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Tuesday time, TFP. If like millions of people, you were a fan of Barbie last year, you’ll soon be able to watch the movie in Barbie Land. Barbie The Movie: In Concert is coming to venues across America this summer, featuring screenings of the movie with a live, all-female orchestra, an immersive Barbie Land experience, and, of course, limited-edition merch. We expect there to be a lot of pink.

In other news… Hollywood’s video-game plans walk on eggshells, young people are turning caps back on to land a job, and Road House beats Prime’s viewership record.

We hope you enjoy this and all upcoming issues, but we have one request: please share your feedback. If you have any thoughts at all about our new look, format, and direction, please reply to this email. It’ll go straight to us. Do not hold back.

LATEST PODCAST EPISODE

YT: The Dead Don’t Hurt, X: Breaking Bad, G: Barbara Rush, R: Martin Short, TT: “Magnetic”, S: “Next Semester”

🍺 Doug Liman’s Road House remake racked up 50 million global viewers over its first two weeks of release — the most eyeballs ever for a Prime Video original movie. Read More → deadline

🏍️ Formula 1-owner Liberty Media has acquired Dorna Sports, the owner of motorcycle-racing circuit MotoGP, in a deal worth $4.5 billion. Read More → thr

🖥️ Microsoft and OpenAI are planning to build a data center for a cutting-edge, AI-focused supercomputer called “Stargate,” which could likely cost $100 billion. Read More → theinformation

🎮 Discord announced that it’ll finally start to show advertising on the free version of its platform, with the first ads coming from video-game makers. Read More → wsj

☀️ MIT researchers have built a tool that estimates how many “outdoor days” your region will lose in the coming decades due to climate change. Read More → techcrunch

77% of you voted No in yesterday’s poll: Do you have an interest in the metaverse?

“But it’s being thrown in our faces so something is real about it.”

“I don’t know. It sounds a lot like Ready Player One, which is pretty cool, but I feel like the bigger consequences concerning privacy would be intertwined with the benefits.”

“It’s evolution at work. Either accept it or be the definition of old.”

.A WORD FROM OUR FRIENDS AT COLLARS & CO.

The world’s comfiest dress shirt

Fellas, it’s time. We’ve lived in a world of discomfort for far too long. Here’s the solution:

Collars & Co. provides high-quality clothing that not only looks great but feels amazing, too — specifically, their now-famous Dress Collar Polos, which enticed Mark Cuban to invest a million dollars on Shark Tank. They offer a special firm-collar technology that keeps the collar sitting up all day.

No bacon collar here! We wear them under blazers, under sweaters, and on their own to level up our look without the uncomfortable stiffness of a traditional, long-sleeved button-down. Restock your closet with these.

.ENTERTAINMENT.

Hollywood turns gamers into focus groups

The Future. With video game-based movies making $712.2 million at the domestic box office last year (2x more than the year before), Hollywood is all-in on the IP for its next generation of franchises. Just as Marvel started to connect its franchises through movies and shows, don’t be surprised if studios and game developers start to create a similar relationship between movies and games.

IP level up
Hollywood studios are learning that if you’re going to make a movie or show based on a video game, you better make sure the fans approve.

• Studios are pressure-testing designs, characters, and story points in communities on Reddit, Discord, and in traditional focus groups.

• The goal is to tow the line between appeasing hardcore fans (who are very vocal) and culture at large (which played a lot of games during the pandemic).

• That’s because there’s major money at play — hit games can gross billions of dollars over their lifespans, so making a movie that fans don’t like could hurt the game.

As for the movies themselves, studios are putting in work on the front end because no one wants to go through their own Sonic the Hedgehog situation, which led to a major creative overhaul of Sonic’s look after the release of the movie’s first trailer led to fan outcry.

But, hey, the backtracking ultimately turned out well for Paramount — Sonic is almost a billion-dollar franchise.

• Watch: Bloomberg released an expansive documentary about the rise and fall of FTX founder and once crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried.

• Read: Employee-coaching company Exos and the Wharton School of Business conducted a study on the consequences of a four-day workweek… and discovered a lot of positives for both companies and workers.

• Listen: The Ankler Podcast dove into the high-profile legal battle between Hollywood agency UTA and former CEO of MediaLink Michael Kassan that has the whole marketing world watching.

.CULTURE.

Capitalization has a big generational gap

The Future. The sign you’ve entered adulthood may be that you start hitting the shift button after a period to capitalize the first letter in a new sentence. With top lexicographers saying that modern capitalization use is a sign of accurately recreating spoken speech (rather than a sign of laziness), smartphone manufacturers may start to include a capitalization preset for contacts so people can keep their writing lowercase with those they feel the most comfortable with.

Uppercase adulthood
One of the last adult milestones is using proper grammar.

• Millennials and Gen Zers turned off auto capitalization on their phones as teens but now feel they need to turn it back on as they try to land more elevated jobs.

• Many held out on turning it back on beforehand because lowercase letters made texts feel more casual and the tone of a conversation feel lighter — like using emojis and exclamation marks.

• But several young people told WSJ that their sudden capitalization use has friends asking why their texts feel so formal and cold now, so being correct has some modern consequences.

Maybe the tide’s turning to the lowercase life, though. Artists like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo routinely have all-lowercase song titles, Spotify uses lowercase for new playlists, and even Sam Altman, the billionaire CEO of OpenAI, still types all-lowercase tweets.

.A WORD FROM OUR FRIENDS AT PROMPTS DAILY.

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