By Walt Hickey

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Shang-Chi

Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings surpassed Black Widow to become the domestic highest-grossing film of the pandemic, with last weekend’s $13.3 million bringing it to a total of $196.5 million in the United States and Canada. Globally, the movie’s made $363 million. Debuting this week was Dear Evan Hansen, an adaptation of a Broadway musical that made a disappointing $7.5 million, south of the $10 million it had been projected to bring in. The musical cost a reasonable $28 million to produce, so it’s not as apocalyptically bad like Cats was with a $6.5 million opening on a $100 million budget.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Toilet Paper

The toilet paper industry is worth $26 billion globally, with the average American using 140 rolls per year. While toilet paper — the ultimate one-time use paper product — would seem to be an ideal use for recycled paper, the reality is toilet paper is predominantly first-use timber. Alternatives made with recycled content have an aesthetic issue, namely that for toilet tissue to be made from recycled paper it’s tough to get that lily-white color that consumers demand, for now.

Anne Quito, Quartz

No Time To Wait

Demand for the forthcoming James Bond film No Time To Die in the United Kingdom is approaching Avengers: Endgame levels, according to exhibitors, and the film is seen to be Britain’s big chance to revive its box office. The movie is expected to appear on 700 screens across the U.K. and many exhibitors will be playing Bond on every screen they’ve got: Cineworld O2 in London plans 50 showings a day, Vue Cinemas in west London plans 25 showings a day, and many exhibitors are planning for one screening every 15 minutes.

Alex Ritman, The Hollywood Reporter

Do You Remember

September by Earth, Wind & Fire mentions the date of September 21, and after years of Demi Adejuyigbe videos and the magic the internet works with memetic dates, the most recent observation of September 21 saw the song log 1.5 million streams on the date, up from 377,000 a week prior — the song usually ballparks 350,000 to 450,000 streams a day — and up 200,000 streams from September 21, 2020. Despite coming out in 1978, September sold 2,500 copies on September 21, 2021, up from the typical average of 300 per day. If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to do a Sufjan-style “write a song about every single date of the year” challenge in the hopes of scoring a song that still moves 300 copies a day in six decades.

Augusta Saraiva, Bloomberg

Tony

Congratulations to Aaron Tveit, who won a Tony Award last night for his role in Moulin Rouge! The Musical. Tveit was the sole nominee in a typically stacked category for best actor in a leading role in a musical, a pandemic-era nomination fluke related to the seriously limited number of eligible productions for the 2019-20 season, which was honored at the ceremony. All was not assured for Tveit, who still had to secure 60 percent of the vote to actually win the Tony.

Kimberly Nordyke, The Hollywood Reporter

Catalogs

Lots of North American paper mills converted from printing and writing paper to cardboard. This was done to meet the explosive pandemic-era demand for ecommerce, but it’s had consequences that are now rippling through the printing business. Some 2.5 million metric tons of capacity that previously went to paper, one-fifth of 2019’s levels, are offline since the start of last year. Making things worse is there’s little help coming from abroad, with imports of paper and paperboard down 9.7 percent last year. As a result, some 100 million catalogs will not be printed this year in time for the holidays. This is a disaster because if not for undesired William Sonoma catalogs how the heck am I supposed to kill flies, alumni magazines? Cable bills? Good Housekeeping?

Marcy Nicholson and Amelia Pollard, Bloomberg

XXX-L Feral Hogs Within III-V Mins

Italy’s main agricultural lobby estimates there are over 2 million wild boars in Italy, creatures that have lately been caught sacking Rome. There’s an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 of them in city parks in the region of Lazio, which surrounds Rome, and lots of them do a Visigoth Special and march on the streets of the Eternal City to the dismay of the Romans. The head of Lazio’s parks wants to up the annual cull of the boars from 700 every two years to 1,000 a year to bring things under control, which is pretty much the best news in prosciutto since the development of salt.

Trisha Thomas, The Associated Press

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