By Walt Hickey

Welcome back and happy new year!

Wicked

Wicked, the Broadway show, posted up record-breaking Broadway box office fueled by both the annual holiday season bump as well as the success of the film based upon Act One of the musical. The show made $5,037,392 last week, the single highest weekly gross in history for any Broadway show, racked up from nine shows over the course of the week, with an extra show over the typical eight. Ticket prices averaged $290.61, and it made $2 million more than it did the previous week. Across Broadway, grosses for the week of Christmas were up 23 percent compared to the same week of last season, and as a whole Broadway grosses for the 2024-25 season are up by 16 percent compared to the previous year.

Caitlin Huston, The Hollywood Reporter

Trading Cards

The market for Pokémon cards remains red-hot, with the hobby seeing its best performance in its 28th year of existence. During the fiscal year that ended last March, The Pokemon Co. produced 12 billion cards, which expanded global supply by about 23 percent. With Konami’s Yu-Gi-Oh card game also remaining intensely popular, exports of trading cards are a big boost for the toy industry of Japan, with cards now accounting for 27.2 percent of total toy shipments and shipments last year reaching the milestone of 1.02 trillion yen ($6.5 billion).

Yuichi Shiga and Chihiro Ishikawa, Nikkei Asia

Sad Bananas

Bananas are sold in bunches, but often a banana falls off the bunch before it hits grocery store shelves. This presents a bit of a pickle for the grocer, because people don’t like to buy lonely bananas when there are perfectly good bunches right next to it, which means that invariably the banana will finish its journey of thousands of miles in a dumpster out back. That sucks for lots of reasons, but a new study has a potential solution. Researchers made three different signs to hang up above crates of these single bananas: One is a picture of a sad banana saying, "We are sad singles and want to be bought as well,” one is a happy banana saying the same thing, and a third sign says, "Here are single bananas that want to be bought as well." Over the course of the study, 3,810 banana shoppers were observed over eight days in two stores, and they ended up being far more likely to buy a single banana when the image of the sad banana was used.

Lisa Eckmann, The Conversation

Public Domain

On January 1, all works from 1929 and all sound recordings from 1924 entered into the public domain. Among these are a dozen Mickey Mouse cartoons, including ones in which the Disney mascot speaks and ones in which he has his now iconic white gloves, as well as lots of movies that feature sound, as talkies essentially replaced silent films in ‘29. Also entering the public domain are Tintin and Popeye; funnily enough, Olive Oyl has been in the public domain for years, as she predates Popeye and was introduced in 1919, while Popeye’s love of spinach doesn’t become a key element of his character until 1931.

Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle, Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain

Cleveland

The mayor of Cleveland has now legally threatened the owners of the Cleveland Browns, alluding to Ohio Revised Code 9.67, better known as the “Art Modell law.” The letter indicates that the Browns must provide the city or others an opportunity to purchase the team as required by the law, given plans to move the team out of Cleveland and over to a city 15 miles away. The Art Modell law was passed after the Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Baltimore Ravens in 1995, and requires pro teams in Ohio that use a tax-supported facility for their home games to provide six months of notice and offer the team for sale to buyers who will keep it local. The Browns contend the law is vague.

Michael McCann, Sportico

Occupancy

U.S. hotels are averaging 63.9 percent occupancy nationwide, three points lower than the 66.9 percent occupancy rate in 2019. That’s a bit of a pinch in an industry not exactly known for thick profit margins, but it’s not entirely clear if it’s solely the result of pandemic-related long-term changes in how people work. On one hand, the U.S. has somehow added a net of 618 hotels since 2019, which is not exactly what you would do if the industry is doomed and facing intractable headwinds. Airlines, by comparison, have said that their corporate business is pretty much back, but it does seem that corporate trips are getting shorter, which would show up in hotel data but not flight data.

Sean O’Neill, Skift

Église

In France, about 95 percent of the over 42,000 Catholic churches in the country belong to the government, as all parish churches built before 1905 are property of the nation’s 34,955 communes. Of the 149 cathedrals, only nine are not publicly owned. Some of them are in pretty rough shape — the November 2024 edition of a survey conducted by The Conference of the Bishops of France found that 72 have been demolished since 2000, and 326 have been deconsecrated since 1905 — and the recent fundraiser to pay for the restoration of Notre Dame has put a bit of a spotlight on how little money there is around to pay to restore or upgrade smaller churches.

Dale Berning Sawa, The Art Newspaper

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