China Covid Recovery Means Challenges for Hollywood

News

With China having largely contained the coronavirus, the movie industry in the world’s number two consumer market is primed to return to pre-pandemic levels in 2021. That presents opportunities and challenges for legacy studios in Hollywood as Western economies struggle to reopen their leisure economies.

Bloomberg reports that ticket sales for Chinese movie theaters during the first five days of the Lunar New Year brought in 5.7 billion yuan ($882 million), a 33% jump over 2019, the  previous record year.

The financial newswire also said shares of Imax China Holding Inc. jumped by 31% in Hong Kong and that Alibaba Pictures Group Ltd. had rallied 35%.

For Hollywood, China’s growing percentage of the global film consumer base has not been seamless, and will likely involve more upheaval. In addition to the obvious language barrier – the gap between Mandarin and English is harder to bridge than between English and European languages – there are also cultural and political hurdles to overcome.

Chris Fenton, a long-time Hollywood executive and author of last year’s Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, and American Business, told NewsGram that Beijing is demanding the right to dictate the content of American movies – and getting it.

“(Beijing has) amazing influence over Hollywood,” Fenton told the online Newsgram site. “There are a couple of versions of it. One is a premeditated version of what is censored even before it was written or scripted, which is this idea with any sort of sensitive topics, whether it has to do with Taiwan, or Hong Kong or Tibet … things that have something to do with human rights issues, whatever it is. Those are essentially taboo in Hollywood.”

According to Aynne Kokas, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, the issue is not likely to disappear for Hollywood any time soon. “China’s market is now central to any major release,” Kokas told Bloomberg.

“Diminishing market share presents a worrying picture for Hollywood studios” that may have been relying on China to recoup blockbusters’ budgets, she said.

Rescheduled Olympics Now In Doubt

Sports, ,

One of the largest casualties of the coronavirus pandemic was the 2020 Summer Olympics, which had been scheduled to take place in Tokyo from July 24 to August 9. The competition has been rescheduled for this summer, but it is far from certain that it will go ahead as planned: According to Wall Street Journal, 80 percent of the Japanese public does not want the influx of foreign athletes and spectators at a time when Covid-19 cases have spiked in the country.

The athletes are ready, but is Japan?

Those concerns are exacerbated by the example set by the Australian Open tennis competition, currently underway in Melbourne. Competition organizers there have been criticized for allegedly putting profits ahead of public health by allowing foreign players into the country.

In addition, Yoshiro Mori, the head of Japan’s Olympic Committee, faced calls last weeks to resign after complaining that “talkative” women in sports organizations caused meetings tended to ‘drag on’.

Jet Blue Announces Luxury Option for Transatlantic Service

Transportation Industry, ,

The global travel industry may be reeling a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, but at least one industry stalwart appears to believe the industry will recover from the crisis, and sooner rather than later.

Monday, Jet Blue Airlines (NASDAQ: JBLU) announced it would offer Mint class service, a high-end cabin with semi-private seating, lie-flat beds and bedside tables and a 17-inch screen, on its upcoming service between the United States and London. The airline is planning to launch non-stop flights between London and John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, and from London to Boston’s Logan Airport before the end of 2021.

No decisions have been announced regarding an arrival/departure airport in London.

Jet Blue upended the domestic travel sector in 2014 by introducing Mint on non-stop flights between New York and San Francisco. The company later announced plans to include the luxury seating option on its Transatlantic routes but many industry analysists expected that uncertainty about the near-to-medium term outlook for the travel sector would cause the airline to shelve those plans, at least temporarily.

In October, McKinsey & Company, predicted that the blow to the global tourism sector could be far worse than previously thought, perhaps up to $8.1 trillion lower than initial predictions following the emergence and spread of the coronavirus last year.

Echoing the concerns, Yahoo!Finance said that international tourism dropped by 65% in the first half of 2020 and added that it could be 2024 before global travel returns to 2019 levels.

Despite the poor outlook, however, Jet Blue Chief Operating Officer Joanna Geraghty told Bloomberg that the airline believes the travel industry will recover quickly once the pandemic is officially declared “over.”

“Demand changes quite quickly overnight when case counts come down and travel restrictions are lifted,” she said.

Top Retirement Destinations for 2021

Retirement,

It’s 2021 – the new year is still fresh, it looks like the new corona vaccines will get our economies back on track and businesses and families around the world are looking forward to crafting a post-pandemic “new normal.”

For many Baby Boomers, however, 2021 will also be a time to begin thinking about retirement. Last year, more than 28 million people born between 1946 and 1964 reported they had left the job market, a 3.2 million spike over the same period in 2019, according to the Pew Research Center.

To mark the new year, International Living, an online lifestyle magazine, has published its Annual Global Retirement Index, complete with the magazine’s top ten picks as retirement destinations. Of course, several of the locations are predictable – France, for example.

But the list also includes some surprises: South-east Asian destinations like Vietnam and Malaysia, or the United States’ southern neighbor Mexico might appear counterintuitive to many people. On second thought, however, they definitely look like excellent options.

It’s a compelling read, and at the very least – terrific fodder for daydreaming!

Millenial Values Changing Investment Patterns

Markets, Millenials, Real Estate, , ,

Growing up in Sydney, Australia, Shenal Harakh learned that real estate was the key to a prosperous financial future. For an immigrant family from India, it wasn’t a bad model: Real estate values Down Under have exploded in recent decades, with the median price for a single-family home jumping from A$111,524 in 1995 to A$871,749 at the end of 2020.

For the 28-year-old Harakh, however, real estate investing left her itching for “action.” Three years ago, the then-anthropology student at Australian National University decided to diversify into the stock market. The move was a prodigious one: In 2020 she turned a 174 percent return in addition to 27 percent and 14 percent returns (respectively) on the Bell Direct and Stake platforms, according to the Australian Financial Review.

Harakh’s investment strategy appears to be a guidebook on Investing for Millenials. Her LinkedIn page says her investments focus on “cultivat(ing) meaningful connections and content where you can see your universe of interests as well as those of others, but still have the ability to separate what’s private, public, or visible to specific contacts and know there’s more to your network than meets the eye.

“As we spend more time online and creating virtual connections, it’s important for us to be able to express the complexity and interconnected nature of our lives,” she writes.

At the same time, she is cautious to warn that market activists must be careful, and that it isn’t for everyone. “Trading is addictive,” she told the AFN. “And the last thing you want to do is lose everything because of this addiction.”