Good Morning Brew Daily Show, I'm Neil Fryman, and I'm Toby Howell. Today, Ancient Rome and the Land of Oz take center stage in a heavyweight battle at the box office. Then China has a problem that Americans can't even fathom too many miles of high-speed rail. It's Friday, November 22nd. Let's ride.
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Check out shop.morningbrew.com to get your wealth planner today or click the link in the description of today's show. Now, a word from our sponsor, Yahoo Finance. Neil, you want to know the first sign that I'm growing up and taking my financial health a little more seriously? When I type Yahoo into the search bar, fantasy football isn't the first thing that comes up anymore. Now, Yahoo Finance is the default search result. Well, that might be more of an indictment of your fantasy team than your newfound financial acumen.
No, it's not that. I am eight and three and tied for first. Thank you very much. But it's just become habit at this point to head over to Yahoo Finance each morning after we finish the show to start catching up on the day's business news. It really does become part of your routine very quickly because you don't need to go anywhere else to get a sense of what's going on. You can keep track of market moves in your portfolio, checking with top analysts and sea headlines relevant to you all in one place.
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The two pieces of bread making up a delicious box office sandwich collide today when wicked and gladiator two make their widespread theatrical debuts. In the aftermath of the box office in cultural phenomenon that was barbinheimer, the internet was quick to make a portmanteau out of this pairing of tentpole projects in the hopes of rekindling some of its predecessors, glory, dubbed, glicked or a wickiator, if you're a man of taste, the marketing departments of both
Movies are hopeful that audiences will come to embrace the tongue-in-cheek pairing like they did with Barbie and Oppenheimer. I am certain that this is going to be the biggest Thanksgiving the industry has ever seen. Jordan Holman and executive at Phoenix Theaters told the AFP. Even if you look at just one half of the duo, it's clear this is going to be a big weekend. Wicked is already the biggest film in Phoenix Theaters' 24-year history in terms of presales, pacing 63%
ahead of Barbie, which ended up grossing $1.4 billion in total. It also helps that the two films compliment each other rather than compete for the same audience, like Barbie before Wicked Movie Goaters are likely to skew female, while Gladiator is after that Oppenheimer older male audience. Still,
To take down Barb and Heimer, Glickit is going to have to defy gravity and I am so sorry for that. Barbie and Oppenheimer open to 245 million combined in North America, while forecasts have the two movies that make up Glickit opening to 165 million.
Yes, but I have faith that one plus one plus Elphaba plus some honoring gory can equal three much like barman. Hire last summer Hollywood does need some magic to happen once again. I mean, you did have a pretty profitable summer this past year with stuff like Deadpool versus Wolverine inside out too. They performed very well, but 2024 still a ways away from those pre pandemic numbers. The first five months of the year were kind of just
hampered by some pretty thin release schedules. We're still recovering from the Hollywood strikes, and then also there's still some hangover from the pandemic as well. The fall was full of duds as well. I mean Joker 2 flopped so hard that no one ever spoke about it. Again, fly me to the moon, which I didn't even know was a movie. It was starring Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson. It cost $100 million to make. It grossed $10 million. How much of that was their salaries?
Yeah, I literally didn't see a single marketing material for this movie, and yet it's starring these big people. Furiosa Mad Max didn't do very well, which is very sad to me because I love that movie. So the movie industry, even though it's had some hits here and there, is still hoping for another barbenheimer-esque moment.
Yeah, we're still pacing 11% below last year's levels. And I'm very curious about Wicked specifically because musicals have really not performed well at the box office at all in the past few years. There have been a ton of flops. The same director who's doing Wicked, John Chu, did In The Heights, which is a total flop, even though it was a solid movie. Dear Evan Hansen, Cats, The Color Purple, it got to the point where musicals were not even advertising themselves
as musicals. You had Wonka, which was a musical. People are probably thinking, I had no idea that was a musical. And Mean Girls, those came out last year to the point where the marketing was not focused on their musicals. Now, I don't think Wicked is a different story because it is the best-selling Broadway show of all time, $1.4 billion in ticket sales.
Everyone knows it's a musical. They're leaning into that and hoping that they can tap into the fervent fandom that Wicked has among millennials and certain Gen Z since it came out on Broadway in 2003 as just an absolute cultural phenomenon to drive movie ticket sales.
I mean, I'm pretty bullish because I went to a friend's giving party last night. There were 20 people there that put on Wicked or defined gravity. I had never seen anything like it. It was like I was at the show. Everyone hit every single note. Honestly, everyone was just incredible singers, but it does show that Griffith has on a certain audience. But it really needs this movie to do well because Universal has invested a lot of money into this. Not only does Wicked part one have a $150 million budget,
They also have already signed up for the second part of the story, which is an additional $150 million. So that's $300 million at a minimum right there plowed into two movies. So they do need this to do well to recoup some of its investment. And then on the other side, Gladiator 2 was also just an extremely expensive movie, $250 million to produce $100 million to promote. So it is already $350 million in the whole. So both these studios, Paramount and Universal need these movies to do well.
And I think one sign that they might do well is that the reviews have been generally positive. I don't think these are going to win any crazy awards, but the reviews are generally like, they will give you what you want. And, you know, Gladiator 2 has huge sandals to fill, you know, the original one best picture. But apparently it is perfectly good.
Here's the one wild card that I do want to mention. So we have Glickit in movie theaters this week. But next week, Disney's Moana 2 joins it. So someone needs to figure out how to combine all three of those movies. But I think you said we're pacing behind it 2023. Something tells me that
We are going to leap ahead of it in this last few weeks of the year. We need to talk about the it social media platform of the fall blue sky. The X rival has been growing like a weed, but can it meet the moment and truly break through? One thing's for sure. A lot more people are saying.
Hey there, Mr. Blue. It's so great to be with you. The site CEO J. Graber said more than one million people were joining Blue Sky every single day following the election, presumably a large chunk of whom decided to leave ex and owner Elon Musk behind. As of earlier this week, Blue Sky had topped 20 million users while daily users searched about while daily traffic searched about 500% in the U.S. What
even is blue sky. So I played around with it the other day and let me tell you it looks a lot like Twitter. In fact, you may not even notice any difference until you start scrolling. That is blue sky says it's differentiator is its personalization opportunities that let you curate your own social media experience.
It has essentially three made feeds, one that shows you the accounts you follow, one that shows what your friends follow, and a third discover feed that resembles more of the algorithmically curated experiences from other platforms. But there are even more ways to customize from there. Toby, 20 million users is a lot more than Blue Sky had just a few weeks ago, but well, well short of the hundreds of millions that X, Metas, Threads, TikTok, and other giants have. What does Blue Sky need to do to keep up the momentum?
It really just has to keep showing how it's differentiated from these platforms because Blue Sky does have a few wedges that it's using to chip away at some of these incumbent platforms. One, people are pretty disillusioned with X right now, especially in the post election period because so much of the feed has shifted to politics. So they are down to consider alternatives where they might be served some other fair. Also, there's the decentralized, this open source angle. Some people really want to have
more control or self-hosted data and content, be a little bit more in charge of their data. And then three, it's just a little milder over there. I mean, a little bit more Mickey Mouse Funhouse compared to X's, I mean, call it like X's little shop of horse or something like that. So all of these factors are combining two
Maybe one thing really pulls you over, maybe another thing, but you see this kind of widespread appeal that it's having to chip away at excess dominance. Okay. So how is it going to make money? What is this business actually like? Well, one thing to know about blue sky is that it just has 20 employees. So they are working around the clock right now to handle all of these new users and make sure their site doesn't
glitch, which it has a little bit. So not a lot of overhead, but the problem is they don't really have a long-term business plan. I mean, if the CEO went in front of Shark Tank and the sharks were like, okay, let's hear your business plan. How many sales do you have? How do you plan to make money? They would not have a good answer for that. They don't do ads. They're not selling their data to train AI, and that has been a big advertising point for them. They say they're going to roll out a subscription
premium plan for certain users, but they don't really have a long-term game plan to make money. It's kind of like, we'll figure it out as we go along, which certain social media platforms have, but yeah, they don't really have a strong revenue plan at the moment.
Because part of the reason is the origin story of Blue Sky was that Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, kind of spun out Blue Sky because Jack Dorsey is a pretty big crypto guy. He's a pretty big proponent of open source technology, so he wanted to build an open source alternative to Twitter.
He didn't, it was really funded by Twitter originally. Once Elon took over, they did sever ties and raise some venture capital money. But yeah, there are definitely some question marks around that. Also just some growing pains that you have to go through. Content moderation decisions are always just a difficult thing. Blue Sky has a little bit of a decentralized approach to it where kind of the groups of people managing the servers make content moderation decisions. But at one point, when all those people are flying over, they're getting 42
1000 content moderation requests a day. Just again, there's only 20 people on the team total. So it has these growing pains. We'll see if it can go from 20 million to 100 million and potentially beyond. But if I'm long term betting, I think X is probably still going to have its entrenched following. And then I think you can't count out threads either because, you know, meta does this.
for years now. They're so good at growing, monetizing, and engaging big swaths of user show. I think Threads is still probably like the leader in the clubhouse to challenge X. I want you all to think back to the summer of 2016. Closer by the Chainsmokers was the number one song on the charts. And Pokemon Go was an absolute phenomenon. The game blended the real world with AR overlays, letting you hunt for your favorite pocket monsters in cities and countries across the globe. But while you were tracking down Charizard,
You were also unwittingly doing something else. Training an AI model. Pokemon goes developer Niantic. Recently announced it was cooking up what it calls a large geospatial model, which is basically an AI that can map geographical locations around the world that haven't been physically captured in person. For instance, Niantic says that if you're standing in front of a church, it can only see the front. Its model can figure out what the rest of the building might look like based on thousands of other data points the AI has gathered.
The reason why its model has so many data points to work with is that Pokemon Go players have been dutifully walking around with their phones out capturing roughly one million scanned locations each week. So, Neil, the vision for something like this is to support pretty much any project that needs to be able to position itself in the physical world. So, think future augmented reality products or robots, maybe even weapons systems.
And that's part of the reason why we're talking about this story. It is hard to imagine anyone running around looking for Squirtle in 2016 really knew what their data would eventually be used for. For sure. I mean, they have an incredible data set in that they say distinguishes it from the other physical data that you can, the mapping data that comes out. I mean, Google, we've all seen Google's cars run around for Google Maps, but they're
restricted to roads. Meanwhile, Pokemon Go players are going more comprehensively out of roads and into forests. I don't even know where people are looking for Charizard, but it is kind of interesting to see AI models go from text-based to the physical world. We know that Chachi BT and other text-based models have been trained on YouTube, videos, books, articles, the internet, and this one is trained on the physical world. I think
We'll see how the response to this is because people have been playing Pokemon Go for eight years, not necessarily knowing that they've signed their data away to train an AI model that they have no idea what is going to be used for. Right. And it was a little split because users, some users were aware that this was the direction Pokemon Go was heading. But on the one hand, you're right.
No one really reads data collection in terms of service. So of course, like the average player probably doesn't know this. But on the other hand, you snoop through some of these Reddit communities and you see that people are saying like, yes, we have known that this is part of neonics business model. So maybe it's not as big a deal as you might expect here. I do just want to dig into Pokemon Go's business a little bit because I remember when it peaked in 2016, like it was a cultural phenomenon. People were running around.
I remember I was in Milwaukee at the time. So I was like, there's a blast always down by the beach. And like the mass of humanity, you saw going down there. It truly was a moment in time, but you just step back. It brought in $560 million in revenue last year. So even though it is faded from that cultural relevance, still an absolute behemoth, it's making half a billion dollars in revenue to this day. Overall, one app analytics company has estimates that it's gross, nearly $8 billion in lifetime revenue.
still just an absolute behemoth. And if you believe what Niantic is doing with its AI data, that just monetizing Pokemon Go users is, you know, for playing the game, it's not going to be their main line of business. They're going to do something crazy with this AI. They possibly could sell it. So that just might be a secondary revenue stream for them. So this company just under the radar is kind of insane. Up next, it is a stock of the week, a dog of the week time.
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Welcome to Stock of the Week, Dog of the Week, the Friday segment where Toby and I pick one stock that will have its vengeance and another that was not entertained. I won the pre-show naval battle at the Coliseum, so I get to go first. And my Stock of the Week is MicroStrategy, a company you might not have heard of, but could soon become a household name.
And that's because MicroStrategy is inextricably linked to the fortunes of Bitcoin. The stock shut up 17% this week in tandem with Bitcoin's surge to join the list of the top 100 publicly traded US companies by market cap. It's even worth more than the American corporate giants like Nike and Dell. So why are MicroStrategy and Bitcoin tighter than Trek and Donkey?
It wasn't always this way. MicroStrategy was a ho-hum software company until 2020 when its co-founder Michael Saylor made what was then a seemingly bizarre decision. He spent $250 million of the company's money buying Bitcoin.
The entire business world was like, bro, what are you doing? But he stood by it saying that he went down a crypto rabbit hole like all of us during the pandemic and regretted not buying Bitcoin sooner. Fast forward four years and MicroStrategy has transformed into what it calls a Bitcoin Treasury company. It now owns 331,200 Bitcoin worth over $30 billion at today's prices, making it the largest corporate holder of the cryptocurrency.
Toby, this was a crazy bet by Sailor, but it seems to have paid off. The stock has gained nearly 500% this year. MicroStrategy is just such a weird company. In the days before Bitcoin ETFs became widely available, MicroStrategy was seen as almost this proxy for trading Bitcoin. If you wanted to go down the avenue of traditional finance, maybe you didn't want to mess with your own wallet, you could just buy MicroStrategy because it more or less tracked the price of Bitcoin.
It has kind of divorced from that at this point because Bitcoin ETFs are widely available now, but you look at the price of microshazis up 500% this year. It is outpacing Bitcoin. So they have this virtuous cycle where it sells all this common stock to buy more Bitcoin as the stock market value continues to rise. Even more stock can be converted to buy even more Bitcoin. So as long as everyone's kind of
down with this virtuous cycle. It is a virtuous cycle, and it does push the company's stock price up. It does kind of drive the price of Bitcoin at this point as well. So what happens though when the price of Bitcoin goes down? That's the big question, Mark. So that's maybe when you see the stock chart return from its peak, but Bitcoin is still going up at this point.
Some think micro strategy is getting a little ahead of its skis in terms of its stock price. Citron Research, which is a short seller, disclosed a short position in micro strategy yesterday, which is why that 70% weekly gain wasn't even more. I think it dropped 16% yesterday after that short seller was like,
We're still bullish on Bitcoin, but we think MicroStrategy's 500% gain this year compared to Bitcoin's 130% gain is a little much. But MicroStrategy has just surged in just the past few weeks because they've disclosed even more Bitcoin purchases.
and announced their plans to buy even more, just selling more stock, selling more debt. They have a goal over the next three years of raising $42 billion in capital to buy more Bitcoin. So they're becoming very much a Bitcoin investment firm where they're not just using their own money to buy it. They're raising money from institutional investors to buy Bitcoin because they think they have a really good formula because as long as Bitcoin goes up, so does their stock price. I don't know if they do any sort of software anymore.
I think they do have a small software business at this point, but yeah, mostly Bitcoin. My dog of the week is Ford. The automaker announced this week it is cutting 4000 jobs from its European business, mostly coming from its operations in Germany and the UK.
It's not hard to guess why it's pulling back every car maker outside of China and Tesla have been struggling to sell electric vehicles. Consumer demand has remained tepid in governments across the globe are slashing EV subsidies, forcing automakers to make some tough strategic decisions.
So you continue to plow money into money losing EV plants and cars, or scale back at the risk of getting passed by others. For Ford, the riding was on the wall and recently paused production of its F-150 Lightning truck, a car that once had a weightless of over 200,000 because of lower than expected demand. So, Neil's Ford stock is essentially flat over the last week, but it's also flat over the past year as investors are left in this holding pattern as it tries to figure out this shift in strategy.
companies, automakers around the world have spent $300 billion on EV and battery production since 2016. GM itself has spent $35 billion. They thought this was going to be a massive industry pivot and they spent the money that would lead them there. Unfortunately, the consumers have just not responded in kind for various reasons. And that has made every single car EV that these companies sell unprofitable besides
Tesla. So they're just not making money on them. It's been a couple years now and they can't justify the investments that they've made. So it's not just forward slashing jobs. Pretty much we've seen job cuts announcements from pretty much every automaker in the past few weeks. Stellantis, General Motors and Nissan. We also know that the Volkswagen is pledging to.
to close down plants in Germany for the first time in its 87-year history, which has caused a sort of a political crisis there, and EVs just aren't selling, and the ones that are selling are Chinese.
Yeah, it is really a two-pronged thing where demand is not there, but then also this competition is just so massive with these cheap cars that are really amazing cars too, if you look at the consumer reaction to them coming out of China. Ford is blaming policy decisions at this point because their chief financial officer, John Lawler,
recently wrote a letter to the German government saying, what we lack in Europe and Germany is an unmistakable clear policy agenda to advance e-mobility. So they're still saying they're criticizing these decisions in Europe to roll back some of these EV subsidies. But you might just say like, hey, if you can't make this business model work without these subsidies, maybe you need to figure out a better business model.
This is not a story that we've talked about for the first time. It's not going to be a story that we've talked about for the last time either. These headwinds are still blowing. It still is very tough to make EV work in this current consumer environment. To close out the week, I'll ask you all a question. Is there such a thing as too much high speed rail?
At least in China, the answer might be yes. After building a crazy extensive high-speed rail network and plans to go even bigger, China's trains have become a giant money pit, the Wall Street Journal reports. The American mind can't comprehend this. Too much high-speed rail? All we've got is the Acela in the Northeast, a couple hundred miles of quasi-high-speed rail that seems to break down every week. China is a totally different story. In the last 12 years,
They've constructed nearly 30,000 miles of high-speed rail, enough to circle the globe one time over. It's one of the largest public works in human history, and it's also been extremely expensive. In the last five years alone, China has spent more than $500 billion on train tracks and stations while its railway operator, China State Railway Group, is nearing
$1 trillion of debt and liabilities per the journal. As the country's economy slows its population declines and people's living standard stagnate, we're wondering, is this the best use of our money? The problem is, is that this has been China's playbook for really decades now is the way you maintain economic growth and GDP growth in the country is through this massive infrastructure spending.
where you run into problems if you're spending that money on things that you don't really need anymore. I mean, reading this Wall Street Journal article, you see these stories of new high-speed rail stations being constructed in places with populations that, one, are rural, don't need it, two, they're shrinking. You go to these stations, they're beautiful, they're brand new, they're pristine, and there's like
four people in them. So it's gone to the point where they're doubling down on train lines too. Like they already have a line connecting one city to one city, one province to one province. And they're building a new one that shaves off two hours or something like that. So it is right now maybe building for the sake of building, which is causing all other sorts of problems because every dollar you allocate towards building high speed rail is a dollar. You don't allocate towards something else. So that is why people are taking a step back and saying, all right, maybe too much high speed rail here.
Yeah, there's one one pretty stark example of this. There's one rural county in inland China. That's about 700,000 people. So think about the county around Rochester, New York. Okay. That's about the same size. Well, it's got 12 high speed rail stations and a 40 mile radius. And the population there is declining. So yes, you're right. China, the state government there has pursued these trophy projects to
as a way to express their power and show the world that they have a lot of capacity and investment to build. But the general economy there is stagnating. People, there's not enough jobs. The property market has crashed. And the people are like, we want maybe a little more stimulus to spur consumer demand rather than these more high-level trophy projects that the government is pursuing. But yes, I think it was quite shocking to see
a place where there maybe is too much high speed rail from our perspective. Okay, let's wrap it up there. It's basically the weekend. You made it. Thanks so much for starting your mornings with us and have a wonderful Friday. Hope you get into something fun this weekend. For any questions, comments, or feedback, send an email to morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com. And if you're enjoying the podcast, don't forget to share it with someone or someone's in your life. For specific ideas, our muse Toby is here.
our news. I want you to share this podcast with someone you want to go to Wicked with and someone you want to go to Gladiator 2 with. Now, that might be the same person and if so, congrats on having a friend with such great range. But if it's two people, even better, my suggestion is put them both in the group chat.
and let them figure out and fight over who is getting the invite to what movie? Gladiator style. OK, let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Liu is our producer. Olivia Graham is our associate producer. Lottie Fiskis is our technical director. Billy Menino is on audio. Hair and makeup is sound asleep after going to the midnight premiere of Gladiator 2 at Lincoln Square, which apparently Paul Mescal attended. Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our show is a production of Morning Brew.
Great. So Daniel, I wish you all well.
