By Walt Hickey

Party

Party City is being successfully stripped for parts and sold to the highest bidder following its bankruptcy filing in December. Auctions of store leases for nearly 700 locations in 45 states are proceeding well, generating $14.5 million so far. Top bidders who will hermit crab into Party City’s shells are Dollar Tree (which bid on 150 leases) and Five Below (which bid on 40), along with other bidders, including Barnes & Noble, La-Z-Boy and Rack Room Shoes. As for the actual city of parties within Party City, an affiliate of Ad Populum serving as a wholesale producer of party products bought the IP and the wholesale business operations for $20 million. Ad Populum is the faceless company behind such curiosities and tchotchkes as the Chia Pet and The Clapper.

Nate Delesline, Retail Dive

Drops of Jupiter

A study published in The Planetary Science presents a model for how exactly Jupiter’s moons came to be. There are four big Galilean moons, 95 moons in general and then lots and lots of smaller moonlets. The computer simulation suggests that, out of the swirling disk of gas, dust and ice that surrounded Jupiter in its infancy, cold spots in its outer region created the conditions necessary for materials to congeal. They eventually became the four Galilean moons of Ganymede, Europa, Callisto and Io. According to the simulations, the cool spots were 100 kelvins colder than surrounding regions, lasted for around 80,000 years of moon-making times and reached out in the disk 123.5 times the radius of Jupiter.

Sahas Mehra, Science

Equity

Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has been carrying out an annual compelling and demanding census for the last two decades: looking at every speaking character in the top 100 films of a given year and discerning the gender and demographic data of the individual speaking characters. For years, this mission was motivated by a somewhat stunning gender gap. Women were only about a third of all speaking characters in movies, a 2-to-1 gap that boggled the imagination, at least mine. In the 2024 report, the Initiative concludes that for the first time since the beginning of their reporting, women actually made up over half of all leads or co-leads in the top 100 films released within a given year. In fact, 54 percent of protagonists in 2024 were women, up from 30 percent in 2023 and up from its most recent high of 44 percent in 2022. Over the course of the 1,800 films they analyzed over the past eighteen years, just 32.4 percent of films had a female lead or co-lead.

Katherine L. Neff, Stacy L. Smith and Katherine Pieper, Annenberg Inclusion Initiative

Sake

The volume of exports of sake from Japan last year was 90 percent higher than they were a decade ago, with the total value of sake exports reaching 43.4 billion yen (US$285 million), up 6 percent year over year. Many sake breweries are still very, very dependent on Japan’s domestic population. However, given population declines and demographic shifts, the industry is increasingly doing roadshows where they try to introduce the product to American and Chinese palates, expanding the spirit’s brand. The sake business still mostly sells domestically to Japan — only 7 percent of Japan’s sake shipment volume went to exports in 2023 — but that’s double the amount from a decade ago.

Taro Fujii and Mitsutoshi Kouta, Nikkei Asia

Dr. Bronner’s

The closely-held soap brand Dr. Bronner’s is known for its rigorous commitments to fair trade, clean energy and renewable business practices. This also includes the forthrightness with which the bottles of soap detail their principles in a manifesto printed on the labels of each bottle of their product. It’s good stuff, generating. An estimated $209 million in revenue in 2024. I prefer their eucalyptus scent myself. For the past several years, they’ve also been what’s known as a B Corp, which is a certification that brands tout to certify a commitment to sustainable business practices. B Corp status is also held by the likes of Patagonia, Warby Parker and Ben & Jerry’s. However, the Bronner’s crew has been facing off against B Lab (which oversees the B Corp certification), arguing that standards have slipped or become too simple to meet. The allegation was prompted by the understandable head-scratcher of a Nestle subsidiary getting the certification despite reports of child labor, wage theft, and abuse of factory workers. You only need 80 points on the scoring rubric to get a B Corp certification, and Nespresso managed to get 84 points. Dr. Bronner’s, for what it’s worth, has 206.7.

Daniela Sirtori, Bloomberg

Brave New World

This weekend sees the release of Captain America: Brave New World, which will continue Marvel’s ongoing reset following its post-Infinity War meanderings. The movie is looking to bring in $80 million to $85 million over the weekend, with another $10 million or so coming in on President’s Day. It will also see release overseas, where it is expected to bring in something on the order of $110 million. Given the year so far and the lack of competition, it’s all but guaranteed to score the biggest debut of 2024 so far and is currently tracking to be middle-of-the-pack in terms of the post-Endgame movies.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Webtoon

Webcomics have matured into a serious industry, with analysts valuing the business of webcomics at over $7 billion, with the industry of online comics projected to pass $11.4 billion by 2030. Almost half of that business is currently in the Asia-Pacific region, which was able to monetize online comics at a quicker clip than other parts of the world. If there’s a central player in the whole enterprise, it’s probably Webtoon, which has 150 million monthly active users reading comics on the centralized service. As for creators, it’s quickly filling the same niche that Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing did as the main turnkey method of getting a webcomic monetized on the internet fast.

Julia Alexander, Posting Nexus

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