Business Taken To
THE NEW HEIGTS

As was noted by The Hollywood Reporter the other day, the cumulative domestic box office for the summer is down 22% from last season. As a general rule, I don’t tend to worry much about the cumulative figures. After all, every season brings different movies. And if Captain America: Civil War isn’t as big as Avengers: Age of Ultron, or if Warcraft isn’t as big a mid-June monster as Jurassic World, well, that’s not entirely a surprise. Moreover, if you look at the months preceding the summer season, the winter/spring numbers are way up from last year. That’s because, just as in 2014 when everyone was fretting about the summer domestic box office, the pre-summer months were unusually strong. Just as The LEGO Movie and Captain America: The Winter Soldier offered “summer in the winter” business, so too did 2016 with a deluge of huge pre-summer hits (Deadpool, Zootopia, Batman v Superman, The Jungle Book).

ith sales like these, Drake can’t possibly have any woes left. Building off its robust weeklong tenure as an Apple AAPL +0.12% Music / iTunes exclusive, the Canadian rap superstar’s latest album Views has been officially certified double-platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), signifying two million in sales and sales equivalents. Those who have been following Views‘ lengthy six-weeks-and-counting tenure at the top of the Billboard 200 album charts won’t be surprised by this news. All but one of its tracks have appeared at least once in the Billboard Hot 100 since release, the lone outlier being the 2015 single “Hotline Bling” which reached that chart’s #2 position well before Views‘ release.