🎬Box-office flop

Good morning. There are two occasions in life when you should shamelessly advertise knowing your favorite artist’s whole discography: when you’re more than 5 shots into karaoke night and when you’re on the receiving end of brain surgery. Singing during brain surgery lets your surgeon monitor your status for select operations, so just in case that ever happens, start updating your Spotify subscription.

— Geraldine Ndzomo, Chibuike Uzor.

Snow White and the box office flop

This weekend, Disney took a bite of a poisoned apple and fell into a deathlike sleep first place at the domestic box office. The new live-action Snow White brought in $43 million in its opening weekend—low by Disney’s standards, but a lot better than any other movie that debuted alongside it, despite the extensive controversy surrounding its adaptation and casting.

What controversies? There have been many, but the big ones involved Rachel Zegler, who has Colombian ancestry, being cast as Snow White; Zegler and costar Gal Gadot, who played the Evil Queen, publicly being on opposite sides of the war in Gaza; and the Seven Dwarves getting a weird CGI remake. This led the studio to dial back the marketing campaign once the movie had an opening date and to bar journalists from the premiere’s red carpet.

The cash envelope, please: Analysts think the bad publicity didn’t hurt the film’s opening performance because the people most committed to Online Discourse are not the same ones who take seven-year-olds to the movies and have to pick between this and the weeks-old Paddington in Peru.

However, industry watchers believe adults and kids alike may be tired of Disney’s animation-to-live action inventory:

• Snow White’s domestic debut haul is the smallest of Disney’s cartoon glowups. The next worst opening in that category was Dumbo, which brought in $45 million in 2019 (unadjusted for inflation) in its opening weekend.

The fairest of them all is not yet lost. Snow White will ultimately be judged on how it performs globally after a couple of months in theaters, plus the “merchandising gold mine” it offers Disney, as one movie franchising consultant told Variety. -GN.

Sports franchises: The new gold mines

Maybe money can’t buy success, but it can buy the most successful NBA franchise of all time. A group led by private equity head Bill Chisholm is buying the 18-time champion Boston Celtics for $6.1 billion, marking the biggest deal in pro sports history. Axios reports the final valuation is expected to be a Tacko Fall-sized $7.3 billion.

Wyc Grousbeck, the current owner, originally bought the team for $360 million in 2002. Since then, the NBA has exploded globally with the help of marketable stars and an ever-expanding media presence. The league’s new rights deals with NBC, ESPN, and Amazon are collectively worth $77 billion.

• Ghana and Morocco are scraping all visa requirements for travel between both countries.

• International flower companies are leaving Ethiopia. According to them, the political climate is not conducive to growing flowers.

• Angola is stepping down from its role as a mediator between M23 rebel forces and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

• Heineken-owned Nigerian Breweries acquired an 80% stake in Distell's Nigeria operations, a South African wines and spirits group.