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Today's Topics
Happy Friday everyone, today we explore:
- Disney was king of the box office last year, can they crush it again in 2020?
- The data from flight PS752, that crashed in Iran earlier this week.
- A couple of the Democratic candidates are spending big to try and get in the White House, is it working?
The numbers behind the numbers:
3 charts, 786 words, 4 mins 40 seconds to read.
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Disney executives probably felt like they were living their own fairytale in 2019, after churning out hit after hit at the box office. Aladdin, Frozen 2, Toy Story 4, Captain Marvel, The Lion King and of course - the biggest of them all - Avengers: Endgame all grossed over a billion at the box office. Oh and the latest Star Wars is about to cross that mark as well.
Under the leadership of Bob Iger, Disney has gone from that cool company that you loved in your childhood (think theme parks and cute movies) to a cultural and content behemoth that is hard to live without.
During Iger's tenure, Disney has acquired Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and - most recently - 20th Century Fox. There's a certain calculated coldness to the operation, squeezing every dime out of every franchise (nobody asked for 19 different Marvel movies) - and yet people seem to be genuinely entertained by each and every one. After all, the box office is notoriously fickle, you can't just stuff a bunch of celebrities in catsuits and expect to sell tickets.
Will the fairytale continue in 2020?
This year Disney won't have the Avengers or the Star Wars franchises to anchor their content - but that doesn't mean they haven't got a huge line up coming out. This year you can expect a live action version of Mulan, an adaptation of the Artemis Fowl books and of course more superhero movies. It probably won't match 2019, but we doubt they'll have a bad year.
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When news first surfaced of the plane crash in Iran, few onlookers fully believed that the tragedy, which claimed 176 lives, was totally unrelated to the missile strikes that had happened just a few hours earlier.
The latest intelligence from the western world has suggested the plane was indeed hit by a surface-to-air missile, with video footage emerging that appear to show a plane being hit by a missile.
That version of events is confirmed by altitude data from the plane. After rising steadily over the first 3 minutes of its flight, the altitude data suddenly stopped recording abruptly. In the event of an engine failure you might have expected to see the altitude begin to drop.
What does Iran say?
Iran continues to deny that the plane was hit by a missile, with the head of civil aviation in Iran saying that it is "absolutely impossible" for Tehran to have shot the plane down.
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Can you win public favour just by spending big on advertising?
We've compiled the latest spending numbers from fivethirtyeight and the 2020 Campaign Tracker to get a sense of which of the Democratic Presidential candidates are spending big - and whether it's helping them to win favour. The short answer? It's not.
Since joining the race at the start of November, Michael Bloomberg has been burning cash at an unprecedented rate. So far he's spent over $100m on TV ads alone - and more than $130m when you include Google and Facebook spending.
Despite his big budget, the latest polls peg his support at a little under 6%. That means he's spending more than $20m for every 1% of support he's garnered so far. That's a lot, but he's still faring better than rival Tom Steyer (also a billionaire), who has splurged almost as much... but still hasn't cracked support of more than 2.2%.
At the other end of the spectrum are the front runners. Biden, Sanders and Warren are the clear leaders in the polls for now, and all of them have spent considerably less. You might be able to expect a few more ads from Bernie though after his campaign raised a massive $34.5m in the fourth quarter of 2019, from 1.8 million different donors.
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Data Snacks
1) Apple's market cap hit over $1.35 trillion this week. That's 16x more valuable than Tesla, 8.5x more valuable than McDonald's and about 52x more valuable than Twitter.
2) A man has edited himself and his girlfriend into Sleeping Beauty as part of a proposal that's going viral this week, with 2m views in just over 24 hours on YouTube.
3) Almost 1500 of you clicked on just one of our data snacks from Wednesday's newsletter - the one about a model selling nudes to help the Aus bushfires. Well done everyone for being so interested in the environment.
4) Michael Bloomberg & Donald Trump have both splurged $10m to buy ad space in the upcoming Super Bowl.
5) The 'Sussex Royals' will be stepping back as senior royals, and hope to become financially independent. Currently 95% of their annual income comes from the Prince of Wales.
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