Business

Inrix, co-founded by a former Microsoft and Ford executive, recently partnered with GM on a cloud-based software effort to reduce crashes, road fatalities and carbon emissions.
The company is close to two decades old and has most recently aggressively grown its business among the public sector as cities transform mobility, and infrastructure funding reached into the billions.
Inrix almost went public this year before the market turned, and is still evaluating the right time for an IPO.

Cars and trucks move along the Cross Bronx Expressway, a notorious stretch of highway in New York City that is often choked with traffic and contributes to pollution and poor air quality on November 16, 2021 in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images

In this weekly series, CNBC takes a look at companies that made the inaugural Disruptor 50 list, 10 years later.
Transportation has been a big part of the CNBC Disruptor 50 list since its inception in 2013, and some of the original transport disruptors have become household names.

This includes Waze — at that time an Israeli GPS start-up with little brand recognition in the U.S. compared to Garmin or TomTom — which was acquired by Google for over $1 billion and has long since become critical to the driving public’s avoidance of speeding tickets and knowledge of the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts. Uber, which despite its stock struggles, has undeniably changed basic ideas about urban mobility. And SpaceX, which is taking transportation disruption to its most ambitious ends.
But another name on that original D50 list remains less well-known to the public, but it is a key link in planning the future of transportation: Inrix.
The company, now almost two decades old (it was founded in 2004), remains under the radar, but its reach in understanding the complexities and challenges in transportation is growing. TomTom is still a competitor, too. When Inrix, based outside Seattle in Kirkland, Washington, launched, a pressing issue was the fact that the world was still relying on helicopters to monitor traffic. “That was state of the art to figure out what was going on,” says Bryan Mistele, CEO and co-founder, and a former Microsoft and Ford executive.
Now Inrix, which operates in over 60 countries and several hundred cities, collects aggregated, anonymous data from 500 million vehicles, mobile devices, mobile apps, parking lot operators, mobile carriers and smart meters, all in real-time, covering both consumer and fleet vehicles, and feeding into a system which is finding favor among public agencies and transportation planners rethinking urban mobility. 
This week, Apple played up its CarPlay technology at WWDC, and it might be neat to have Siri adjust the temperature in your car one day, but Inrix has on its to-do list a range of tasks from reducing the climate footprint of city traffic through means including optimization of traffic signal timing, to plotting out how autonomous robotaxis will operate within cities, picking up and dropping off passengers, and finding their own parking when needed.

The core of the company’s mission hasn’t changed: its intelligent mobility, based on GPS data. Mining GPS data from cars and phones got the company off the ground and to clients like IBM, Amazon, and automakers. The biggest changes since its early years are moving beyond the core data to a software-as-a-service model, and that model is being adopted by its biggest-growing customer segment: cities like New York and London and additional geographies around the world including Dubai.

Zero crashes, zero carbon, zero traffic

Inrix still works closely with many private sector clients, including auto giants such as BMW and GM. In fact, one of its most recent deals is a cloud-based software venture with GM that overlaps with one of the biggest goals of public sector agencies: reducing crashes and fatalities. Inrix and GM are using data from GM vehicles on air bag deployments, hard braking and seatbelt usage, as well as from the U.S. Census, as part of a data dashboard for city planners with a “Vision Zero” goal of no road fatalities.
“There are 1.3 million people killed annually in crashes,” Mistele said.
Those numbers have been rising in recent years, too, specifically in the U.S., with a record set in 2021.
The recent passage of the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) includes roughly $5 billion in discretionary funds as part of the Safe Streets and Roads for All Grant Program, which will help the public sector tackle the issue. 
“Roadway analytics are a big area of revenue growth,” Mistele said. “There is an enormous amount of money flowing into the public sector from the infrastructure bill,” he said.
Traffic data software-as-a-service is now as much as 30% of the company’s overall business and growing at a compound annual growth rate of 40%.
The “zero” vision also overlaps with the goal of making transportation carbon neutral and reducing the number of accidents, ultimately through autonomous vehicle use.
About a year ago, Inrix launched a traffic signal timing product, which in pilot cities such as Austin, Texas, has demonstrated a 7% decrease in congestion “from doing nothing other than optimizing traffic signals,” Mistele said. The Florida Department of Transportation has also adopted the technology. “Every second of delay is 800,000 tons of carbon, or 175,000 vehicles,” he said. 

While full self-driving and autonomous urban mobility have progressed slower than the most ambitious forecasts, it is moving ahead and just last week GM’s Cruise self-driving robotaxi business received approval in San Francisco.
“We are big believers in ‘ACES,'” Mistele said, referring to “autonomous, connected, electric, shared” vehicles. Moving to a mobility-as-a-service model will become increasingly linked to the rise of autonomous transportation. “Instead of driving into a city and parking for eight hours, in most urban areas you will see mobility delivered as a service and shared,” he said. “How do you make it happen? By giving vehicles better information,” he added.
He is a believer that ‘ACES’ and robotaxis will make transportation safer, but that will require them receiving data on everything from road closures to parking dropoff areas. “We do meter by meter mapping of these urban areas … curbside management will get more complex,” he said.
According to Mistele, even though there is always lots of hype with new technology and a “coming back to reality” period, the progress made by companies including Cruise and Waymo in the robotaxi space and Nuro in robo-delivery of consumer goods like pizza, the deployments taking place now in cities, and the growing production of autonomous vehicles, leads him to believe that over the next decade this will be a transportation model in use in most of the top urban areas.
“I don’t think we will see it pervasive across the entire U.S., in rural areas where there is no need or use cases. But EVs and autonomous, and moving more to mobility-as-a-service will be pervasive,” he said.

More coverage of the 2022 CNBC Disruptor 50

There was a moment early on in the pandemic when the world literally stopped moving that Inrix had a worry about its business, but that didn’t last very long. In fact, Mistele says the radical changes in mobility patterns never seen before March 2020 have increased the need for planners, whether in mass transit or business, to better understand vehicle data, and it was the pandemic moment that became critical to its pivot to a software-as-a-service model.
As one example, he said companies in the tire sector needed more than ever before to analyze data on miles driven — the No. 1 variable in that niche — to determine consumer demand and appropriate manufacturing levels. And in the retail sector, companies were trying to understand traffic patterns and whether to close stores, or move stores to new locations.
Inrix’s data has less obvious uses as well, such as in financial services, where hedge funds want to know how many people visit a car dealership, what’s going on at a retail distribution center, and the traffic into and out of ports, especially with the supply chain under intense pressure during the pandemic.
The company has 1,300 customers today across its growing public sector business, its private enterprise business, which includes companies as diverse as IBM’s The Weather Channel and Chick-fil-A, and the auto sector.
Inrix has been profitable for most of its history, operating off of its own cash flow since the 2005-2007 period. “Some years growth is better than others,” Mistele said, and the customer ratio can change — with new use cases emerging during the pandemic and auto sales dipping for a few years before a big rebound — but the company does double-digit growth on an annual basis.
And after almost twenty years as a private company — with it largest investors including venture capital firm Venrock, August Capital, and Porsche — it almost pulled the trigger on an initial public offer before the market for IPOs closed. Over a recent period of six months, it had worked “very heavily” on an IPO transaction and was very close to filing the securities documents. “We even had the ticker reserved,” Mistele said. “We were ready to go, but the market tanked on us after Russia invaded Ukraine,” he said.
One of the oldest Disruptors is in a holding pattern for now with its exit strategy, but Mistele said it will be evaluating the market every few months.

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“Jurassic World: Dominion” may score the top spot at the domestic box office this weekend, but lackluster reviews and word of mouth could stall its potential haul.
The third and final film in the new trilogy of “Jurassic Park” films is the worst reviewed of all six films in the franchise, currently holding a 36% rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes from 175 reviews.
There’s wide consensus among critics that “Dominion” desperately wants to capture the nostalgia of the original but that the stunning visual effects fail to offset its missteps in storytelling and character development.

Still from Universal Studio’s “Jurassic World: Dominion”
NBCUniversal

“Jurassic World: Dominion” may score the top spot at the domestic box office this weekend, but lackluster reviews and word of mouth could stall its potential haul.
“Inevitably, ‘Jurassic World: Dominion’ will make a fortune worldwide, since these films always do,” wrote Robbie Collin in his review of the film for the Daily Telegraph. “But in credibility terms, it’s an extinction-level event.”

The third and final film in the new trilogy of “Jurassic Park” films is the worst reviewed of all six films in the franchise, currently holding a 36% rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes from 175 reviews.
While the Universal film is expected to tally around $125 million in ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada this weekend, poor audience reception could hamper its overall grosses in the coming weeks. Not to mention, the film faces steeper competition from other films, such as Disney and Marvel’s “Thor: Love and Thunder” in the coming weeks.
Directed by Colin Trevorrow, “Dominion” takes place four years after the destruction of Isla Nublar, the island that once housed the cloned prehistoric beasts. Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard reprise their roles as Owen Grady and Claire Dearing and are joined by “Jurassic Park” alums Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, who return as Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler and Ian Malcolm, respectively.
“Even with the original cast on board, there’s surprisingly little chemistry or humor, and the movie makes repeated pit stops to stress family values,” wrote Joshua Rothkopf in his review for Entertainment Weekly.
There’s wide consensus among critics that “Dominion” desperately wants to capture the nostalgia of “Jurassic Park” but that the stunning visual effects fail to make up for its missteps in storytelling and character development.

Here’s what critics thought of “Jurassic World: Dominion,” which arrives in domestic theaters this Friday:

Ross Bonaime, Collider

“‘Dominion’ wants audiences to remember what they loved about the first film, yet without harnessing any of the joy or spectacle that made this series such a standout when it launched in 1993,” Bonaime wrote in his review for Collider.
“Instead, ‘Jurassic World: Dominion’ is an exhausting slog, a legacyquel that doesn’t seem to recognize where the power of that legacy comes from, and overarching idiocy that permeates every scene in the film,” he wrote.
Bonaime said the film attempts to pay homage to fans of the original “Jurassic Park” trilogy, which was released between 1993 and 2001, but fails to give its trio of Dern, Neill and Goldblum anything interesting to tackle.
“Instead of pitting this iconic trio amongst dinosaurs once more, ‘Dominion’ mostly faces them off against giant locusts, which is about as compelling as it sounds,” he wrote.
Read the full review from Collider.

Chris Pratt stars in Universal’s “Jurassic World: Dominion.”

Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

“‘Dominion’ is the final entry into a trilogy that, at no point, ever knew what it was doing,” Loughrey wrote in her review for Independent. “It’s been like watching a cook completely butcher a recipe, before manically pouring in spice after spice to try and fix it.”
Loughrey said there were “crumbs of ideas for better Jurassic films that no one ever had the boldness of vision to commit to.”
She pointed to the “Jurassic World” villain played by Vincent D’Onofrio who threatened to militarize velociraptors.
“Dinosaurs with guns? Cool, they should have done that,” she wrote.
Then she noted that “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” toyed with the idea of Dr. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong) splicing together different dinosaur genes to create new species.
“Mutant dinosaurs? Cool, they should have done that,” she wrote.
“Dominion” seems to follow the same pattern. The trailer teases that dinosaurs have been unleashed from captivity and now roam among us. However, the film spends little time on this concept, instead exploring larger-than-usual locusts destroying crops and a rescue operation after Maisie (Isabella Sermon), a human clone of the daughter of one of Jurassic Park’s original founders, is kidnapped.
“The only way to really enjoy ‘Dominion’ is to hold tight to those small sparks of imagination,” Loughrey wrote.
“There’s a car chase in the middle of Malta where a velociraptor gets absolutely decked by a metal pole,” she wrote. “Some genetic fiddling introduces the feathered and more scientifically accurate Therizinosaurus to the pack — a nightmarish creature with ‘Babadook’ claws. DeWanda Wise, as pilot Kayla Watts, slips so easily into the Han Solo-esque, reluctant hero role that it’s frustrating she’s been introduced so late in the trilogy.”
Read the full review from Independent.

Stephanie Zacharek, Time

“The point of entertainment is not to wear you down, but you’d never know it from watching ‘Jurassic World: Dominion,’ directed by Colin Trevorrow,” Zacharek wrote in her review for Time.
She noted that the film kicked off in a “reasonably promising fashion” but quickly becomes “wearying” after the first hour rolls by.
“There’s so much plot, so many characters, so damn much Chris Pratt, that the dinosaurs end up taking a backseat,” Zacharek wrote. “They’re the forlorn underdogs of their own film.”
“With so many humans bumbling around, there’s barely room for dinosaurs,” she added. “Some highlights include a duo of apex predators going at it in a fight-to-the-death for universal superiority, though really, they’re tussling over one tiny deer carcass.”
A bright spot of the feature, Zacharek says, are new characters Ramsay Cole, a nerdy BioSyn genius played by Mamoudou Athie, and the “ornery-cool mercenary pilot” Watts.
Read the full review from Time.

DeWanda Wise and Laura Dern star in Universal’s “Jurassic World: Dominion.”

Germain Lussier, Gizmodo

“‘Jurassic World: Dominion’ is being billed as the ‘Conclusion of the Jurassic Era’ and that will undoubtedly be the case,” Lussier wrote in his review for Gizmodo. “Mostly because it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that this once-beloved franchise should become extinct.”
Lussier said the film’s greatest sin is that it is “generally uninteresting and boring.”
Like other critics, Lussier praised the film’s visual effects, noting that “every second a dinosaur was on screen, I believed it was a dinosaur.” But he too said that wasn’t enough to save the film. He noted that as the final chapter of the sequel trilogy, the film is “painfully familiar,” seeming to follow the same path as previous installments without elevating the material.
“The first ‘Jurassic Park’ worked because it was simple, relatable, and smart,” he wrote. “You wanted to be in that place, with those characters, and everything made sense.”
“Now, five sequels later, there hasn’t been one film that comes close to capturing that magic,” he added. “They’re all either too complicated or too similar. ‘Jurassic World: Dominion’ is both of those things, as well as being a narrative cesspool, making it, without a doubt, the worst Jurassic movie yet.”
Read the full review from Gizmodo.
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC. NBCUniversal is the distributor of “Jurassic World: Dominion” and owns Rotten Tomatoes.

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The announcement marks the latest expansion for GM’s Ultium technologies, including batteries, outside the auto market.
Last year, the companies announced a partnership to develop a lunar rover using the Ultium vehicle platform and batteries for NASA.
GM has also announced partnerships to use or test the technology in electric motors for trains, boats and other systems.

MILFORD, Mich. — General Motors and Lockheed Martin said Thursday they plan to produce an array of moon-roving vehicles for commercial space missions and services powered by the automaker’s electric vehicle battery technology.
The companies said they plan to test the batteries in space later this year, with the goal of having their first vehicle using the batteries on the moon in 2025. In addition to potential NASA bids, they hope to strike deals with private companies such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

“The interest around the world is tremendous,” said Derek Hodgins, Lockheed Martin’s director of product strategy and sales for lunar infrastructure services, during a joint event here at the GM Proving Ground.
The announcement marks the latest expansion for GM’s Ultium technologies, including batteries, outside the auto market. The automaker also has announced partnerships to use or test the technologies in electric motors for trains, boats and other industries.
GM and Lockheed last year announced a partnership to develop a lunar rover utilizing its Ultium vehicle platform and batteries for NASA, which is assessing projects following a bid for its upcoming Artemis missions to the moon.
The companies say their experience developing the lunar rover for NASA is being used to develop other types of vehicles for space missions and services such as data and soil collection.
The lunar mobility vehicle for commercial use is being developed at a multimillion-dollar simulator at GM’s testing lab that emulates the moon’s surface and atmosphere, including the change in gravity. GM was previously the major subcontractor that helped Boeing create a similar vehicle used during three Apollo missions on the moon.

The new vehicle is being designed to be more technologically advanced, powerful and to last at least 10 years on the moon. Its top speed, for example, will be 12 mph compared to the 7 mph of the Apollo-era vehicles. It also is designed to operate autonomously when not being used by astronauts.
“This is no dune buggy,” Hodgins said. “These are tools that were not available in the late ’60s.”
Lockheed Martin is already speaking with potential customers for the lunar rover vehicles, according to Hodgins. He declined to disclose what companies are involved in the discussions.
GM also said Thursday it is drawing on its experiences developing the Hummer EV for system controls, battery management and torque management to control the propulsion for the new lunar rover program.
“It’s moon dust, but there are also craters, rocks and other things you’re going to have to navigate,” Drew Mitchell, vehicle dynamics performance engineer for Hummer, said Thursday.
The project remains in development. However, executives said they expect to move into “execution phase” shortly.

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Stitch Fix is laying off 15% of its salaried workers, or about 330 people.
The company also issued weak revenue guidance as it contends with weaker consumer demand.
Shares of the company fell Thursday to $7.78. A year ago, the stock was trading above $68.

Stitch Fix said Thursday that it is laying off 15% of salaried positions within its workforce, mostly in corporate roles and styling leadership positions, in a bid to trim expenses amid red hot inflation and waning consumer demand for certain items.
CNBC was first to report on the layoffs, which the company confirmed Thursday afternoon as it reported its financial results for the three-month period ended April 30.

Stitch Fix said it expects to save between $40 million to $60 million in fiscal year 2023 with the job cuts. It also anticipates incurring restructuring and other one-time charges of roughly $15 million to $20 million, which will be recognized in its upcoming fourth quarter.
The company also offered up a disappointing forecast for its fiscal fourth quarter, calling for revenue to be between $485 million and $495 million, which would represent as much as a 15% drop from prior-year levels.
Stitch Fix shares tumbled nearly 11% Thursday, closing the day at $7.78. They declined another 15% in after-hours trading. The stock traded as high as $68.15 a year ago.
The job cuts come as the online styling service has been grappling with higher expenses on everything from its supply chain to marketing to labor, and it has also been struggling to onboard new users.
“We’ve taken a renewed look at our business and what is required to build our future,” Stitch Fix CEO Elizabeth Spaulding said in a memo to employees. “While this was an incredibly difficult decision, it was one needed to make to position ourselves for profitable growth.”

Elizabeth Spaulding, chief executive officer of Stitch Fix, participates in a panel discussion during the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., on Monday, May 2, 2022.
Lauren Justice | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The roughly 330 people were notified of the cuts on Thursday morning, the memo said. That number represents about 4% of the company’s overall workforce.
The cutbacks at Stitch Fix fit into a broader trend shaping up within the U.S. labor market, as pandemic darlings such as Peloton, Netflix and Wayfair become more conservative with their hiring, but airlines, restaurants and hospitality chains still struggle to fill roles.
The layoffs come three months after Stitch Fix cut its revenue guidance for the year and withdrew its earnings forecast. Spaulding said the company’s active client count was not where she wanted it to be. As of April 30, Stitch Fix counted 3.9 million customers, a 5% drop from the prior year.
Stitch Fix’s business is entirely online and that was seen as a bright spot during earlier stages of the Covid pandemic, as spending shifted online. More recently, its rollout of a direct-buy option known as Freestyle didn’t go as well as the company had hoped for. And more and more shoppers are shifting back to spending their money in stores as pandemic restrictions lift.
Stitch Fix reported a net loss for its fiscal third quarter of $78 million, or 72 cents per share, compared with a loss of $18.8 million, or 18 cents per share, a year earlier.
Revenue fell 8% to $492.9 million from $535.6 million a year earlier.
“We know we still have work to do,” Spaulding said in a press release.
Stitch Fix’s market cap has fallen below $1 billion, as the stock has declined about 58% this year.

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Disney has abruptly fired Peter Rice, its most senior television content executive, sources told CNBC.
Rice didn’t know the firing was coming, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
Disney elevated Dana Walden to take over for Rice, while the company’s board expressed its support for CEO Bob Chapek.
Chapek told Rice in a short meeting Wednesday he wasn’t a cultural fit at Disney, a source told CNBC.

LOS ANGELES — Disney has abruptly fired Peter Rice, its most senior television content executive, multiple sources told CNBC on Thursday, while the company’s board expressed support for CEO Bob Chapek.
Rice, who came to Disney in 2019, after the company finalized its deal to buy 21st Century Fox, didn’t know the firing was coming, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. He will be succeeded by Dana Walden, Rice’s top lieutenant, effective immediately.

Chapek told Rice he wasn’t a cultural fit at Disney in a short meeting on Wednesday, one of the people said. Based on feedback from other Disney employees, the CEO made the decision Rice didn’t work collaboratively with others and was more interested in controlling his own fiefdom, the person said. Chapek also felt Walden excelled in working with others, the person said.
“Dana is a dynamic, collaborative leader and cultural force who in just three years has transformed our television business into a content powerhouse that consistently delivers the entertainment audiences crave,” Chapek said in a statement.

Peter Rice, then-chairman and chief executive officer of Fox Networks Group Inc., speaks at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, May 3, 2017.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

While generally well liked personally, Rice has irritated some co-workers at Disney for monopolizing information rather than sharing it with co-workers — a style that may have worked at Fox but was ill-fitting at Disney, according to a person familiar with the matter. He clashed with former Disney head of streaming Kevin Mayer over who should have greenlight powers over choosing content for Disney+.
Still, Rice supported Chapek’s organizational changes, which gave him back the power to have direct conversations with Hollywood talent about whether Disney would choose their work, another person said. Rice was given an undisclosed payout, a person familiar with the matter said.
Rice also interviewed with Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav last year for a top content executive role, according to people familiar with the matter. Zaslav ultimately decided he didn’t want the extra layer between him and division heads, the people said. Disney eventually renewed Rice’s contract in August 2021, which was set to run through 2024.

Chapek’s future

Rice was seen as a possible candidate to succeed Chapek as Disney’s chief executive, though that’s not why he was fired, two of the people said. Rice is respected in Hollywood, and his ouster is “unheard of” and “sizeable,” one of the people said. A Disney spokesperson declined to comment. Rice couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
“The strength of the Walt Disney Company’s businesses coming out of the pandemic is a testament to Bob’s leadership and vision for the company’s future,” Susan Arnold, chair of Disney’s board, said in a statement. “In this important time of business growth and transformation, we are committed to keeping Disney on the successful path it is on today, and Bob and his leadership team have the support and confidence of the board.”
Arnold’s statement is the first public comment Disney’s board has made about Chapek since he’s dealt with several controversies this year, including a falling out with former CEO Bob Iger and his handling of communications around Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation. Chapek’s contract is up in February.
Rice’s firing comes as Disney is aggressively working to expand its streaming audience, a major priority of Chapek’s. Rice oversaw 20th Television, ABC Entertainment, ABC News and FX, among other brands.
— CNBC’s Julia Boorstin contributed to this report.

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Box office analysts currently forecast a $125 million debut for Universal’s “Jurassic World: Dominion.”
“Top Gun: Maverick” will have fewer premium format theaters, but older audiences are expected to continue buying tickets to see the Tom Cruise-led film.
“Dominion” won’t have any major competition from an action flick until July 8, when Marvel’s “Thor: Love and Thunder” hits theaters, but it has been receiving poor reviews.

Tom Cruise attends the UK premiere and Royal Film Performance of ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ in Leicester Square on May 19, 2022 in London, England (L) and still of Jurassic World: Dominon (R)
Getty Images | Universal Studios

Dinosaurs are destined to steal the box office crown from Tom Cruise this weekend, but it’s not clear by how much.
Universal’s “Jurassic World: Dominion” enters domestic theaters this Friday, and it will snag the majority of pricier premium format screens from Paramount and Skydance’s “Top Gun: Maverick.”

Box office analysts forecast a $125 million debut for “Jurassic World,” which should easily be the top grossing film at the box office his week. “Dominion” is the sixth film in the “Jurassic” franchise, which dates back to summer 1993, when Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” stomped all sorts of box office records.
“Interestingly, two blockbusters jockeying for screens is a ‘problem’ that hasn’t presented itself much if at all over the course of the pandemic,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore. “The dominance of one film for weeks on end has become the new normal, but one that is not beneficial for the overall health of theaters who need multiple popular films on their screens particularly in the summer season.”
Prior to the pandemic, it was not unusual for the summer movie season to see a stacked slate of film releases. Often blockbuster features opened back-to-back or with only a week or two between debuts.
“We’ve pointed to numerous litmus tests for moviegoing’s rebound over the past year, and this weekend will present yet another one,” said Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at BoxOffice.com. “Can two giant blockbusters coexist relatively close to each other? Pre-pandemic, especially during summer, the answer was often yes with one caveat: the strength of word of mouth.”
“Top Gun: Maverick” has soared at the box office since it opened two weeks ago, tallying more than $546 million globally. Domestically, the film saw only a 32% drop in ticket sales in the during its second weekend in theaters, generating $86 million. Typically, films will see between a 50% and 70% drop between the first and second weekend. Analysts predict “Maverick” could snare another $50 million during its third domestic weekend.

“‘Maverick’ is clearly living up to and beyond its side of the bargain with a record-breaking run and near-immaculate audience reception, but it will lose out on IMAX and other premium screen ticket price boosts when ‘Jurassic’ opens,” said Robbins.
The average regular movie theater seat costs between $10 and $12, while premium seats average around $16. In some cases, premium formats like IMAX can cost $20 or more per seat. Domestically, the studio and movie theater chains typically split film proceeds evenly.
Still, the “Maverick” run at the box office is far from over. Robbins noted that the film has generated a lot of goodwill in cinemas, and while younger audiences may be courted into seeing the new “Jurassic World” film, older audiences will likely still turn up for Cruise’s sequel. More than half the audience for “Maverick” has been 35 or older, according to Paramount.
“The expected impact of ‘Jurassic World’ on the marketplace is one that has been baked into the strategic cake for ‘Top Gun: Maverick,'” said Dergarabedian. “The film will likely see another surge in popularity in late June and, of course, on the Fourth of July holiday.”
For “Jurassic World: Dominion,” however, this game of diminishing returns could be much more severe. The blockbuster feature has received overwhelmingly negative reviews from critics and could see a steep drop off in ticket sales after its opening weekend if word of mouth from moviegoers is also sour.
“Dominion” won’t have any major competition from an action flick until July 8, when Marvel’s “Thor: Love and Thunder” hits theaters. However, counterprograming like “Lightyear,” “Elvis,” “The Black Phone” and “Minions: The Rise of Gru” could draw potential moviegoers away.
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC. NBCUniversal is the distributor of “Jurassic World: Dominion.”

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A little-known conglomerate of companies including Vitamin Shoppe, Pet Supplies Plus and a home furnishing chain known as Buddy’s is suddenly the talk of the retail industry.
Franchise Group, a publicly traded business with a market capitalization of about $1.6 billion, has entered into exclusive sale talks with Kohl’s.
Analysts and experts are pointing to Franchise Group’s track record and its recent acquisitions for a better sense of what Kohl’s future could hold.

Shoppers enter a Kohl’s store in Peoria, Illinois.
Daniel Acker | Bloomberg | Getty Images

A little-known conglomerate of companies including The Vitamin Shoppe, Pet Supplies Plus and a home furnishing chain called Buddy’s is suddenly the talk of the retail industry.
Franchise Group, a publicly traded business with a market capitalization of about $1.6 billion, has entered into exclusive sale talks with Kohl’s. It proposed a bid of $60 per share to acquire the retailer at a roughly $8 billion valuation. Franchise Group and Kohl’s are in a three-week window during which the two businesses can firm up any due diligence and final financing arrangements.

Questions have since been swirling about what all this will mean for Kohl’s, should a deal go through: What will happen to the Sephora beauty shop-in-shops within Kohl’s, or the retailer’s returns partnership with Amazon? Will Kohl’s CEO Michelle Gass stay on with the company? Are store closings inevitable?
Also, why would Franchise Group want to own Kohl’s in the first place, as retailers including Kohl’s confront inventory challenges and inflation? Just a few weeks ago, Kohl’s slashed its financial forecast for the full fiscal year as more Americans pull back on discretionary spending. Meanwhile, investors are wrangling with rate hikes from the Federal Reserve and the potential for a recession in the near term.
The deal is still in flux, so those questions don’t have firm answers at this point. Instead, analysts and experts point to Franchise Group’s track record and its recent acquisitions for a better sense of what Kohl’s future could hold.
Spokespeople from Franchise Group, Sephora and Amazon didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on this story. Kohl’s declined to comment.

What Franchise Group wants

“What Franchise Group does is look for good businesses and well-known, strong brand names with a good consumer following,” said Michael Baker, a senior research analyst at D.A. Davidson.

“And then they have a different strategy on how to capitalize or how to monetize those acquisitions,” he added. “Sometimes it’s turning them from company-owned stores into franchise stores.”
Franchise Group was founded in 2019 through a $138 million merger between Liberty Tax Service and Buddy’s, according to the company’s website.
Under President and CEO Brian Kahn, who has a private equity background, Franchise Group went on to scoop up Sears’ outlet business; Vitamin Shoppe; American Freight, which sells furniture, mattresses and appliances; Pet Supplies Plus; Sylvan Learning; and Badcock, a home furnishings chain that caters to lower-income households.

A Vitamin Shoppe store in New York.
Scott Mlyn | CNBC

Franchise Group is mostly in the business of owning franchises. But the consensus is that Kahn likely won’t employ the same strategy at Kohl’s, which has more than 1,100 bricks-and-mortar stores across 49 states.
“The strategy there would be to work with the current management team to run [Kohl’s] better, or replace management if needed,” said Baker. “They’ve done that with some of their assets. … Kahn has a track record of doing good deals.”
Baker used Franchise Group’s most recent acquisition of Badcock, a deal valued at about $580 million, as one example. The company has since entered into two different sale agreements, one for Badcock’s retail stores and another for its distribution centers, corporate headquarters and additional real estate, to net roughly $265 million altogether. Rob Burnette remains in his role as Badcock president and CEO.
On an earnings call in early May, Franchise Group’s Kahn told analysts — without naming Kohl’s directly — what he looks for in any transaction.
“Management, for us, is always the key,” he said. “Whether we do very small transactions or very large transactions.”
“We’ve got a lot of conviction in the brands that we operate now,” Kahn also said on the call.
He added that all of Franchise Group’s past acquisitions generate plenty of cash to support the company’s dividend and to allow for further M&A activity, and any deals it considers in the future would also have to fit this mold.

A real estate play

Earlier this year, Kohl’s deemed a per-share offer of $64 from Starboard-backed Acacia Research to be too low. In late May, the retailer’s stock traded as low as $34.64 and it hasn’t been as high as $64.38 since late January. Kohl’s shares closed Wednesday at $45.76.
Franchise Group likely views its $60-per-share offer as somewhat of a steal, particularly if the company can finance most of the transaction through real estate.
Franchise Group said in a press release earlier this week that it plans to contribute about $1 billion of capital to the Kohl’s transaction, all of which is expected to be funded through debt rather than equity. Apollo is in talks to potentially be Franchise Group’s term loan provider, according to a person familiar with the matter. Apollo declined to comment.
Meanwhile, the majority of this deal is anticipated to be financed through real estate. CNBC previously reported that Franchise Group is working with Oak Street Real Estate Capital on a so-called sale-leaseback transaction. Oak Street declined to comment.
If it plays out this way, Franchise Group would receive an influx of capital from Oak Street, and it would no longer have Kohl’s real estate sitting on its balance sheet. Instead, it would have rent payments and lease obligations.
As of Jan. 29, Kohl’s owned 410 locations, leased another 517 and operated ground leases on 238 of its shops. All of its owned real estate was valued at a little more than $8 billion at that time, an annual filing shows.
“If Franchise Group can get the $7 billion or $8 billion out of the real estate, they’re only paying about $1 billion for the assets. So it’s pretty cheap,” said Susan Anderson, a senior research analyst at B. Riley Securities. “And I think [Kahn] wouldn’t do the deal unless he already has the sale lined up and agreements already in place.”

‘A playbook in place’

But some retail experts are pouring cold water on the plan, saying such a substantial real estate sale could end up putting Kohl’s in a much weaker financial position.
“This is completely unnecessary and will only serve to weaken the firm and restrict investments that are needed to revitalize the business,” said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail. “Takeovers of other retail businesses that have followed this model have never ended well for the party being taken over.”
To be sure, some sale-leaseback transactions, and particularly those on a much smaller scale, have been seen as successful.
In 2020, Big Lots reached a deal with Oak Street to raise $725 million from selling four company-owned distribution centers and leasing them back. It gave the big-box retailer additional liquidity during near the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Also in 2020, Bed Bath & Beyond completed a sale-leaseback transaction with Oak Street, in which it sold about 2.1 million square feet of commercial real estate and netted $250 million in proceeds. Bed Bath CEO Mark Tritton touted the deal at the time as a move to raise capital to invest back in the business.
Franchise Group could be eyeing Kohl’s as a way to create more efficiencies on the backend, between all of its other businesses, according to Vincent Caintic, an analyst at Stephens. Cobbling together resources such as fulfilment centers and shipping providers could be a smart move, he said.
“They have the furniture stores, a rent-to-own store, and a lot of them deal with consumer goods,” Caintic said. “Maybe they can get some additional pricing power by becoming a larger player.”
At the same time, he said, this would be Franchise Group’s largest acquisition to date, which could come with a steeper learning curve.
All of Franchise Group’s retailers combined did $3.3 billion in revenue in calendar year 2021. Kohl’s total revenue surpassed $19.4 billion in the 12-month period ended Jan. 29.
“Franchise Group has a history of buying businesses, levering them up, and then freeing up capital very quickly to pay off that debt,” Caintic said. “They do have a playbook in place.”
But, he added, the companies Franchise bought before it pursued Kohl’s were much smaller – “And those were done when it was very cheap to get debt.”

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Topps’ parent company, Fanatics, will launch a line of trading cards featuring college athletes.
The company didn’t disclose how much some of the athletes will be paid, but says their compensation will vary depending on several factors.
The Florida company says the college market is an “untapped category” that can bring in new collectors.

Fanatics display at the All-Star Players House Presented by MLBPA located at the Corner Alley Bar & Grill on July 07, 2019 in Cleveland, Ohio.
Duane Prokop | Getty Images

Topps is launching a line of trading cards featuring college athletes this fall, in a deal that parent company Fanatics said will cut some players in on the profits and pair them up with school logos on cards for the first time.
Fanatics, which sells sports apparel and acquired Topps earlier this year, said the program will include more than 150 schools featuring both current and former athletes. The company also has deals with more than 200 individual student-athletes at those schools to use their names and likenesses. And the plan is to keep adding schools and athletes, Fanatics said.

The majority of the Power Five conference schools are participating, including Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Oregon and Texas A&M.
“We think this entire category is one that will not only bring new collectors into the space, but will also benefit student athletes to expand product offerings available in the marketplace,” Derek Eiler, executive vice president of Fanatics’ college division, told CNBC.
Terms of the deals with schools were not disclosed, but most of the athletes at those schools will not get money. Fanatics also declined to say how much the individual student-athletes with their own deals will be paid, but said compensation will vary based on their position, their public profile and how high they’re expected to be drafted. For players who go on to play professionally, the demand for their football or basketball card will likely increase.
Fanatics said it will be the first time school logos are licensed for use on trading cards. In other trading card deals with college athletes, school logos had to be airbrushed out.
“We are excited that Kentucky student athletes are a part of this exclusive new program with Topps and Fanatics which allows fans to collect official trading cards of their favorite current UK Wildcat athletes for the first time,” Jason Schlafer, University of Kentucky’s executive associate athletic director, told CNBC.

The deal also includes digital cards that can be produced quickly. Eiler said those can be used to try and capitalize on key moments or big plays during games.
Physical cards will be sold in packs and individually at Fanatics retailers, Fanatics’ website, hobby stores and some college bookstores.
For Fanatics, the deal helps establish relationships with student-athletes before they reach the professional ranks.
“With Fanatics shrewdly leveraging the iconic Topps brand they recently purchased, their launch into physical and digital trading cards will simultaneously boost their own revenues while creating yet another avenue for student athletes to monetize their name-image-likeness,” said Patrick Rishe, director of the sports business program at Washington University.
Rishe said the deal could energize the autograph market for current and past stars.
“Imagine what a card signed by Ed Pickney and others from the Cinderella 1985 Villanova basketball team could earn,” he said.
Fanatics acquired Topps in January in a deal worth an estimated $500 million as it sought to dive deeper into the sports collectibles market. The company was founded in 2011 by Michael Rubin, co-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils. In March, Fanatics raised $1.5 billion to give it a valuation of $27 billion.
The company ranked No. 21 on this year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list. More