By Walt Hickey

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Wicked

It was the biggest weekend of the year at the movies, with Wicked making $114 million domestically and Gladiator II making $55.5 million, fueling a domestic box office of $210 million overall. Wicked is the standout of the weekend, becoming the highest-grossing domestic opening for a Broadway adaptation (beating Into the Woods with $31 million) as well as biggest international opening (beating Les Miserables), the fourth-highest-grossing musical opening ever (behind Frozen II and ahead of the Little Mermaid remake). So far, the domestic box office is 26.6 percent behind 2019 and 10.5 percent behind 2023, so with Moana 2 on the way this weekend, it’s a last-minute shot in the arm for the domestic film business.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Clear

The United States for some reason decided to let a private company profit off the ineptitude of their own airport security apparatus by hawking a fast pass to travelers willing to pay a tithe and hand over their biometrics. Travelers with Clear don’t actually get to skip security, but they do get to skip the line, and the company makes $700 million from this process thanks to a thorough group of salespeople at every airport who cosplay as security professionals when they’re just trying to obtain your face. Clear wormed its way into the American security apparatus by offering generous kickbacks to airports; for instance, LAX gets 12.5 percent of the $42 million in revenue Clear made from its business at that airport, SFO gets 12.5 percent of the $36.2 million there, and Chicago’s Midway and O’Hare made 12 percent of the $21.9 million there. That said, the jig may be up: PreCheck — the TSA program — is actually running fast enough these days that Clear can be a slower option.

Brody Ford, Bloomberg

Tulips

One fascinating detail from the Wicked production has been revealed: namely, that the massive field of tulips around Munchkinland were in fact real, and required 9 million tulips to make. They found a tulip farmer in Norfolk, England, who would plant and grow the bulbs for them, and next year the farm’s going to open up a whole public thing. If this kind of stunt of growing massive fields of produce in the service of a single set of shots for an ambitious blockbuster that desired the verisimilitude of a physical set sounds familiar, you may recognize the name of production designer Nathan Crowley: He’s also the guy who grew 500 acres of corn for Interstellar.

Jazz Tangcay, Variety

Fast Food

Fast food is in a bad place right now: it’s become too expensive for what was once its core consumer looking for a cheap bite on the go, and it’s not high enough on the value chain to actually compete with the fast-casual locations like Chipotle or Sweetgreen that they’re peers with when it comes to pricing. A survey in May found that 78 percent of Americans viewed fast food as a luxury, which is a bad place to be if you want to rack up a few more billions served. Sales have been mediocre all year, but foot traffic is downright bad. According to Black Box Intelligence, every month of the year has seen foot traffic to fast-food places dip, and as of the most recent data, in September foot traffic was down 2.5 percent year over year.

Adam Chandler, Sherwood News

Lions

If your preferred NFL team is, perhaps, disintegrating in real time and throwing in random residents of Bergen County, New Jersey, at quarterback just to control the season as it crashes into the top of the draft order, maybe you should look to Detroit for an American-engineered bandwagon. If you need any reason, here’s the best part: Bookies and the insipid mobile betting industry will get wiped out if Detroit takes this one all the way. The Lions opened the season around 12-1 to win the Super Bowl and they’ve since improved to 3-1, and at DraftKings, overall 31 percent of bets are on Detroit to win the Super Bowl, which is doing great at the sportsbooks at the terrestrially-bound casinos in Vegas and Atlantic City. If they win, the sportsbooks will lose a bunch of money and be considered a major liability by the bookies. Icing on the cake!

Ben Fawkes, The Athletic

Like Fish In A Barrel

Archaeologists have found a 4,000-year-old network of canals built by the civilizations that preceded the Maya in the Yucatan peninsula. The canals — in a fascinating, zig-zagging pattern — run for miles through the wetlands of Belize’s Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary. There’s interesting evidence that they may have been used essentially for fish farming, given holding ponds and the presence of barbed spearpoints found nearby that may have been attached to sticks and used to spear the fish swimming down the canals. They were used for something like a thousand years.

Christina Larson, The Associated Press

Teff Luck

Teff is a tiny cereal gran that was domesticated between 4000 and 1000 BCE, has been cultivated for thousands of years in Ethiopia and Eritrea, accounts for two-thirds of the protein intake in the Ethiopian diet, and is now having a major moment across the rest of the world because it’s gluten-free and gluten-free is so hot right now. About 90 percent of the crop is still grown in Ethiopia but farmers in Idaho, India, Australia and Europe are cultivating it now, and the market is expected to grow steadily over the next few years, riding multiple trends in the food business. It’ll rise 11 percent annually, increasing from $1.5 percent in 2025 to $3.5 billion in 2030.

Jennifer Lawinski, Food Dive

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