Numlock News: March 18, 2025 • Othello, Dog Man, Lumon Industries

By Walt Hickey

Drone Shows

Using large swarms of drones to create intricate performances and displays in the sky is a rapidly growing business, reaching a valuation of $339 million in 2023. The Middle East has a disproportionately large market, accounting for $41 million of that value — the average show in the region costs $112,250 and utilizes an average of 401 drones. The money is good for those who get in on it, with a 76 percent increase in the number of pilots of unmanned vehicles in the UAE, which have applications in mapping and surveying as well.

Amar Diwakar, Rest of World

Othello

The hottest writer on Broadway is William Shakespeare, with the new production of Othello starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal breaking records during its previews. The show grossed $2.8 million last week, more than any non-musical has made in a single week on Broadway. While Hamilton notoriously charged $998 for the best seats during the holidays, Othello charges the eye-watering price of $921 for the first 14 rows in the center orchestra and the first 2 rows in the front mezzanine, which is pretty much unheard of. Its average ticket price during its first week of previews was $361.90, more than double the second-priciest show.

Michael Paulson, The New York Times

Brackets

Warren Buffett has long imparted a wager and probability lesson, offering $1 million in the Berkshire Hathaway company basketball tournament if any of them correctly call the first round of March Madness. This year he’s tweaking the odds — he’s getting old and wants to give someone a million dollars at some point — and announced that the prize will be awarded if an entrant picks the winners for at least 30 of the 32 first-round games. This could happen: in 2017, five entrants correctly predicted the winner of 31, only to miss out on the million by 1. In 2019, out of all the official brackets submitted in the NCAA’s contest, 3,080 chose correctly in 30 out of 32 cases. However, in the upset-heavy 2021 bracket, just one out of every 1,578,469 did.

Karen Langley, The Wall Street Journal

Graphic Novels

The data is in: while the sales of the top 20 graphic novels for adult readers were down 18 percent year over year, kids really cannot get enough of comics. Circana BookScan’s chart of the top 20 kids’ graphic novels in 2024 saw sales up 7 percent year over year. That said, one franchise really is responsible for this business: Dog Man by Dav Pilkey, the writer who accounted for 12 of the 20 entries on the list. The top-selling graphic novel of the year by far was Dog Man Vol 12: The Scarlet Shedder, which sold 1,273,926 copies. This was just over double the runner-up, Dog Man Vol. 13: Big Jim Begins, which sold 664,819 copies in the month of its release. That was followed by Cat Kid Comic Club 5: Influencers, Pilkey, Dog Man Vol. 11: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under The Sea and then at No. 5 The Baby-Sitters Club Vol. 15: Claudia and the Bad Joke, just one of two non-Pilkey comics in the top ten.

Brigid Alverson, ICV2

RTDs

Coca-Cola is continuing to run headlong into the alcohol business and will launch a vodka-based version of Minute Maid lemonade and pink lemonade with 5 percent ABV soon. This will expand the current batch of wine-based Minute Maid Spiked, which has included Blue Hawaiian and Strawberry Daiquiri flavors. Canned cocktails have been particularly successful lately when they actually contain spirits like vodka, not just ambiguous malt beverages with unclear alcohol origins. For instance, Surfside was the second best-selling canned cocktail with spirits last year, seeing 378 percent year-over-year growth. I, for one, look forward to when Coca-Cola just says screw it and returns to its origins — starting adding hard drugs to the soda again and selling it as a cure-all.

Chris Casey, Food Dive

Extended Stay

One interesting niche in the hotel business is dominated by Extended Stay America, a company that offers rooms at substantially cheaper prices than a typical hotel of their size, including kitchenettes for people working temporary jobs in new locations or undergoing life changes. Within the hotel industry, lots and lots of rivals are deeply envious of its success, and the likes of Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott and Wyndham have all attempted to replicate the business. One reason is that ESA’s 700 hotels require way less overhead than your typical hotel. Given the longer stays, rarer check-ins, higher occupancy (8 to 9 percentage points higher than usual) and ability to cut down turn-down service to a weekly basis, a standard 120-room location only needs 6 to 10 employees to operate, compared to hundreds at a comparably-sized full-service hotel.

Sean O’Neill, Skift

Lumon

The fictional corporation at the heart of the hit show Severance is Lumon Industries. As the show approaches the end of its second season and its popularity hits new highs, it’s become a pretty strange moment for the real-world companies that call themselves Lumen or Lumon. The show is successful enough that people visit the soulless filming location at the Bell Works complex in Holmdel, New Jersey, which is really saying something. Companies such as Lumen Technologies (a fiber-optic networking company in Louisiana), Lumen (which makes metabolic measurement devices) and Lumon Dental (a dentist near Detroit) have all been catching stray interest from fans of the program. A glazing company called Lumon even saw 200 job applications for a recently posted position in sales, about 4 times the usual volume.

Katie Deighton, The Wall Street Journal

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Numlock News: March 17, 2025 • Nintendo, Sphere, Illinois

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Sports

Last year, total ad spending on women’s sports jumped to $244.4 million, increased sharply from the $102.3 million spent the previous year — a 2.5 times increase. This comes not only from increased real estate — commercial airings were up 37 percent — but the increasing value of that real estate: dollar volume was up 139 percent in the period. One key engine of that jump has been women’s basketball, as the NCAA tournament final last year had the single largest audience for any basketball game aired on television since 2019.

Anthony Crupi, Sportico

Streaming Geographies

One strange idiosyncrasy of the music business’ shift to the streaming model is that the worth of a song’s streams depends on where it happens. This means that the nationality of the ear listening can have some pretty significant reverberations for artists, especially artists who come from countries with low royalties but who manage to make it big in other places in the world. The U.S., for instance, has a pretty high royalty rate. If an act can make it big here, they can make bank even if the artists are based in other countries. For example, a Nigerian act enjoys domestic success by drawing from a pot where a Spotify subscription goes for $0.84 per month, but making even a slight appeal in the U.S. or U.K. (where subscribers pay $11.99 a month) means they can make great money and enjoy great buying power with that at home. The buying power is another thing; your standard 0.35 cents per stream royalty gets you 2.8 cents of buying power in Nigeria, 1.2 cents in Indonesia and 0.95 cents in Colombia.

Glenn Peoples, Billboard Pro

Sphere

I met a traveler from an antique land,
who said — “A gigantic, immersive LED Sphere
stands in the desert. Near it, by The Sands,
wait, sorry, I guess it’s The Venetian now,
there’s a concert venue that’s pretty dope,
I think that its builder also owns the Knicks.
It yet survives, but I see it less on Instagram,
like the U2 show was cool but who’s in it now;
And on the newswire, these words appear:
Sphere Entertainment: “quarterly net loss of $126 million
look on my RSN, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing but Sphere remains. Round the decay
of that colossal Wreck, MSG Networks,
forbearance deadlines stretch not far away.”

Kurt Badenhausen, Sportico

Seal on a Bedsheet

Illinois voted on a proposed set of new state flags to replace its current flag, which was presumably put together the night before it was due by the parents of whichever guy had to decide on a flag. A long-derided “seal on a bedsheet” flag — or SOB — won after a process of narrowing down the alternatives to 10 new finalists, 2 previous flags and the current flag. The headline news is that the existing flag won with 166,000 out of 385,000 votes. The real news is that if you were specifically trying to not replace your flag, “create a vote where the established well-known flag is up against twelve possible replacements and all it takes is a plurality to win” is exactly how I would design an election to ensure that you keep the flag. Indeed, the proof of dissatisfaction with the current flag is clear, given that 219,000 people voted against it, albeit for a myriad of other options. At the very least, the great state of Illinois has yet again given election nerds another example to bring up in their social choice theory discussions of how not to run an election.

John O’Connor, The Associated Press

Hype Hits Reality

A new survey monitored shifting perceptions around AI in just four months. In a poll taken at the end of November/beginning of December, 26 percent of respondents were hopeful about artificial intelligence, 24 percent were excited, 36 percent were skeptical and just 11 percent were overwhelmed. Well, after four months of this stuff, the bloom is off the rose: 24 percent are hopeful (down 2 points), 19 percent are excited (down 5 points), 44 percent are skeptical (up 8 points) and 17 percent are overwhelmed (up 6 points), which isn’t really the direction you want those numbers to go.

Jamie Ballard, YouGov

Novocaine

A tough weekend at the box office; despite 5 new releases, total receipts came to just $52 million, the worst of the year so far. This pushes year-to-date revenues 5 percent behind 2024 and 38 percent behind where they were in 2019, not exactly what an industry that had circled 2025 as the big comeback year was hoping for. Next weekend Snow White is coming out, so it’ll be the last $50 millionish weekend until probably after August. Winning the weekend was the action comedy Novocaine which made $8.7 million, followed by Mickey 17 with $7.6 million and Black Bag by Steven Soderbergh with $7.5 million.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Switch 2

The release of the Nintendo Switch 2 is poised to be a major driver of gaming in a year that’s already chock full of drivers. Analysts anticipate that Nintendo is going to make a play for the single largest game console launch ever. They anticipate that Nintendo will release the console in June with a first-day launch inventory of 6 million to 8 million units. For perspective, the 2 most recent PlayStations each moved 4.5 million units in their first quarter, and the Switch sold 2.7 million units in its first month. The real question comes down to price, as the new chip in the Switch 2 probably costs $130 to $150, well above the $80 that the Nvidia chip in the Switch cost.

Takashi Mochizuki, Bloomberg

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Numlock News: March 14, 2025 • Mountain, Minecraft, Manga

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Manga

Total manga sales came in at 704 billion yen (US$4.65 billion) in 2024. While that’s a really strong sales number, there’s a whole lot of shifts going on behind the scenes. For one, digital manga made up 73 percent of Japan’s domestic sales of manga in 2024, which is 20 percentage points higher than in 2019. This has had some reverberations across the industry, not the least of which is an 8.6 percent decline in print manga sales last year. Of the 15,000 new manga volumes published last year, 37 percent were digital first. Sales are expected to plateau sooner rather than later, at which point it’s expected that sales within the Japanese domestic market will begin to fall, at which point the industry will have to make up for those lost sales in the international market. That is one reason that (as of just this January) all four major manga publishers have launched a digital manga platform in the United States.

Richardson Handjaja, ICV2

Antarctica

An international team of scientists led by the British Antarctic Survey has completed Bedmap3. It assembled 6 decades of survey data of the continent (acquired by planes, ships, satellites and sleds) into the single most detailed map of the land beneath the 27.17 million cubic kilometer ice sheet. One fun find is a new spot with the thickest overlying ice. Previously, this was thought to be Astrolabe Basin in Adélie Land, but the new data puts it in Wilkes Land over an as-yet-unnamed canyon where the ice is 4,757 meters thick.

British Antarctic Survey

Homestake

From 1958 to 1990, The Homestake Mining Company processed millions of tons of uranium ore at a site in New Mexico, piping 21 million tons of uranium mill tailings into two unlined earthen pits in the process. Over the decades, this decayed into radon, and contamination seeped into four aquifers in the region. In 2022, after years of weighing what to do, the company announced that cleaning the groundwater just wasn’t feasible. Instead, it would buy up and demolish the homes inside of a 6,100-acre area (455 of 523 so far) and hand it over to the Department of Energy sometime around 2035. One issue? There is a fifth aquifer, the San Andres-Glorieta, which is the last remaining source of clean water in the region. At this time, there are 3 uranium plumes seeping slowly towards it, only held at bay by a hydraulic barrier that has used around 14 billion gallons of water since 1977.

Alicia Inez Guzmán, Searchlight New Mexico

SPC700

A component of the Super Nintendo console called the SPC700 is, in a deeply interesting twist, getting faster with age. The SPC700 is a coprocessor that Sony made for Nintendo and was supposed to have a digital signal processing rate of 32,000hz. However, ceramic resonators can run at higher frequencies when subjected to temperature changes, and in 2007 designers noticed that some Super Nintendos emulated at a frequency of 32,040Hz. This is important, especially because people want to emulate and compete for speedrun records on the games and take a shot at the history books on the systems. But, get this, an administrator of a tool-assisted speedrun bot has flagged that SPC700s are now running faster with age and possibly with use; the fastest in a set clocked at 32,182 Hz.

Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media

Dogs

China’s population has declined for three consecutive years, and the marriage rate fell by a fifth in 2024, hitting the lowest level in half a century. While China relaxed the one-child policy a decade ago, a baby boom has not materialized, and the market for baby formula in China dropped 21 percent from 2021 to 2024. Over the same period of time, however, demand for pets has boomed, and Goldman Sachs projects that pets will outnumber toddlers 2-to-1 by 2030. That means that the pet economy is poised to boom, on track to jump 40 percent by 2030, to 352 billion yuan (US$49 billion).

Karoline Kan, Bloomberg

Mount Spurr

A volcano in Alaska has drawn the attention of researchers at the Alaska Volcano Observatory who believe that recent gas emissions from Mount Spurr would indicate that new magma is forming under the volcano. This means an eruption is likely (though not certain) to occur within the next few weeks or months. Mount Spurr is 80 miles west of Anchorage and had eruptions in 1953 and 1992, the latter of which shut down Anchorage’s airport for 20 hours. The likeliest scenario would be an eruption from an opening 2 miles away from Spurr’s summit on Crater Peak. However, that could pose a risk to those within 20 miles of the volcano and create sandstorm-like visibility problems in Anchorage.

Wesley Early, Alaska Public Media

Yearn for the Mines

A Minecraft Movie hits cinemas on April 4, and it’s currently tracking to a solid $58 million opening in North America. Video games have become hot sources of Hollywood inspiration whether it’s hits like the Sonic franchise or the Mario franchise. Given its status as the single best-selling video game franchise of all time, studio bigwigs looking to get teens back into the cinema consider Minecraft an incredibly desirable adaptation.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

This week in the (unlocked!) Sunday edition, I spoke to John Adkins, who writes the outstanding newsletter

Animation Obsessive

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Numlock Sunday: John Adkins on what the Flow win means

I love this newsletter, it’s a personal must-read of mine, and last week following the thrilling win for Flow at the Academy Awards I loved the post the Animation Obsessive team wrote about it and diving deep into just why this is such a milestone in the field of animation. We spoke about how the European funding model differs from the American one, why it’s so remarkable that an Academy Award winning movie was made in Blender, and what this means for animation.

Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.

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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: MCU · Fanfiction · User Magazine · Reentry · Panda Dunks · Net Zero · Spiraled · On The Edge · Luggage · The Editors · Can’t Get Much Higher · Solitaire ·

Posting Nexus · Memorabilia · Drainage Tile · Desert Surfing · Music · Congestion Pricing · Underwater Sound · Hunts Point · Queer Olympics · Energy Drinks · Baseball Movies · Trillion Trees · Risk Aversion ·

Sunday Edition Archives: 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018