long-term. Whether or not this does happen is now up to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which will need to create exceptions to the Endangered Species Act to reflect the compromises in the Colorado bill that passed the state House and Senate.

Christine Peterson, Vox

Andromeda

A study from 2008 suggested that a collision between the Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy is inevitable in the next 5 billion years, which would create a combined galaxy tentatively dubbed Milkomeda, which we really need to work on. That Andromeda is hurtling toward us at about 110 kilometers per second has been known for a while, but the gist is this would be a pretty big reorg for the Local Group. A new simulation pushes back on that, finding a roughly 50 percent chance the collision actually ends up as a near miss. The new results took into account the four largest galaxies in the Local Group, and found that the chance of a merger is slightly less than half when only factoring in Milky Way and Andromeda, goes up to two-thirds when adding in the Triangulum galaxy, and is back down to a coin flip when adding in the Large Magellanic Cloud. If anything, this proves that third-party long shots are hell on any forecasting model.

Daniel Clery, Science

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