By Walt Hickey

Welcome back! Welcome to new readers, we’ve got a fun newsletter today, plus a plug for a friend.

Folie à Deux

Joker: Folie à Deux was a surprising flop at the domestic box office, opening to just $40 million despite expectations of $50 million to $60 million last week, $70 million three weeks ago, and the 2019 opening of Joker which came in at $96.2 million. It’s a bad opening and the latest of several consecutive DC Comics movies to misfire ahead of the splashy reboot of that universe next year. The movie is at least doing decently overseas — making $81 million — but I wager the next time we see Joker on screen is either gonna be a Batman movie or a live-action Balatro adaptation.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Art Forgeries

For the past 50 years, the Van Gogh Museum has stepped away from discussions about forgeries of Van Gogh, a practice that ended in a shocker of a research piece published in The Burlington Magazine identifying three purported Van Gogh works that the leading research center on the artist has concluded are fakes. One is Interior of a Restaurant, which surfaced in the 1950s and was regarded as a second version of Interior of the Grand Bouillon-Restaurant le Chalet, Paris, which Van Gogh painted in November or December of 1887. The giveaway that Interior of a Restaurant is faked is twofold: First and foremost, one of the colors is Manganese blue, a synthetic pigment only patented in 1935, and second, the flowers include sunflowers, which wouldn’t have made it to November on tabletops and likely were an interpretation of the forger working from a black-and-white photo. Another potential fake — Head of a Woman, sold for $993,250 in 2011 — is now thought to be a copy made between 1902 and 1909 and squirreled away for a century.

Martin Bailey, The Art Newspaper

Coraline

The 2009 movie Coraline was re-released to cinemas this past summer and quietly racked up a record-breaking rerun, bringing in $53 million globally over the course of its 15th anniversary re-release. On one hand, this makes sense — all the weird teens who loved the Henry Selick adaptation of the Neil Gaiman book are now old enough to take their kids to see it — but that also is the highest-grossing re-release in the United States in the past 10 years, as well as the highest grosser in the history of Fathom Events. Now, because it’s spooky season, they’re just gonna release the stop-motion animated Laika film again into cinemas, because if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Jordan Moreau, Variety

Mutation

Mutation is the key to our survival, the ability of life to adapt to new surroundings, fill new niches, and expand outward. Mutation is the reason we are the dominant species on the planet, at least for now. Mutation can be scary, can go wrong, but can also be a revolution. On November 1, those paying close attention will observe a mutation: 10 locations of Spirit Halloween, which hermit crabs defunct retail space into pop-up costume shops, will become experimental Spirit Christmas locations, a real Nightmare Before Christmas situation. If anything, this is a great way to reuse that massive pile of unsold Harley Quinn costumes as “colorful female elf” given Folie à Deux flopping. The real concern for me here is that when these suckers fold on December 26, it’s gonna be like the collapse of the Soviet Union, except instead of surplus AK-47s and black market shoulder-mounted RPGs, it’ll be surplus Santa suits making their way into the next generation of belligerantly drunk SantaCon attendees.

Blake Taylor, Attractions Magazine

Horses

Saturday was the last race day ever for the Singapore Turf Club, a 300-acre horse racetrack in the city-state of Singapore. The racetrack will be bulldozed and housing will go in, as a country with just over 6 million people and an area less than that of New York City contends with tradeoffs about space. Race-day average viewership fell from 11,000 in 2010 to 6,000 in 2019, and then the pandemic led attendance to drop by half. Even on the final day of racing, only about 10,000 people turned out, a third of capacity. It’s not as if Singapore has lost its love for racing, either; 270,000 turned out for the most recent F1 race. The racetrack joins the last existing 18-hole public golf course in Singapore in folding amid an increased pressure for more housing.

Low De Wei, Bloomberg

Amazon

The Amazon River is at its lowest level in ages thanks to below-average rainfall, with the river port at Manaus, Brazil, logging its lowest water level since 1902. The Port of Manaus is on the Rio Negro, a major Amazon tributary, and the water level was logged at just 12.66 meters on Friday, continuing its decline. Grain shipments have been halted on the Madeira River, another tributary, and the drought has impacted the hydropower plants responsible for the larger part of Brazil’s electricity.

Bruno Kelly and Jake Spring, Reuters

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Brood Parasites

Some birds have evolved to sneak into other birds’ nests and lay their eggs, leaving their offspring in the care of the other birds who then have to do all that extra work to care for it, an evolutionary phenomenon called obligate brood parasitism. Only 1 percent of all bird species do it, but it’s found in at least 100 species and has evolved no fewer than seven separate times in the history of birds. The parasitic birds — cuckoos are the classic, but also cowbirds, honeyguides and more — have evolved some particularly clever adaptations. The common cuckoo evolved to mimic the look of a predatory raptor to scare off parent birds, and the cuckoo finch looks like an innocuous nonparasitic bird. Nonparasitic birds take about 20 minutes to lay an egg, but a parasitic bird can pop out an egg in seconds, capitalizing on a potentially brief window to parasitize a nest. The parasitic hatchling also grows much, much faster than the host bird’s, and might be noisier or more demanding to boot.

Sofia Quaglia, Knowable Magazine

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