Raphael Stevens

With $3.3 million from Thursday night previews, Warner Bros. Discovery’s “Blue Beetle” is expected to take in between $22 million and $32 million during its opening weekend domestically
The film arrives in theaters after recent DC Comics-based films have flopped at the box office and as the studio undergoes a major regime change.
Box office analysts predict the film could thrive on word-of-mouth and an influx of Hispanic moviegoers, even as fellow Warner Bros. release “Barbie” keeps scoring big bucks.

Xolo Mariduena stars ase Jaime Reyes in Warner Bros.’ “Blue Beetle.”
Warner Bros. Discovery

It’s pink vs. blue at the box office this weekend.
As “Barbie” continues a historic run in theaters, a little-known superhero called “Blue Beetle” is looking to take the top spot on the charts this weekend.

With $3.3 million from Thursday night previews, Warner Bros. Discovery’s latest film based on a DC Comics character is expected to take in between $22 million and $32 million during its domestic debut.
Meanwhile, Warner Bros.’ “Barbie,” which has steadily tallied $545 million domestically since its late July release, is expected to add between $17 million and $22 million during its fifth weekend.
“Blue Beetle” arrives in theaters after several DC Comics-based films have flopped at the box office and while the studio undergoes a major creative regime change.
“The four movies released this year are orphans,” said Robert Thompson, a professor at Syracuse University and a pop culture expert, referring to DC titles “Shazam! Fury of the Gods,” “The Flash,” “Blue Beetle” and the upcoming “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.”
“They’re part of the old universe that’s about to get completely rebooted. [Warner Bros.] has to promote these, they want them to be big hits, obviously, but there is a sense that they’re part of the old guard,” Thompson said.

And audiences haven’t turned out for these films so far. “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” generated just $57.6 million domestically and “The Flash” tallied a little more than $100 million in the U.S. and Canada.
These performances show an “indifference” from audiences, said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore.

Will ‘Blue Beetle’ take flight or be squashed?

When “Blue Beetle” first entered development in 2018, there was potential for the character of Jaime Reyes, the man behind the moniker, to cross paths with DC’s other famed heroes. However, turnover at the studio, mostly due to the merger between Warner Media and Discovery, has put the future of the hero in question.
As superhero movies have become more popular in the cultural zeitgeist, much of the appeal of big franchises has been the interconnectability of the stories. It’s why Disney’s Marvel Studios was able to to introduce obscure comic book characters like the Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man and Moon Knight into the Marvel Cinematic Universe and turn them into fan favorites.
Blue Beetle, without the promise of interaction with Justice League veterans like Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, the Flash or Aquaman, might not be able to drum up much enthusiasm at the box office.
To be sure, standalone, unconnected films have had success for DC in the recent past, but they featured well-known characters like Batman and the Joker.
“We’re in limbo now,” said Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at BoxOffice.com. “In a world where superheroes aren’t really novelties anymore, that’s going to be a tough sell for a lot of people.”
Robbins said “Blue Beetle,” which features a Mexican-American family at its core, could benefit from an influx of Hispanic moviegoers in the same way that Marvel’s “Black Panther” saw Black moviegoers who were not comic book fans rush out to see the film.
Critics have raved about Xolo Mariduena’s magnetic performance as the titular character and how the film centers on a hero who is family-focused, not a lone gunslinger.
“Blue Beetle” still falls into some of the old trappings of past superhero movies, including chaotic, repetitive CGI fight sequences, but some say as DC course corrects in the next few years, it should look to keep Mariduena and Blue Beetle on its roster.
“A film like ‘Blue Beetle’ could benefit from solid word-of-mouth,” said Dergarabedian. “Judgement for the latest DC entry should come after the first three weeks, not the first three days in theaters.”

A new era on the horizon

“Blue Beetle’s” biggest battle is recouping enough at the box office to justify its $125 million budget and any additional marketing costs spent by the studio.
The figure pales in comparison to the $200 million budget of “The Flash,” which capped its theatrical run at $268.5 million globally. After marketing costs and splitting ticket receipts with theaters, the film will not break even for the studio.
Similar concerns abound for “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” which is scheduled for a December release. The sequel has a budget of around $205 million, but has gone through three separate rounds of reshoots as well as endured pandemic production costs. While many blockbusters will turn to reshoots to punch up dialogue or insert scenes to clarify beats within the film, few require this many rounds of additional photography.
Much of the film’s issues came from conflicting creative directions previous heads of the studio wanted for the the overall DC Extended Universe. And now, with James Gunn and Peter Safran at the helm, the film appears to be going through its final series of changes.
Yet, the upcoming era of Gunn and Safran doesn’t guarantee a surefire future for DC Studios, said Thompson.
“I don’t think there’s going to be this sort of miracle all of a sudden,” he said, noting that despite the pair’s pedigrees in the industry, including Gunn’s success with three Guardians of the Galaxy films for Marvel, won’t immediately erase years of hit-or-miss films from DC and the toll that took on audiences.
“That’s pretty optimistic,” Thompson said. More

After years of talk and a SPAC boom in the sensor sector, automakers have finally started incorporating lidar units into their vehicles.
A few — namely Innoviz, Luminar and Ouster — could finally be poised for major growth, and soon, as automakers rush to adopt more advanced hands-free driving systems.
“We believe that a major portion of the industry market share is going to be determined in the next 12 to 18 months,” Innoviz CEO Omer Keilaf said.

A Hesai lidar sensor on top of a vehicle in Shenzhen, China, July 10, 2022.
Jade Gao | AFP | Getty Images

For investors in lidar startups, this has been a long time coming.
After years of talk — and a SPAC boom in the sensor sector — automakers have finally started incorporating lidar units into their vehicles. And many more lidar-equipped models are expected over the next few years.

Lidar, short for light detection and ranging, is a sensor technology that uses invisible lasers to create a detailed 3D map of the sensor’s surroundings. Lidar sensors are considered important components of nearly all autonomous-vehicle systems currently under development. They’re also finding increasing applications with advanced driver-assist systems as well as many other areas of robotics.
Playing into investors’ intense interest in self-driving technology, many lidar startups went public via mergers with special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, over the last few years. Valuations for those companies have since fallen sharply, but a few — namely Innoviz, Luminar and Ouster — could finally be poised for major growth, and soon, as automakers rush to adopt more advanced hands-free driving systems.
While the big money is still a few years away, some of those startups are already separating themselves from the pack with growing order books, fast-evolving technology, and revenue — right now, or soon — in the tens of millions of dollars.

Market share up for grabs

Israel-based Innoviz, which went public via a SPAC merger in late 2020, will soon see its units on the road. A hands-free highway-driving package on BMW’s new 7 Series, set to launch in Germany by the end of the year and elsewhere in 2024, will include an Innoviz lidar sensor nestled in the big sedan’s front grille.
That sensor, together with software that Innoviz developed for BMW, gives the vehicle’s computer brain a constant look at what’s in front of the car, out to about 250 meters.

Innoviz CEO Omer Keilaf thinks the new BMW series will be followed by a wave of vehicles equipped with lidar sensors.
“The technology is safety critical, there are very high levels of tech differentiations, and the player that wins the most business is ultimately going to have a scale and cost leadership advantage that is likely going to be difficult to match,” Keilaf said during Innoviz’s earnings call earlier this month.
“We believe that a major portion of the industry market share is going to be determined in the next 12 to 18 months,” he said.
Not all of that market share will be claimed by Innoviz, of course. Some will go to existing global auto suppliers, which may or may not turn to startups for the technology. In China, the market is already led by local lidar maker Hesai, which generated $123.2 million in revenue in the first half of 2023.
But the worldwide addressable market is likely to be large enough to leave significant opportunities for a few of the post-SPAC U.S. startups.
Aside from its work with BMW, Innoviz has a big contract with Volkswagen and is deep in talks with several other global automakers.
Analysts polled by Refinitiv expect Innoviz to report just $6 million in revenue in 2023, but they see it growing to $17.1 million in 2024 once its shipments to BMW get up to full speed.
That’s more than most other lidar companies that recently went public via SPACs are expected to generate, but it’s well behind forecasts for the two emerging leaders of the group, Luminar and Ouster.

Building to scale

Luminar, based in Orlando, Florida, has perhaps the most name recognition of the group among U.S. investors. It has the largest market cap as well, at around $2.2 billion.
Luminar is focused entirely on automotive lidar, designing its own silicon chips and offering related software as well.
Led by CEO Austin Russell, Luminar has locked up deals to supply lidar and software to Volvo Cars, EV maker Polestar, Mercedes-Benz, and Israeli automotive visual sensing giant Mobileye, among others. The deals cover more than 20 upcoming new vehicles from major automakers in total.

Austin Russell, chairman and chief executive officer of Luminar Technologies.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Luminar, which began shipping its lidar units in November, has big ambitions, but as Russell pointed out during its most recent earnings call, it doesn’t need huge market share to make money.
“Our target market penetration by the end of the decade is only 3% to 4%,” Russell said, “because we think even with that, we’ll be able to achieve around $5 billion revenue and $2.5 billion EBITDA with as much as a $60 billion forward-looking order book at that point.”
Russell sees Luminar growing its forward-looking order book, which stood at $3.4 billion at the end of 2022, by at least another $1 billion in 2023. But most of that revenue is years away, and the company still has a long way to go before it starts reporting profits.
Luminar CFO Tom Fennimore said earlier this month that investors shouldn’t expect Luminar to hit breakeven until the end of 2025.
Wall Street thinks Luminar has the cash to stick around until then, and it likes the look of the lidar maker’s pipeline: Analysts expect Luminar to deliver $84.5 million in revenue this year, growing to $268.4 million in 2024, according to Refinitiv.

Looking outside autos

Ouster is arguably Luminar’s closest rival, but it has a somewhat different focus — and a much smaller market cap, at around $250 million.
While waiting for the auto industry to adopt lidar at scale, CEO Angus Pacala has sought out opportunities beyond autos. Ouster’s lidar units can be found in automated mining trucks and forklifts, in drones used for mapping, and even in cities, helping to improve pedestrian safety.
But Pacala agrees that the market for automotive lidar is about to grow significantly. He said earlier this month that Ouster is about to begin shipping samples of a new low-cost solid-state lidar sensor called DF to automakers. A more advanced version — incorporating a new custom chip — is set to follow next year.
Wall Street doesn’t expect Ouster’s revenue to grow quite as dramatically as Luminar’s, but it’s still likely to see significant growth — from $82 million in 2023 to $136.3 million in 2024, per Refinitiv.
Unlike Luminar and Innoviz, Ouster hasn’t yet announced big orders from automakers. But Pacala thinks DF could bring in a lot of new business.
“You don’t need to be first as long as you’re building the thing that’s going to be sustainable long term, and that’s an integrated solid state digital technology,” he said. “And so the DF shines because it’s low cost, it’s solid state, it’s digital. There’s really nothing like it in the world other than this device, and we’re putting it in the automakers’ hands this quarter.” More

New Covid vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax will likely provide protection against the new “Eris” variant, now the dominant strain of the virus in the U.S.
The drugmakers designed their updated coronavirus shots to target the omicron subvariant XBB.1.5, which is slowly declining nationwide.
All three companies are still waiting for the Food and Drug Administration to approve their vaccines, meaning those jabs won’t be available to the public for a month or so.

A pharmacist prepares to administer Covid-19 vaccine booster shots during an event hosted by the Chicago Department of Public Health at the Southwest Senior Center in Chicago, Illinois, Sept. 9, 2022.
Scott Olson | Getty Images

New Covid vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax will likely provide protection against the new “Eris” variant, now the dominant strain of the virus in the U.S.
The drugmakers designed their updated vaccines to target the omicron subvariant XBB.1.5, which is slowly declining nationwide. But health experts and initial data suggest that the new shots will still be effective against Eris, or EG.5, and other widely circulating variants – all of which are descendants of omicron. 

“I think that these vaccines will provide very substantial protection against EG.5. Maybe just a little bit of loss, but it’s nothing that I’m very concerned about,” Dr. Mark Mulligan, director of the NYU Langone Vaccine Center, told CNBC. “It looks like we’re going to be OK.”
All three companies are still waiting for the Food and Drug Administration to approve their vaccines, meaning those jabs won’t be available to the public for a month or so. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also has to decide which Americans should get the shots and how often. 
Still, the upcoming arrival of those vaccines offers some reassurance to Americans as Eris and other Covid variants fuel a slight uptick in cases and hospitalizations across the country but remain below the summer peak that strained hospitals this time last year.
Eris accounted for 17.3% of all cases in the U.S. as of earlier this month, according to the latest data from the CDC. The new strain surpassed XBB.1.5, which accounted for roughly 10% of all cases. 
The World Health Organization earlier this month designated Eris a “variant of interest,” meaning it will be monitored for mutations that could potentially make it more severe. 

But the health agency and experts said Eris does not appear to pose a significant threat – or at least no more than any of the other omicron variants currently circulating in the U.S. It’s also not expected to cause a huge wave of Covid cases like other strains have in previous years. 

Why are the shots likely effective against Eris?

The new vaccines will likely provide protection against Eris because the strain has a very similar genetic makeup to XBB.1.5. 
The key difference is that Eris carries an additional amino acid mutation, which may make the strain only slightly more capable of evading immunity from previous infection or vaccination. 
“It’s not like back then when we had the alpha, beta, delta and omicron variants emerge and they were significantly different from one another,” said Dr. Nicole Iovine, chief hospital epidemiologist and an infectious disease physician at the University of Florida. “These are all omicron variants, so they’re much more similar to each other. I think this vaccine is actually going to be quite effective because of that.” 

A nurse administers a booster shot at a Covid-19 vaccination clinic on April 0=6, 2022 in San Rafael, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

That’s backed up by new data from the three companies.
Moderna on Thursday said its updated shot caused a “significant boost” in protective antibodies against Eris and another quickly spreading strain of the virus called “Fornax,” or FL 1.5.1, in a clinical trial. The company didn’t provide specific data on antibody levels since the trial results are preliminary. 
But Moderna President Stephen Hoge said in a release that the results “reflect our updated vaccine’s ability to address emerging Covid-19 threats.” 
A Pfizer spokesperson, in a statement to CNBC on Thursday, said the company’s own shot “effectively neutralized” a number of omicron variants, including Eris and XBB.1.5, in a recent study on mice. The company plans on releasing the entirety of the study results in a research publication, the spokesperson said. 
A Novavax spokesperson also told CNBC that it expects its updated Covid vaccine to work against Eris given its similarity to the XBB.1.5 strain. 
“We’re now conducting testing to demonstrate that,” the spokesperson added. 

Should you wait for the new shots? 

As Eris gains a stronger foothold in the U.S., some Americans may be questioning whether they should get one of the currently available Covid boosters rather than waiting for the new shots to arrive. 
Some experts say it depends on individual circumstances and risk levels, so patients should talk to their doctors.
Mulligan said unvaccinated or immunocompromised people who haven’t gotten the available boosters could potentially consider taking them now. Those patients are at a higher risk of getting severely sick from Covid. 
But he added that most people, especially healthy patients, could probably afford to wait for the new vaccines.

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Eris isn’t expected to infect a substantial number of Americans before the shots come out. “Some of us may get impacted, but I don’t expect us to see a huge wave in a short period of time between now and the next month or two,” Mulligan said.
The currently available boosters also might not provide as much protection against Eris because the variant has “drifted too far away” from omicron BA.5, according to Dr. Dean Blumberg, chief of the division of pediatric infectious diseases at UC Davis Health. The boosters target BA.5, BA.4 and the original strain of Covid. 
“It’s probably not going to be that beneficial and we do expect the updated vaccines to be available in about a month or so,” Blumberg said. “So I would wait for that one and get one as soon as it’s available.” 
Still, it’s unclear how many Americans will take the new Covid shots given widespread vaccine fatigue. More

Starboard Value now owns 9.9% of Bloomin’ Brands’ shares, according to a regulatory filing.
Shares of the Outback Steakhouse owner rose on the news.
Starboard has previously pushed for successful turnarounds at Darden Restaurants and Papa John’s.

An Outback Steakhouse truck sits parked outside a restaurant in New York.
Daniel Acker | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Shares of Outback Steakhouse owner Bloomin’ Brands rose 9% in premarket trading Friday after an activist investor disclosed its interest in the restaurant company.
Starboard Value now owns 9.9% of Bloomin’s shares, according a regulatory filing.

In recent quarters, Bloomin’s sales growth has slowed. Earlier in August, the company reported that its U.S. same-store sales grew just 0.8% in the second quarter as traffic to its restaurants shrank.
In addition to Outback, Bloomin’ also owns Carrabba’s Italian Grill, Bonefish Grill and Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse and Wine Bar.
Going into Friday, Bloomin’ shares have risen 27% this year, giving the company a market value of more than $2.2 billion.
It’s unclear what changes Starboard plans to push for at Bloomin’ Brands at this point. Past activists investors targeting the company, including Jana Partners and Barington Capital Group, have tried to pressure Bloomin’ to cut costs and spin off some of its brands.
Starboard Value has a proven track record of successful turnarounds at restaurant companies. In 2014, Starboard took control of Darden Restaurants’ board and implemented a number of changes, like improving Olive Garden’s breadsticks, that helped boost sales and the stock.
More recently, the firm struck a deal with Papa John’s in 2019 as the pizza chain sought to end a feud with disgraced founder John Schnatter and revive sinking sales caused by his scandals. Earlier this year, Starboard CEO Jeff Smith stepped down as chairman from Papa John’s board, and the company bought back most of the investment firm’s shares. More