🎬 Bucket Money 🍿

👋 Good morning! Nothing sells tickets like a heatwave and working air conditioning. As brutal temperatures baked Europe last week, France (where most homes lack AC) hit a record-breaking 44.3°C (111.7°F), sending audiences hunting for somewhere cool. With schools shuttered and landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre forced to cut back hours, the local multiplex kept its doors wide open. That added up to 3M cinema admissions in a week, up 52% from the week before (and 54% over the same week last year). If you're still on the ground in Europe after Cannes Lions, godspeed and stay cool.

Happy Monday from The Dailies. We've rounded up the fresh box office numbers and the latest from around the industry. Let’s get into it. 👇

The Big Picture: 'Toy Story 5' carried the weekend, taking $70M of the $152.5M total on its own. 'Supergirl,' meanwhile, opened soft and set off the usual "superhero movies are dead" chatter. More realistically, the genre's ok and this one just didn't connect. 'Spider-Man' is up next in July and should do big numbers. Zoom out and 2026's in good shape, ahead of last year for the weekend and the year so far.

Up next: 'Minions & Monsters' drops Wednesday ahead of the holiday weekend, looking at a $100M+ five-day haul. Live action 'Moana' lands the weekend after.

🗣️ A24 is standing by its Google AI deal. Last week, the indie darling took a ~$75M investment from Google's DeepMind to co-develop AI filmmaking tools, and the reaction was… not warm. Now the studio’s making its case. A24 spokesperson Sophia Shin calls it a research partnership, not a content pipeline: "We'd rather have a seat at the table than on the sidelines." Shin even distanced A24 from generative AI itself, saying the studio doesn't love the AI output currently onscreen in Hollywood and that the work is about fixing behind-the-scenes workflow headaches. A24 reiterated the guardrails too: Google can't train on its films or data, and no filmmaker is required to touch the tools. Critics so far seem unconvinced, with several reading "seat at the table" as proof of the sellout fears rather than a reassurance.

🎙️ MS NOW is replacing live weekend shows with taped podcasts. MS NOW (formerly known as MSNBC) is pulling its live weekend evening shows and handing the slots over to taped video podcasts and outside partnerships. Among them is a deal with Crooked Media, the podcast company behind 'Pod Save America.' Crooked's shows scored the network's strongest taped-series launch in years, and half of those viewers were new to MS NOW on Saturday nights. Casualties include veteran anchor Alex Witt, exiting after nearly three decades, and 'The Weekend: Primetime,' signing off for good. MS NOW isn't alone here. Podcasts are cheaper to license than original shows are to produce, and they pull the younger viewers networks want, which is why Fox News, CBS, NBC, and even Netflix have all leaned into similar strategies.

⚖️ Hundreds of local papers are ganging up on Big AI. A coalition representing nearly 400 local and regional newspapers is suing OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the companies quietly scraped their articles (paywalls and all) to train ChatGPT and Copilot without permission or payment. The suit says they didn't just copy the work, they stripped out the bylines and copyright notices first, the digital fingerprints that mark who owns a piece and where it came from. Former New Jersey AG Matthew Platkin, who's spearheading the suit, argues local reporters cover the council meetings and obituaries no chatbot ever will, so their work shouldn't be hoovered up for free. The AI companies will lean on the usual "it's fair use" defense, but nothing's settled, and the New York Times' similar case against the same companies is still in play.

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A $49.99 popcorn bucket shaped like an IMAX camera, tied to Nolan's 'The Odyssey,' sold out in about an hour this month. Then it restocked and sold out again. It's now on its third wave of demand. Welcome to the strange, lucrative world of the collectible popcorn bucket.

$54M. That's how much AMC pulled in selling these things in 2023, up from a grand total of $0 just five years earlier. What used to be a goofy concession-stand add-on is now real money, and a rare bright spot for theaters still recovering from the pandemic.

You've probably seen a few of them: The 'Dune' sandworm that resold for up to $800 on eBay. The 'Alien: Romulus' xenomorph head. And, most recently, the Trojan Horse for 'The Odyssey.' Mock it all you want. The bucket money clears.

The numbers followed the hype. AMC sold two-thirds of its 500,000-unit Super Mario Galaxy Movie order in three days, pulling in an estimated $15M to $21M off a single film. The chain now plans collectibles for 40+ releases this year, up from nine in 2023.

It can be a real gamble, though. Lead times run six to nine months, so chains are placing bets long before they know what'll hit. The 'Minecraft' bucket flew off shelves. The Red Hulk one sat there. Welcome to the popcorn wars.

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