By Walt Hickey

Ne Zha 2

The new animated film Ne Zha 2 earned another 1.92 billion yuan (US$267.1 million) in its second week in cinemas in China. This brings its cumulative total to a record-smashing US$1.11 billion, becoming the highest-grossing film in the history of China and beating out the previous record-holder The Battle at Lake Changjin, which topped out at US$802 million. The film also beat the US$936.7 million that Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens made in North America, snatching the record for the most money ever made by a single movie in a single market. The China box office has hit US$2.14 billion, which is up 418.9 percent over the same period of 2024, a remarkable level of traction for the box office.

Naman Ramachandran, Variety

Restaurants

The National Restaurant Association, which fights for the constitutional right to bear wings, projects that the industry will reach $1.5 trillion in sales in 2025 and that employment in food service will reach 15.9 million. The industry as a whole is in a constant state of death and rebirth. As of last year, 4 in 10 restaurants were unprofitable and 53 percent of restaurant operators were still walking around with pandemic-related debt. The vast majority of restaurants are prioritizing increasing in-person visits, which tend to have way better margins compared to delivery.

Sam Danley, QSR Magazine

Einstein Ring

The new Euclid telescope operated by the European Space Agency spotted an exciting find right off the bat: an Einstein Ring. This is when a galaxy appears to have a ring around it but is, in fact, an extremely distorted image of a galaxy that (in a feat of cosmic serendipity) is directly behind the closer galaxy. It then appears (bent through gravitational lensing) as a ring around the nearer galaxy. The nearby galaxy, NGC 6505, is 590 light-years away, and the distorted galaxy is 4.4 billion light-years away. As it stands, only about 1,000 gravitational lenses are known, and only a tenth of them appear as the neat Einstein rings. Over the course of the six-year mission, Euclid is hoping to image 1 billion distant galaxies, with hopefully on the order of 100,000 new gravitational lenses among them.

Daniel Clery, Science

Romance Is Dead

The percentage of romance films in movies made has fallen sharply in the past several years, with IMDb data indicating that romance movies dropped from 34.8 percent of films released in 2000 to just 8.6 percent in the past year. Romance movies are a bit cyclical; they made up a large fraction of films released from the 1940s through the early 1960s before slipping substantially. They recovered gradually over the final three decades of the century, reaching a recent high in the early 2000s. Even romance as a subplot in other movies, such as action movies, is declining.

Stephen Follows, StephenFollows.com

I’m Doing Great

It is a fundamental attitude of the American people when assessing the economy that they themselves are doing just peachy, but it’s their neighbors and everyone else who’s struggling. Turns out, this bears out even when talking about their community. In a 2023 survey, 61 percent of respondents said that they had a favorable opinion of their local government, while just 22 percent had a favorable opinion of the federal government in Washington. A 2022 survey found that 52 percent think their local public schools are good while just 22 percent said as much nationally, and 74 percent said that their local news was very trustworthy but only 59 percent said the same of the national media. Crime is bad in the United States (63 percent) but very few say it’s bad where they are (17 percent). A new survey found that 69 percent of voters said elections in their community were well-run, while just 43 percent said the same about elections across the United States. It’s as if we’ve convinced ourselves that every other place in the country is a godforsaken hellhole, even if we’re doing good.

Jenn Hatfield, Pew Research Center

Core

A new study published in Nature Geoscience analyzed 168 pairs of earthquakes that happened between 1991 and 2023 in the remote South Sandwich Islands. They were picked up by sensors on the other side of the world, at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska and the Yellowknife Seismological Array in Canada’s Northwest Territories. The goal was to intuit the current topography of Earth’s core, as the earthquakes were paired based on their similar positions to the core. This allowed the researchers to compare and contrast, finding that the 5200C, 2500-kilometer long ball of iron is spinning, growing, speeding up, slowing down and seeing lots of distortions over time. Some areas were seen rising or falling up to 1 kilometer over the course of a few years, meaning that the core itself has similar kinds of activity to the surface of the Earth itself. The core has its own landslides and volcanoes in the regions where the inner core meets the outer core.

Hannah Richter, Science

Shanghai

The Port of Shanghai processed 5 million containers in January, a record month following a year in which 50 million containers moved through the port. Shanghai’s port is the first in the world to do so. The particularly busy January was the result of a number of factors, such as Chinese exporters seeking to get their goods into the United States ahead of potential tariffs and get them shipped ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday. The tariff question could have a pretty massive impact on the volume of goods leaving China for the U.S., which reached $525 billion last year. Bloomberg estimated that an additional 10 percent tariff could make it unviable to ship 40 percent of Chinese goods to the U.S.

Bloomberg News

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