 |
|
|
|||||
If the scariest thing for a studio head to contemplate is a flop, executives with plenty of horror flicks in the pipeline have little to fear. Not only did The Conjuring: Last Rites have the largest opening for a horror movie in history over the weekend, earning $194 million worldwide, but it was just the latest example of a scary movie surpassing industry expectations this year. At a time when even superhero tentpoles no longer reliably turn out filmgoers, horror has become the closest thing to a safe bet that studios can hope for these daysthe final girl of the box office. The genres dominance this year wasnt a foregone conclusion back in January. Horror stumbled out of the gate in 2025, with Universals Wolf Man taking in just $34 million worldwide on a $25 million budget. Director Leigh Whannells previous stab at reviving a Universal monster property, The Invisible Man, brought in a much-more-lethal $144 million back in February 2020, making it tempting to view the two films as a case study in pre- and post-pandemic box office. Luckily, it turned out to be a fluke. Other horror movies released in January followed a more typical pattern for the genre of low budget and low risk. Steven Soderberghs experimental haunted house outing, Presence, grossed a paltry $10 million, but avoided flop status because Soderbergh made it for an even-paltrier $2 million. It was followed by the late-January AI-gone-wrong chiller, Companion, which nearly quadrupled its $10 million budget. Of course, these January bright spots were only a sneak preview of where horror was headed this year. Franchises and indie horror thrive The Conjuring: Last Ritesthe ninth film in a multi-headed series that includes Annabelle and The Nun sub-franchisesfollowed a slew of horror hits of all shapes and sizes. There were IP-extending reboots like Final Destination: Bloodlines ($307 million) and 28 Years Later ($150 million); original stories from exciting directors, like Ryan Cooglers Southern-fried vampire opus Sinners ($366 million) and Weapons ($251 million and counting), the follow-up to Zach Creggers surprise 2022 hit, Barbarian; along with pure schlock like Clown in a Cornfield, which made nearly $13 million on a $1 million budget, making it Independent Film Company’s (IFC’s) biggest horror hit in its 25-year history. No other genre is enjoying so much success with both originals and beloved IP. Scary movies have remained a sturdy enticement for moviegoers in the years since COVID-19 and the rise of streaming led to a post-2019 theatrical downturn. Recent hits like Alien: Romulus, Nosferatu, Nope, Smile and Terrifier 3 have regularly lured crowds from their couches over the last few years. What seems different in 2025, though, is how consistently this genre has been overperforming at the box office, confounding industry analysts. The new Conjuring, for instance, was projected to bring in $50 million at the domestic box office this past weekend, and ended up with $83 million. Weapons was tracking for $25 million to $30 million, but opened to $43 million instead, and managed to stay on top for three of the next four weekends. The new Final Destination similarly overshot expectations for its first weekend by about $12 million, and went on to outgross the series previous top entry, 2009s The Final Destination, by about $120 million. The success of Sinners, meanwhile, has become one of the biggest Hollywood stories of the year. After it beat opening weekend estimates of $40 million by $8 million, several insider publications poured cold water on that victory, pointing out that Sinners would have to make somewhere between $185 million and $300 million to break even on its relatively high $90 million budget and complicated back-end deals. The film ultimately blew right past the highest of those projected figures, beating the curse of the second weekend drop-off. These horror movies arent just hitting big relative to their budget sizeslike Februarys The Monkey, which made nearly seven times its $10 million price tagtheyre bona fide blockbusters, surging like superhero movies did in the 2010s. A year of big-budget bombs As for the actual superhero movies, theyre continuing to adjust expectations downward after the 2019 peak of Avengers: Endgame, which made $2.8 billion and remains the second-biggest movie of all time, just behind Avatar. Long gone are the days when the $200 million budgets and $100 million marketing spends for Marvel movies made financial sense, as one or two of them were practically guaranteed to crack a billion dollars each year. Indeed, none of the three Marvel movies released in 2025 surpassed the first Ant-Man movies $519 million take a decade ago, although The Fantastic Four: First Steps came close, with $515 million. At the time of Ant-Mans release, amid Marvels imperial era, it wasnt even considered that big a hit. Former juggernaut Pixar is also a long way from its billion-dollar glory days, with this summers Elio tapping out at $153 million. And while the live-action remake of Disneys Lilo and Stitch was a massive success, becoming the only Hollywood movie this year to cross the billion-dollar mark, another live-action Disney remake, Snow White, was a costly bomb that didnt even earn back its $209 million budget, making the live-action remake subgenre a mixed bag at best. Horror movies, on the other hand, are looking like the only sure thing left for theatrical releases in 2025. Even rare disappointments like the killer robot sequel M3GAN 2.0 ($39 million on a $25 million budget) and slasher reboot I Know What You Did Last Summer ($60 million on an $18 million budget) have an enviably low floor for losses. And with a slate for the remainder of the year that includes sequels for Predator, The Black Phone and Five Nights at Freddysalong with Guillermo del Toros Frankensteinhorror is poised to continue making a killing in 2025.
Category:
E-Commerce
In boardrooms and startup accelerators around the world, a counterintuitive truth is emerging: the leaders who move fastest are often the ones who deliberately slow down. While our Western culture glorifies the perpetual sprint, elite performers are discovering what Navy SEALs have known for decades”slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” The Tyranny of Chronos Our modern productivity obsession is rooted in what the ancient Greeks called chronoslinear, measurable time that ticks relentlessly forward on our calendars and clocks. This is the time of deadlines, sprint cycles, and quarterly earnings reports. It’s quantitative, urgent, and unforgiving. But the Greeks recognized another dimension of time entirely: kairosthe right time, the opportune moment, time that’s qualitative rather than quantitative. Kairos is the difference between sending an email at 2 a.m. because you can, and sending it when your recipient is most likely to engage meaningfully with your message. It’s the difference between filling your calendar with back-to-back meetings versus creating space for the kind of strategic thinking that actually moves the needle. The most successful entrepreneurs and leaders I’ve worked with have learned to dance between both types of time, but they’ve discovered that honoring kairos often requires the courage to slow down in a chronos-obsessed world. The SEAL Philosophy in the C-Suite When Navy SEALs say “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,” they’re describing a mindset that prioritizes precision over speed, preparation over reactive rushing. In high-stakes military operations, moving too quickly can mean missed details, poor communication, and catastrophic failure. The same principle applies to business leadership. Consider the CEO who spends an extra week refining their product strategy rather than rushing to market. That deliberate deceleration often prevents months of costly pivots later. Or the manager who invests time in really understanding a team conflict rather than applying a quick fix that creates deeper resentment. This isn’t about moving slowly for its own sakeit’s about moving at the speed of insight rather than the speed of anxiety. The Three-Part Rhythm of Peak Performance The most effective leaders operate in a rhythm I call “Move. Think. Rest.”or MTR, pronounced motorthree integrative phases that honor both chronos and kairos time: Move: This is the phase to step away from your desk, to get out of your head and into your body so that you can activate those feel-good hormoneslike serotonin, endorphins and dopaminein order to bring calm to the chaos and energy to blah thinking. It could take the form of an in-person walking meeting; a walking meeting on the phone, sans video; or a team standing meeting. It might also take the form of a dance break. Humans are designed to move, and the type of movement I describe is intentional and finite. It helps you to shift away from rushing to entering a flow state. Think: This is your kairos timespace for backcasting (reflection, memory, metacognition) as well as forecasting (imagination, dreaming, and daydreaming). It’s when you pause to step back from the tactical and zoom out so that you can actually think more strategically. Many leaders skip this phase, jumping from one action item to the next, then wonder why they feel perpetually reactive rather than proactive. Rest: True rest isn’t just for physical recoveryit’s purpose is also for cognitive and emotional renewal. It’s the space where your subconscious continues processing complex challenges while your conscious mind recuperates. It allows for your default mode network to kick in. The DMN is the meaning-making part of the brain and it goes to work when you are not engaged with the world. The leaders who understand this phase gain access to insights that their always-on competitors miss. The Value of Emotional Recovery This emotional recovery component of MTR is particularly crucial for leaders. As executive coach Scott Peltin pointed out to me, leaders spend their days absorbing the emotional energy of their teamsfielding frustrations, celebrating wins, navigating conflicts, and holding space for others’ anxieties and ambitions. Without intentional emotional recovery, leaders become depleted reservoirs, unable to provide the steady presence their organizations need. Emotional recovery isn’t just about taking a vacation or getting enough sleep (though both help). It’s about creating regular practices that allow you to process and release the emotional residue of leadership. This might mean a daily walk without podcasts or music, journaling to externalize swirling thoughts, or simply sitting quietly for 10 minutes between high-stakes meetings to reset your emotional baseline. Practical Applications for the Overwhelmed Executive How do you implement this philosophy when your calendar is already packed and expectations are sky-high? Start small: Introduce “Think Time” blocks in your calendar. Even 15 minutes before major decisions can shift you from reactive to strategic mode. Practice the “24-hour rule” for important communications. Draft that crucial email or decision, then sit on it overnight. You’ll be amazed how often this prevents costly mistakes. Create “slow lanes” in your workflow. Designate certain projects or decisions as nonurgent, allowing them the time they need to marinate for optimal outcomes. Build in emotional recovery rituals. Schedule brief transition moments between intense meetings. Even three minutes of deep breathing or stepping outside can prevent emotional buildup that clouds judgment later in the day. Embrace strategically saying no. Every yes to something urgent is often a no to something important. Slow leaders understand that protecting their kairos time sometimes means disappointing people who operate purely in chronos time. The Competitive Advantage of Deliberate Pace In our hyperconnected world, the ability to slow down becomes a differentiator. While your competitors are spinning their wheels in perpetual motion, you’re gaining the clarity that comes from operating at the speed of wisdom rather than the speed of fear. The future belongs to leaders who can resist the cultural pressure to confuse motion with progress, who understand that in an age of infinite information and constant connectivity, the scarcest resource isn’t timeit’s attention. And attention, like wine, improves with the right kind of patience. Remember: in a world obsessed with faster, the leaders who master the art of strategic slowness don’t just survivethey flourish.
Category:
E-Commerce
By now weve all heard of tech debtthe costs well have to incur in the future to maintain suboptimal software and technology decisions from the pastbut in three decades as a tech executive, Ive come to observe a far more insidious phenomenon that threatens to undermine business transformation: process and data debt. Unlike tech debt, process debt isnt just ITs problem. The accumulation of manual workarounds, inconsistent data practices, and inefficient workflows that build up over time spreads throughout the organization, affecting every department, from accounting to supply chain. And process debt is the number-one thing that will stand in the way of a companys ability to adopt AI to innovate and reinvent itself. Process debt doesn’t just slow down AI initiatives; it fundamentally stops them from reaching their potential as we move toward more autonomous systems. The Tomato Problem Consider something simple: ordering 1,000 kilograms of tomatoes. Due to natural moisture loss, only 950 kilograms arrive. The supplier invoices for the full amount. Most systems escalate this to human review. But when operational foundations are clean, autonomous AI approaches this differently. It understands tomatoes typically lose 5% in transport, factors in seasonal patterns, then processes autonomously. More importantly, it builds institutional knowledge for future decisions. This is the difference between AI that frustrates and AI that transforms. Your Roof Collapses In insurance, we’ve seen property claims processing transformed from days-long research into minutes of intelligent analysis. AI systems now handle complex items, such as custom artwork, by leveraging deep databases and sophisticated reasoning. The results: an 80% reduction in processing time and a 23% improvement in pricing accuracy, representing millions of dollars in annual value while dramatically improving the customer experience. The lesson wasn’t about efficiency gains. It was about how AI performs when you design processes around its capabilities rather than retrofitting it onto existing workflows. The Learning Gap What we’re seeing validated in research confirms what many suspected: there’s a fundamental difference between organizations that succeed with AI and those that don’t. Recent MIT research shows that 95% of enterprise AI initiatives struggle to deliver value, not because of technology limitations, but because most systems cannot adapt and integrate effectively into existing workflows. Gartner reinforces this trend, predicting that by 2030, more than 50% of AI models will be domain-specific, tailored to industry or function, up from 5% today. The pattern is clear: generic solutions cannot address the unique operational challenges that define real business value. An Agentic Order of Operations The most impactful AI transformations start with addressing process and data debt first. Organizations that clean up their operational foundations unlock AI’s full potential. Those that don’t find themselves constrained by legacy inefficiencies, regardless of their technology investment. This creates an interesting dynamic. As AI becomes more autonomous, competitive advantage increasingly belongs to organizations willing to do the hard work of liquidating process debt before deploying sophisticated systems. What This Means for Leaders We’re entering an era where AI does not just assist. It makes autonomous decisions and manages entire business ecosystems. The organizations that understand this are building the foundations that will define tomorrow’s competitive landscape. In my experience, the answer lies not in the sophistication of your AI models, but in the quality of the operational foundation you build to support them. That foundation work happening today determines who leads in the autonomous economy of tomorrow. I often say, There is no artificial intelligence without process intelligence. The companies that understand this distinction will be the ones that thrive.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||