Good morning and welcome to the weekend (almost). With the World Series starting tonight, brush up on a brief history of baseball with our 3-chart deep dive from September. Today we're exploring:
Cord cutters continue
Comcast HQ gave out mixed signals from its vast array of businesses this week.
The company’s revenue surged to more than $30 billion, surpassing expectations, as theme parks and streaming helped soften the blow from the company’s wireless and connectivity business — which lost 18,000 broadband and 490,000 video subscribers, respectively.
A bit of everything
Modern day Comcast is the very definition of a sprawling empire, with interests spanning communications, TV, movies, distribution, theme parks and more.
Its flagship streaming service, Peacock, welcomed 4 million new subscribers, partly due to the appearance of The Super Mario Bros. Movie on the platform, pushing Peacock's revenue up by 64% and narrowing the division’s losses, while the company’s Universal theme parks had a record-breaking quarter.
But, the company’s studio had a comparatively lean year, with revenues in its moviemaking division falling 24% year-over-year, despite the solo success of Oppenheimer. However, the real problem for Comcast is simply that its biggest divisions are the ones struggling, with subscriber losses at the closely-watched broadband division more than enough to outweigh any positives, as investors dumped the company’s shares — which fell more than 8% yesterday.
A new survey from Pew Research Center shines a light on how Americans are increasingly thinking about climate change, with 63% of respondents expecting the negative impacts of climate change to get worse during their lifetimes.
The questions, asked of ~8,800 Americans, also explored how people feel about the individual sacrifices they may have to make. 23% of people polled expect “major sacrifices” in their own lives because of climate change, while 48% expect to have to make “minor sacrifices” and 28% foresee “no sacrifices”.
Getting hot in here
The new survey comes just a few weeks after data confirmed by NASA, NOAA and the EU’s Copernicus Service revealed that September 2023 was the most unusually warm month in more than a century-and-a-half of temperature recordings, with a temperature anomaly of 1.44°C (relative to the 20th century average).
That September reading all but confirmed that 2023 will break records, with NASA researchers predicting (with “99% probability”) that this year will be the warmest on record.
The Barbie boost
Following one of the most successful movie marketing campaigns in recent memory — complete with pink Airbnbs, partnerships, billboards and a release that took on a life of its own alongside Oppenheimer — Barbie has cemented itself as the biggest movie of the year. And, Mattel, the toymaker behind the original Barbie doll, is benefiting doubly from it.
On Wednesday, the company reported a 16% year-on-year increase in gross billings in Barbie toys for its third quarter, propelling the company's doll category to an impressive 27% growth and boosting overall sales by 9% year-on-year to $1.9 billion.
The dreamhouse: more please
The hit movie, directed by Greta Gerwig, raked in more than $1.4 billion at the global box office, becoming the highest-grossing movie of the year — edging out another fictional character, Super Mario, for the top spot.
The success of the doll-to-blockbuster crossover has given Mattel renewed momentum — the key challenge is, of course, how to maintain it. The company’s plan? More of the same, with movies in the works that feature the toymaker's other beloved brands including Trolls, Barney, Hot Wheels, and Polly Pocket.
• Unilever reported a 15% surge in deodorant sales as workers returned to the office and socializing picked back up.
• The US economy brushed off any questions that it was weakening, as real GDP growth came in at a very healthy +4.9% (annualized) in the third quarter, beating expectations.
• Britney Spears is seeing a streaming resurgence, with songs in her catalog experiencing a 21% jump in plays in the days before the release of her memoir.
• Amazon revenue jumped 13% in its latest quarter, ahead of expectations, as advertising and AWS drove profits just shy of $10bn.
• Click through a museum of internet artifacts.
• Our friends at The Pudding have done it again — check out their latest work, exploring how modern music genres have changed on Spotify.
Off the charts: Who became a billionaire this week?
