Crypto News: Your friendly neighborhood moneymaker

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Spider-Math

MJ (Zendaya) swings through the city with Spider-Man. Photographer: Jay Maidment — Swinging into the record books.

Since Spider-Man in 2002, the teen webslinger has racked up $10 billion in worldwide box-office receipts, across 11 movies. That’s roughly the same as the Star Wars franchise, and is comfortably ahead of James Bond, Harry Potter and Fast & Furious. No other film character comes close.

The awesome power of your friendly neighborhood superhero is on full display this month, with Spider-Man: Brand New Day scoring the largest opening weekend in Hollywood history, beating out even Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame. That’s not just price inflation, either. While total ticket sales aren’t tracked as accurately as box-office grosses, it looks like Spidey’s latest outing sold more than 30 million tickets domestically in its first weekend, placing it either first or second in the all-time rankings.

What accounts for the angsty arachnid’s extraordinary chart-topping, across the franchise as a whole and especially in his latest outing? It’s not a function of sheer cinematic quality. This movie, which Bloomberg’s Sarah Rappaport calls “a fun little popcorn flick you forget about the second you step outside the cinema,” is not going to win Oscars or garner outsize critical acclaim.

So what explains it? A few theories present themselves:

1. It’s all about keeping things light enough to be the perfect family entertainment. Who wants to take the kids to a Christopher Nolan Batman movie? Jon Favreau’s Iron Man also got the tone right, but the character was too quickly subsumed into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

2. It’s all about New York, the greatest city in the world, which grounds the fantastical in the real.

3. It’s all about the slightly awkward marriage of Sony (which owns the movie rights to Spidey and 900 related characters) and Disney (which owns the character itself, and which produced the film).

The animated *Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse* broke boundaries and box-office expectations.

Sony is not great at making its own standalone superhero movies. (Cough, cough, although OK.) But by the same token, it doesn’t look at each movie as part of a vast edifice of extended-universe shenanigans. Spider-Man movies are big and small(ish) at the same time. Our relatable middle-class hero generally saves New York City, not the entire multiverse, and faces human villains rather than intergalactic CGI apparitions.

4. It’s all about the #squadgoals coupling of Tom Holland and Zendaya, beloved movie stars who light up the screen and our hearts, and who are a couple not only onscreen but also IRL. (They just married!)

5. It’s all about global warming. Movies are a great way to beat the heat.

My personal theory, however, is that it’s all about Peter Parker’s double life as a freelance photojournalist. Not all heroes wear capes.

By the numbers

Bottles of Chartreuse liqueur at Le Grand Restaurant in Paris on May 4, 2023. Photographer: Joel Saget/Getty Images — A restaurant that wants to sell rare Chartreuse cuvées will also need to place substantial orders for entry-level green and yellow expressions.

$3,203

The price of a bottle of Chartreuse Yellow Voiron from the 1940s at Hedonism Wines in London. “Chartreuse has truly been elevated to iconic status,” Emmanuel Cadieu, head sommelier at Plénitude in Paris, tells Joel Hart.

1,000

The number of scoops of gelato sold at Ciccetta’s in Edinburgh on a typical day. It doubles on sunny days. The Bruntsfield gelateria isn’t near the main tourist attractions, but it’s part of a serious trend. The Scottish capital is now a burgeoning gelato destination, Laura Avetisyan reports.

430

The number of venues Brandon Presser visited while researching our Two-Night Minimum travel guide to Lisbon. Be sure to check out Tasca Pete next time you’re in town!

The number of top spots movies with a colon in their title occupy on the list of the largest US opening weekends of all time. (Four of the six feature a hyphen too, at least if you trust IMDb’s typography.)

You can’t hide from camo

U.S. President Bill Clinton, wearing camouflage clothing and waders, waves to photographers on December 27, 1993, before going duck hunting on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Photographer: Jennifer Young — Unc was low-key dripped out.

Are you a man who likes a bold pattern but who’s worried about undermining conventional ideas of masculinity? Hunting camo is made for you! “For guys, it’s their masculine floral or leopard print,” Tanner Whatley, a collector and dealer in Mississippi, tells Madison Darbyshire.

These patterns are highly in demand: Georgia-based Realtree, one half of the hunting camo duopoly, says its camouflage appears on 1 billion new licensed products annually for brands such as Mountain Dew, Crown Royal and Puma. At the high end, Balenciaga used hunting camo patterns on a $2,690 jacket in its pre-fall collection in 2024, and a rare vintage turkey vest from Mossy Oak has sold for $4,000.

“It’s like finding a vintage Rolex,” says Whatley of finding rare “Made in the USA” camo pieces dating back to the last century. Just, you know, a bit less refined.

Tea is the new coffee

A Teapulse employee tops drinks with a cheese foam. Photographer: Kenneth Bachor/Bloomberg — Just what you always wanted on top of your tea: cheese foam.

Peter Parker grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, a short leap away from Flushing’s Chinatown. Were he to swing down to the corner of Prince Street and 38th Avenue today, he’d find a store formerly known as Molly Tea, now trading as ? Tea because of a trademark dispute, right next door to a Teapulse. At the latter establishment, for a mere $5.95, he could order a large Orchid Blanc Cheese Tea in one of five different sugar levels, from “No sugar” through “100% sugar.”

Erinn Gardner went deep on the new wave of Chinese tea chains, which serve drinks including osmanthus tea, mango pomelo taro fruit tea, or even tea paired with brown sugar pearl sundae soft-serve ice cream. There’s a lot of room to grow. Mixue Group, which has six stores in New York and a similar number in California, boasts nearly 50,000 locations worldwide. Tea drinkers, it turns out, are still willing to splurge on low-stake indulgences, just so long as the price stays within single digits.

One Very Specific Recommendation: The Lamborghini Countach 25th Anniversary

Lamborghini Countach 25th Anniversary. Photographer: Motive Archives/Courtesy of Broad Arrow Auctions — It’s fierce.

Everyone who’s anyone in the car world will be in Monterey, California, next week when the globe’s most expensive, beautiful, historic and downright wild cars — both new and old — descend for five days of rallies, concourses, racing, debuts and general automotive jubilation. This year is particularly special because the first-ever supercar, the Lamborghini Miura, will be celebrating its 60th birthday.

We are always particularly fascinated by the auctions that happen amid it all, which are benchmark affairs that last year totaled $432.8 million across five major houses.

One to watch: This 1989 Lamborghini Countach 25th Anniversary, one of 657 produced to celebrate a quarter century of the Raging Bull brand. The scissor-doored sculpture on wheels includes style upgrades from a young Horacio Pagani, the designer whose namesake hypercars now command multimillion-dollar price tags. It’s Lot 246 in the Broad Arrow auction on Aug. 14, with a low estimate of $600,000 and no reserve. —Hannah Elliott

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