North American Box Office: Down 100% in Q2

The COVID-19 crisis has affected almost all businesses, but the movie business has seen its revenue drop to almost nothing in the second quarter of 2020.With movie theaters mostly closing starting in March, the first quarter results were already down 2…



The COVID-19 crisis has affected almost all businesses, but the movie business has seen its revenue drop to almost nothing in the second quarter of 2020.

With movie theaters mostly closing starting in March, the first quarter results were already down 25.4% in North America before things really hit rock bottom. The second quarter, which ends at the end of June, so far has seen revenue drop an unprecedented 100% compared to the same quarter last year.

Overall, box office receipts are down 58.1% compared to the same period in 2019.

And the box office lull is expected to last until the end of the year according to Wedbush Securities media analyst Michael Pachter.

"Our estimates are clearly subject to change given the fluidity of the release slate and the mood on social distancing as stay-at-home orders begin lifting across the country," wrote Pachter in a May 26 note.

The first signs of recovery could happen in July, when the first in a series of big movies are expected to hit cinema screens. Movies doesn't come much bigger than Christopher Nolan's latest epic, Tenet, scheduled to be released on July 17. The distributors of the film, Warner Bros., recently took the unprecedented step of removing the release date from the movie's poster and the trailer, clearly hedging their bets as to whether it's safe, and profitable, to open theater doors in July.

Disney's live action 'Mulan' (trailer) will be released a week after on July 24, while 'Wonder Woman 1984' (trailer), also from Warner Bros., is set to be released a month later on August 13 (after having been delayed from its original June 5 release date). A full list of COVID-19 related movie cancellations and delays can be found here.

Over 102,000 people have died in the United States from the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 1,745,000 confirmed cases so far. There have been 87,000 cases in Canada with more than 6,700 deaths.

HBO Max is live: $15/mo for a massive library, significant headaches

Welcome to the $15/mo streaming service that calls Police Academy a “classic.”

HBO Max is live: $15/mo for a massive library, significant headaches

Enlarge (credit: WarnerMedia)

Like it or not, another subscription streaming service has entered the chat.

This one—HBO Max—debuts across the United States on Wednesday, and it comes from the combined AT&T-Time Warner media empire. After taking shape in 2018, the new "WarnerMedia" cluster of film and TV content has since put together a streaming library of exclusive content—particularly by yoinking content away from Netflix and other partners, in apparent defiance of AT&T's antitrust pledge to US Congress.

WarnerMedia didn't make the service available to Ars Technica ahead of the launch, so I jumped into the fray by claiming a free seven-day trial on launch day and picked through its first day's content and interface. I did so to answer the following question: has WarnerMedia pulled off a service worthy of a $15/month fee?

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VW. Das Auto. Der Betrug. Die Paten

In diesen Tagen hat der Bundesgerichtshof entschieden, dass der Einbau von Manipulationssoftware in einem straff geführten Konzern wie VW der Konzernführung anzulasten ist. Sie habe arglistig Käufer und staatliche Aufsichtsbehörden getäuscht

In diesen Tagen hat der Bundesgerichtshof entschieden, dass der Einbau von Manipulationssoftware in einem straff geführten Konzern wie VW der Konzernführung anzulasten ist. Sie habe arglistig Käufer und staatliche Aufsichtsbehörden getäuscht

Querfront in Corona-Zeiten?

Ein Email-Austausch zwischen zwei alten weißen Männern über linke Positionen und geistige Ver[w]irrung in Zeiten von Corona

Ein Email-Austausch zwischen zwei alten weißen Männern über linke Positionen und geistige Ver[w]irrung in Zeiten von Corona

We still don’t know why YouTube deleted phrases critical of Beijing

YouTube would only say its classifiers didn’t consider “the proper context.”

A man in a suit speaks into a microphone.

Enlarge / Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks in Wuzhen, China, in 2017. (credit: Du Yang/China News Service/Visual China Group via Getty Images)

YouTube says it has "rolled out a fix" for an "error in our enforcement systems" that had led to the automatic deletion of comments that included two phrases critical of China's government. But in an email exchange and phone call with Ars Technica, a company spokeswoman declined to provide real details about why YouTube's software was deleting the comments in the first place.

As I explained on Tuesday, "共匪" means "communist bandit." It was a derogatory term used by Nationalists during the Chinese Civil War that ended in 1949. It continues to be used by Chinese-speaking critics of the Beijing regime, including in Taiwan.

"五毛" means "50-cent party." It's a derogatory term for people who are paid by the Chinese government to participate in online discussions and promote official Communist Party positions. In the early years of China's censored Internet, such commenters were allegedly paid 50 cents (in China's currency, the yuan) per post.

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100,000 Americans dead—and counting—as COVID-19 ravages US

US leads the world in cases and deaths—and the pandemic is far from over.

A medical technician in protective gear handles a wrapped corpse on a gurney.

Enlarge / Transporter Morgan Dean-McMillan prepares the body of a COVID-19 victim at a morgue in Montgomery county, Maryland, on April 17, 2020. (credit: Getty | ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS)

More than 100,000 people in the United States have died from COVID-19 according to several pandemic-tracking efforts—and the pandemic is far from over. As the country reached the grim milestone, many areas were still seeing increasing case counts, and researchers have suggested that a second wave of infection is looming.

The risk of continued spread remains high as all 50 states have now begun easing restrictions aimed at curbing transmission.

So far, the US leads the world in the number of confirmed cases and deaths, with around 1.7 million cases and over 100,000 deaths. The country with the next highest numbers is Brazil, which has nearly 400,000 cases and over 24,500 deaths.

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