By Walt Hickey

Experiential Theater

Hypnosis Mic: Division Rap Battle is a new movie out in Japan that grossed an impressive $5 million across just 85 cinemas. The movie comes with an interesting hook: it’s an interactive movie with multiple branching paths that the audience votes on with a mobile phone app. This has attracted lots of repeat viewing — over 30 percent of the viewers return for another go — and each viewing lasts 100 to 106 minutes out of over 5 hours of available footage and 48 different possible versions. The movie tells the story of six battle rap teams featuring some of the leading hip-hop groups in the country. The tech is reportedly not all that hard, with the distributor supplying a small box the size of two PlayStations that gets plugged into the internet and the movie theater’s projector.

Patrick Brzeski, The Hollywood Reporter

NYT Cooking

The app NYT Cooking, the flagship core product of a New York-based gaming and media company, drew in 456 million visits last year. Its YouTube channel’s views were also up 72 percent, and it reached 4.3 million hours of watchtime. Cooking now has a repository of 24,000 recipes and is the No. 1 cooking app on Apple’s app store. It has ascended to the top of the food pyramid (no, not that one) at the same moment that the previous king of the space, Food Network, is beset by declines related to the demise of the cable business model. Cooking has also outpaced Epicurious following its decline. While they publish 75 recipes a month, the classics are the (pardon the pun) meat and potatoes of the enterprise — the most popular recipe of 2024 was a bolognese sauce that’s over 30 years old. It’s the jewel in a crown that contains such luminaries as Wordle, The Athletic and evidently some kind of local daily news.

Hannah Miller, Bloomberg

Campaign Finance

A genie we let out of a bottle several years ago called “campaign finance” has attracted more and more attention from governments eyeing potential reforms. Not the federal one — for god’s sake, don’t be foolish — but in the states, there have been 319 bills pertaining to campaign finance issues across 45 states (and Guam) from January 1 through March. States like New York, Hawaii, Virginia, Minnesota and Arizona lead the pack. Most of the state-level bills are currently pending in legislative committee, but a few have actually managed to advance, including several in Virginia that show genuine promise given the state’s historical disposition toward, say, using campaign funds for personal uses. Many of the bills are about allowing the use of campaign funds for childcare expenses, which has been the case at the federal level since 2018, and hopes to facilitate more parents running for office.

Dave Levinthal, OpenSecrets

Daredevil

The two-episode premiere of Daredevil: Born Again is a hit, the most-viewed Disney+ series debut this year, hitting 7.5 million views in its first five days. That number is a bit less than Agatha All Along but the first-day view time is behind only that of Echo. It’s also impressive because it’s the first truly mature-rated Disney+ series and the first MCU television series since the Netflix era. Speaking of which, the original three seasons of the show saw their viewership pop 153 percent week over week since the premiere. Daredevil, one of my personal favorite superheroes, always gets bogged down in the stuff he’s got going on, making a mess of any adaptation that tries to adapt the entirety of his character. By which I mean, Daredevil is a street-level vigilante, the orphan son of a boxer killed by the mob for refusing to throw a fight, who uses his powers of echolocation and his intense training as a ninja to fight evildoers in Hell’s Kitchen ranging from organized crime to low-level crime and also ninjas. He is intensely Catholic, has a strong sense of justice, and oh right by day he’s a lawyer (I forgot to mention that he’s a really talented attorney) fighting corruption and also ninjas. Speaking of which, he’s most commonly romantically connected with an anti-heroic ninja, also complicated. He predominantly throws down with Kingpin and Bullseye while dressed as a devil (like I said, Catholic) and exploring morally ambiguous themes. Wait, also, he’s blind, I forgot to mention that part, that’s also important. Like I mentioned: the guy’s got a lot of stuff going on, it’s extremely funny when any given adaptation feels the need to cram all of it in there.

Robert Steiner, Variety

Dams

A new study makes the provocative and controversial argument that we may be underestimating the total population of the world — official records have been found to systemically underestimate the actual number of people living in rural areas. The study’s evidence for this claim is data from 307 dam projects in 35 countries completed from 1980 to 2010. It looked at the number of reportedly resettled people in areas displaced by new reservoirs and compared it to major population datasets of those areas. The most accurate estimates undercounted the actual number of people by 53 percent on average, while the worst estimates were 84 percent off. Their conclusion goes so far as to say that the actual world population is significantly higher than the official U.N. estimate of 8.2 billion. However, demographers think the study has erred by misapplying older grid-level population estimates, arguing about the quality of the data, the bulk of which comes from just a few countries.

Chris Stokel-Walker, New Scientist

Slugging

In Washington D.C., starting around the oil crisis in the 1970s, an informal ad hoc system of carpooling emerged called “slugging.” A Virginia driver willing to put up with a few extra passengers commuting into D.C. would pick up some companions at designated areas and avail themselves of the free, speedy H.O.V. lanes into D.C., massively cutting down their commute time. The pandemic and subsequent work-from-home put a damper on the practice, but new in-office requirements have reinvigorated slugging in D.C. This is especially prudent given that the 2024 INRIX traffic scorecard estimated that DMV area drivers lost an average of 62 hours in congestion over the year.

Corrie Driebusch, The Wall Street Journal

Directed

An indictment in the Southern District of New York charges a Hollywood director with wire fraud, money laundering and several counts of transactions from illegal activity related to an alleged ripoff of Netflix. According to the allegations, Carl Erik Rinsch got a $11 million Netflix deal to finish a television series for them but used the funds on personal expenses and investments, which went pretty badly, declining by half. Rinsch then won big in crypto and options trading, spending that cash on Rolls-Royces, divorce lawyers and legal representation to sue Netflix for more money. The civil matter was settled — an arbitrator ruled the director owed Netflix about $9 million last year — but now the criminal matter will proceed. At the end of the day, it could be worse for Netflix; depending on how things go, there could be a true crime series they could soon produce.

Winston Cho, The Hollywood Reporter

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