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Podcast Notes: Morning Brew Daily - Episode 554
Episode Overview Title: What Goods Will Be Impacted By Tariffs & Amazon Buying TikTok? Hosts: Neal Freyman & Toby Howell Date: April 4th, 2023 Description: The episode discusses the impact of Trump's recent tariffs, the response from global markets, and the implications for companies like Apple. Additionally, the episode covers the possible acquisition of TikTok by Amazon and highlights Microsoft's 50th anniversary, along with the upcoming Minecraft movie.
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Episode Structure
- NYC Subway Map Update (00:00 - 03:00)
- Trump's New Tariffs (03:00 - 15:00)
- Overview of the tariffs and market response
- Specific goods likely to see price increases
- Global Reactions to Tariffs (15:00 - 18:45)
- Responses from world leaders and affected countries
- TikTok Acquisition Deadline (18:45 - 23:00)
- Overview of the potential bid for TikTok
- Microsoft Turns 50 (23:00 - 28:00)
- Acknowledgment of Microsoft's history and impact
- Minecraft Movie Release (28:00 - 31:00)
- Discussion of the potential success and challenges of the film adaptation
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Key Discussions
- NYC Subway Map Update
- New Design: The NYC subway map underwent its first redesign in 50 years, prioritizing visual clarity for a variety of users.
- Toby's Rating: Toby appreciates the redesign for its improved visibility and user-friendly approach.
- Trump's New Tariffs
- Economic Impact: Trump imposed a 10% tariff on a wide range of imports, leading to a significant drop in stock markets, reminiscent of the COVID-19 pandemic market response.
- Companies Affected:
- Apple: Experienced a major sell-off due to its reliance on manufacturing in China, Vietnam, and India; faced tariffs of 46% and 26% respectively.
- Retail Sector: Companies like Target and Dollar Tree experienced significant losses.
- Consumer Goods Impact: Expect price hikes in everyday items, including food (especially fresh produce) and electronics.
- Global Reactions to Tariffs
- International Response: Leaders from the EU, UK, and developing countries expressed outrage and concern.
- EU's Stance: Ursula von der Leyen criticized the tariffs, suggesting they would harm global economic stability.
- Cambodia's Concern: Leaders worried about the impact on key export industries.
- TikTok Acquisition Deadline
- April 5 Deadline: ByteDance must sell its U.S. operations or face a ban.
- Potential Bidders: Amazon's late entry into the bidding process; others include major private equity firms and notable figures like Mr. Beast.
- Negotiation Challenges: Complications due to the app's algorithm and the reluctance of ByteDance to sell.
- Microsoft Turns 50
- Milestone Celebration: Discussion of Microsoft's evolution and impact on technology, emphasizing its adaptability and market significance.
- Cultural Impact: Mention of Microsoft's influence on software, gaming, and computing infrastructure.
- Ranked Innovations: Overview of The Verge's top five Microsoft products:
- Windows XP
- Xbox 360
- Surface Pro 3
- Halo
- Windows 95
- Minecraft Movie Release
- Film Anticipation: The film hopes to capitalize on the game's immense popularity and success in the gaming sector.
- Challenges: The lack of a narrative structure may impact its box office success, yet strong marketing and fan engagement might counteract this.
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Key Takeaways
- Market Volatility: The new tariffs have caused widespread panic among investors, raising concerns about economic recovery.
- Consumer Impact: Everyday goods prices are likely to rise, with significant implications for American consumers.
- International Relations: The tariffs could lead to strained relationships with trading partners and potential retaliatory measures.
- Cultural Milestone: Microsoft's 50th anniversary highlights its pivotal role in shaping modern computing.
- Film Adaptation Success: The Minecraft movie's performance could influence future adaptations in the gaming genre.
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Conclusion This episode of Morning Brew Daily provided a critical look at current economic policies and their broader implications for both consumers and international relations. With insights into major companies and their responses, the discussion framed a context for understanding ongoing market dynamics and the evolving landscape of technology and entertainment.
--- For more updates and episodes, subscribe to Morning Brew Daily on your favorite podcast platform or YouTube.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Checking off the boxes on your to do list is a great feeling. And when it comes to checking off coverage, a State Farm agent can help you choose an option that's right for you. Whether you prefer talking in person, on the phone, or using the award-winning app, it's nice knowing you have help finding coverage that best fits your needs. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
0:27Good morning for Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Liberation Day was more like Liquidation Day, as stocks plunged to their worst trading session since 2020. Then everyone is lining up to buy TikTok, but can a deal get done before the app has to go dark in the US? It's Friday, April 4th. Let's ride.
0:52When all of you come to visit New York next, first of all, say hi to me and Toby. Second of all, you might notice something a little different on the walls of subway stations. The New York City subway got a new map this week, its first redesign in almost 50 years. In many ways, the new map is a throwback to the 1972 Unimark map, which which has a modernist streamlined feel and features as many straight lines as possible. That was replaced in 1979 with Michael Hertz's so-called spaghetti diagram, which has remained in use until this week. Toby, on a scale of Jaguar to HBO Max, how would you rate this redesign?
1:28I think it's very, very understandable, which is the main point here, because think about a transit map. It has to be, you know, available to be seen by people with different levels of vision. It has to be seen by people who have different levels of understanding of what New York City is. It's not just locals taking it. So there's a lot of things to kind of take into account. And what this map is good at is that it finally gets away from reality a little bit. It's a lot more abstract than the previous, more geographically representative map. And it prioritizes visual clarity over pure accuracy, which I think is a good thing for a lot of people.
2:05Because the good thing it does, too, is improve the visibility of transfer points at the busiest subs. You can clearly see, all right, Union Square's got a lot of stuff going through it. So this is where I have to make my transfer. So I do think that this is not a new debate. I mean, you talked about the 72 map that changed over in 79. So we've been having this geographic versus visually representative debate for a long time now. And now we're swinging back towards, you know, visually representative. And it looks cool. That's my main baseline. It looks cool. Now a word from our sponsor, Tax Act.
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3:50Get started today at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. After President Trump unleashed the biggest hike in American tariffs in more than a century, markets responded similarly to when I tried Vegemite for the first time. It was a historically gruesome day on Wall Street. The S &P 500 tumbled 4.8%, erasing$2.5 trillion in value, and the Nasdaq plunged nearly 6%. That was their biggest one-day losses since March 2020 when the world was shutting down due to COVID. Investors consider these tariffs a severe economic shock that threatens to crush corporate profits, raise prices for consumers, and slow growth in the U.S.
4:29and around the world. To recap, on Wednesday, a.k.a. Liberation Day, Trump upended decades of U.S. trade policy when he instituted a 10 % tariff on virtually all American imports with much higher duties on 60 countries he considers the worst trade offenders against the United States. It is an earth rattling gambit by Trump to reshore manufacturing back to the U.S. and swallow short term pain for a longer term buildup of the industrial base. The president brushed off the market panic yesterday, saying his tariff plan is going very well and adding that I think our markets are going to boom. Got to give it a chance.
5:02Got to give it a little bit of time. But, Toby, as it stands, it's the end of the economic order as we know it. And Trump feels fine. Investors, on the other hand, are panicking. Right. The damage was immediate and it was widespread. Over 80 % of the companies in the S &P 500 were in the red as of 10, 20 a.m. in the morning. And then over 80 % finished the day in the red as well. And the hardest hit companies were those that rely on manufacturing abroad. So think about your Apples, your Nikes of the world. Retailers too that source a lot of their products from abroad also took hit. Target was down over 10%.
5:37Dollar Tree was also down double digits. Big tech was also feeling the pinch a lot. The Magnificent Seven saved more than$1 trillion off of their market cap, and Apple had its worst day in over half a decade. So those were just some of the biggest names. And why you saw such a deeply red day is that from the very top of the tech world all the way down to Dollar Tree and the retail world, there was a lot of people feeling the pinch here. Yeah, let's talk about Apple for a sec, because they really were the poster child of this sell-off, especially in tech. Apple has manufactured its iPhones and everything we buy from it in China for a long time.
6:17It has these vast factories from its suppliers there. And in 2018, over the past five or so years or decade, it's been trying to diversify away from China because Trump threatened tariffs on China in his first term. So where did they go? To Vietnam and India. So they set up these big factories to make iPhones and iPads, Macs and other accessories in Vietnam and India. And then what does Trump do yesterday is slaps a 46 percent tariff on Vietnam on Vietnam and a 26 percent tariff on India. So this diversification around Asia that Apple tried to do starting in 2017, 2018 just completely backfired and fell nine percent yesterday because it is going to bear the brunt of tariffs.
7:01And overall, the hardware sector, everything we get from China, which is absolutely crushed. Yeah, Apple has some very tough choices to make now because it already is one of the more expensive phones and more of the expensive products on the market. So they can't necessarily raise prices. I mean, maybe they can. They're Apple. Or they'll just have to eat the profits. That's what a lot of companies are kind of facing right now. It is fascinating, though, because big tech, even though we kind of lump them together, like Apple's business model is very different from Amazon's, which is very different from Meta's.
7:29But yet we saw both of those companies also take a major hit. Meta is actually exposed because, remember, we've talked about how much Chinese e-commerce retailers spend money on their platform. Xi and Taimou just dump billions of dollars into meta advertising. And if they start to pull back due to these tariffs, then it hurts meta as well. So you start to see these effects kind of start. Even if meta doesn't manufacture anything, I mean, I guess they manufacture Ray-Ban glasses and headsets at this point, but they're mostly an advertising company, but that is another reason how these tariffs affect even companies that aren't manufacturing direct goods in those countries.
8:06And then another sector that was hit so badly was retail. As you mentioned, five below Gap, Urban Outfitters, Kohl's, Best Buy, they all posted losses of more than 15%. And if Apple was the poster child of the tech wipeout, then I think RH, formerly known as Restoration Hardware, will be the poster child of the retail wipeout. So they make high end or they make high end furniture in China. And on Wednesday, as Trump was announcing these tariffs, the CEO was on an earnings call giving a pretty downbeat earnings call as it was. And what the transcript shows is that he looks at the screen and says, oh, believe as he's seeing these tariffs roll out.
8:48And later he's explaining to the analysts, anybody of scale in the home business has a high percentage of their content coming out of Asia, among all furniture stocks that got wiped out. RH suffered a 40 % drop. And then finally, one blip of green in that sea of red yesterday where some stocks did go up. Consumer staples was a big one because even that's the classic go-to protection in times of downturn. You still need to buy goods like toilet paper, food, etc. Then utility healthcare sectors also didn't fall as hard as the rest. Also, companies that make American-made products rose pretty well.
9:24Some automakers actually weathered the storm quite well. Ford was a survivor, if you want to call it. They said yesterday that they're going to lower some prices on its vehicles to match the same level it charges employees to try to capitalize on this surge of Buy America. So there were a few companies there that were green, even though most of the market was red. The other angle of this post-tariff shock wave that is reverberating through the economy is that a lot of things are on their way to becoming more expensive. According to the Yale Budget Lab, this round of tariffs could bump up fresh produce prices by 4 % and overall food costs by nearly 3%.
9:59That means you can expect some sticker shock on your favorite foods and drinks. To name a few, coffee in the U.S. is almost entirely imported with 99 % grown outside U.S. borders. Same with shrimp, where over 90 % comes from just four countries now facing new duties of up to 46%. Chocolate and vanilla, same story. Even a cheat day McDonald's burger could get more expensive thanks to a 10 % tariff on Australian beef, which is blended with American cuts to create their patties. Outside of the grocery aisle, tech is another industry that not only had a rough day in the market, but is also likely to see higher prices.
10:35China and Vietnam supplied the vast majority of laptops and tablets, nearly$47 billion worth last year, with new tariffs of up to 50%. Price hikes are likely to follow. And then finally, everyday things like shoes are also staring down higher input costs. China and Vietnam account for nearly 70 % of shoes sold in the U.S., and tariffs of 54 % and 46 % are going to hurt. So, Neil, those are some of the categories where economists are forecasting the tariffs to impact. And one other one that you didn't mention is toys. The Toy Association, which is the toy industry lobby group, estimates that 77 % of all toys in the U.S.
11:10are manufactured in China alone. The toy industry operates on very slim margins. So you can't expect them like an apple to absorb the hit that come from tariffs. So the Toy Association estimates that it will cost consumers at least 30 percent more to buy toys purchased from China than they currently do. But yeah, it's a very interesting education and where things are made. I mean, 94 percent of shrimp comes from not the U.S. The shrimp lobby is very happy. The Manufacturing Association here or the Shrimp Producer Association said we are grateful for the Trump administration's actions today. It will preserve American jobs, food security, and our commitment to ethical production.
11:48So you see here, things that the United States does make, at least in small quantities, the job creators here, the companies here are very happy. But for other things that we just simply can't make, bananas, vanilla all comes from Madagascar. Shrimp comes from India. Cocoa comes from everywhere else. Coffee beans, we import 99%. There's no American substitute for that. So if there are tariffs on these products, then their prices are likely to go up. So now that Trump launched the trade war, the big question is how will the world react and what does that mean for the economy? The overall sentiment abroad was outrage, threats of retaliation and bafflement over how these tariff rates were chosen.
12:27In the EU, a major trade partner of the US that was hit with 20 % tariffs, president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said the global economy would, quote, massively suffer from the tariffs and urge negotiation. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer promised to respond with cool and calm heads. In France, President Emmanuel Macron did not keep his cool, encouraging European companies to avoid investing in the United States because of the tariffs. Switzerland said it was confused why it was hit with a 32 percent tariff higher than other U.S. trade partners with similar economies. When 99 percent of U.S.
13:01goods can be imported into Switzerland without a duty, the calculations of the U.S. government are not clear to the federal council. the Swiss Federal Council said. Meanwhile, in developing countries that were walloped with tariffs, leaders are spooked, fearing the decimation of key industries centered on sending products to the U.S. Clothing-focused Cambodia, which counts the U.S. as its top export market, was hit with a 49 % tariff. As a small country, we just want to survive, said a spokesperson for Cambodia's ruling party. Toby, these tariffs reached every part of the globe. What you're seeing right now is sort of a jockeying period amongst world leaders where they, One, try to figure out if this is a jumping off point for negotiations with the United States or if it is something that is here to stay.
13:43That being said, you said it touched every corner of the earth, including some truly random places. And I just want to highlight some of those. One of those are the Hurd Island and McDonald Islands. They are in external Australian territory. They face what Trump is calling a reciprocal tariff of 10 percent, even though the islands had zero trade with the U.S. last year. And the reason why they had zero trade with the U.S. last year is that they have no human population. They are home to only a large population of marine birds and mammals, including seals, abatrosses, and penguins. So that was kind of held up as a meme yesterday of like we are literally tariffing every corner of the earth, even those corners that don't have humans and just have penguins.
14:24All right. So the investors won't have any time to take a deep breath today because the March jobs report is out at 830 a.m. and we'll see what picture of the labor market that paints. But it's just been a wild week on Wall Street. Trump yesterday said that there would be room for negotiation. Remember, the tariffs are not going into effect until April 9th next week. His aides had been going out all over the media and saying, these are the final rates. We're not negotiating. They're not negotiable. And then Trump, to reporters yesterday as he was boarding his helicopter, said, you know, I'm down to negotiate if somebody offers something spectacular in return, then we can talk.
15:07So you can bet they will be fielding calls, they will be negotiating for the next couple of days until these tariffs go into effect, but clearly a shockwave across global markets. Up next, we got a deadline for TikTok coming up. The Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University helps you go from, I know the way, to I've arrived with our top 10 ranked online MBA. Gain skills you can learn today and apply tomorrow. Get ready to go from make it happen to made it happen. And keep striving. Visit Strayer.edu slash Jack Welch MBA to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Shev and as many campuses, including at 2121 15th Street North in Arlington, Virginia.
15:52Tuesday on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozema St. John host the highly anticipated new competition show. I hired 10 creatives from all walks of life. They will be battling it out to see who can impress the world's biggest brands. This is a huge opportunity. This is the battle for the next big idea. This is not play play. We're spending millions of dollars. I'm so excited to embark on this adventure with all of you. Make the best idea win! On brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere Tuesday on NBC. In some non-tariff news, TikTok's clock is getting mighty close to midnight. night. The April 5th deadline for ByteDance, the platform's Chinese parent company, to sell its U.S.
16:32operations or face a nationwide ban is less than a day away. The final countdown has a slew of bachelors from PE giants to big tech power players lining up to win the social media platform's final rose. Right now, the leader in the clubhouse, according to the Financial Times, is a deal that would spin off TikTok's U.S. business into a new entity backed by investor powerhouses like Andreessen Horowitz, Blackstone, and Silver Lake. Oracle would oversee U.S. data, while ByteDance would retain a minority stake under the 20 % cap required by law. Meanwhile, Amazon entered the chat late in the game, making a Hail Mary bid via letter to the Trump administration.
17:10They joined a bizarrely wide field of other suitors, including Perplexity AI, which wants to rebuild the app's algorithm from scratch, mobile tech company Applovin, and even Mr. Beast, who says he's been approach by some backers to be the face of a bid. Whether a deal is actually completed by the deadline or the deadline is extended remains unclear, with a major sticking point being the app's all-important algorithm. ByteDance has floated an idea to license it out to new owners, while U.S. officials want it fully controlled domestically. What is clear, TikTok has become a geopolitical football to be tossed around until Trump can tush-push it across the finish line and get a deal done or get stuffed at the goal line for good.
17:50You said it wasn't tariff news, but But in a way, it is because everything ties back into tariffs now. Trump said that he would be willing to lower tariffs on China. Right now, they're at 54 % if Beijing would approve a deal. And it's a very interesting quirk of this acquisition or buying process because how do you buy a company that's not for sale? China does not want to sell this app. ByteDance does not want to sell this app. They're trying to force this to happen. Maybe they can use tariffs as a negotiating tool. And then you have these the host of major investors in the United States like Blackstone, Andreessen, Horowitz, Silver Lake, these big P.E.
18:27firms that appear to be able to step in to buy TikTok. Should there be a spin out? But just a quick recap of how we got here. I mean, this has been years in the making and it could be extended even further. But last year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers in Congress passed this ban or sell law for TikTok where you either had to, you know, they, ByteDance, either had to sell TikTok to a U.S. owner or it would go dark in the United States. The deadline was January 20th, the day after Trump was inaugurated. Trump extended the deadline for 75 days as soon as he was in office. And so that's kind of where we're at.
19:06The 75 days is up. And J.D. Vance, who has been tasked by Trump, the vice president, with overseeing a potential TikTok deal, said it is highly unlikely that TikTok will go dark again. All signs point to a deal or another extension. Yeah. Vance is being very confident that a deal will be reached before Saturday's ban enforcement deadline. I mean, literally. Yeah, it is coming up. But literally yesterday he said in an interview with Fox that it'll come out before the deadline. So it looks like he's saying that something is about to come together. Now, I do think maybe that talking point from Vance is the fact that they will have a bid lined up with that big PE conglomerate, not Mr.
19:44Beast, unfortunately, or fortunately, whatever your perspective is. But I don't know if that bid will actually be accepted. That's just another case. So I do think maybe the most likely thing is somehow the can will get kicked down the road once again because this is just such a complex negotiation for a very valuable asset in this geopolitical trade war. Today is a big birthday in the corporate world. Microsoft turns 50. The American tech juggernaut, best known for creating Clippy and, well, I guess ushering in the PC revolution also, has managed to reinvent itself from one technological disruption to the next, amassing a market value that now stands at nearly$3 trillion and making its co-founder, Bill Gates, one of the richest people in the world.
20:26He wasn't always that rich, of course. Back in the spring of 1975, Gates was a Harvard dropout who on April 4th of that year launched a tiny software company with his childhood friend Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Their mission was as simple as it was ambitious to put a computer on every desk in every home. But how they aimed to do that differentiated them from the pack. Whereas all the other companies in the very small tech sector at the time were focused on hardware, Gates and Allen decided to go all in on software. That decision and the execution of it in the subsequent decades has made Microsoft a nearly ubiquitous part of the world's computing infrastructure from MS-DOS to Windows to the cloud and now AI.
21:08All the while, it's been a model of stability in its 50-year history. Microsoft has had just three CEOs, Gates, Steve Ballmer, and the current one, Satya Nadella, who's occupied the corner office since 2014. Toby, it hasn't always been smooth sailing for Microsoft for the past half century, but it's been as proficient as my skills for Office Suite. Very proficient, Neil. Yeah, I think you said it well. The real power of Microsoft has just been ubiquity. You cannot do knowledge work in the modern era without bumping into some product that Microsoft created. And it's also been able to find a way to reinvent itself throughout various tech cycles.
21:46It's basically actually created tech cycles. Its first act was probably Windows. Its second act was Office and then this dominance of the desktop. And then its third has been cloud infrastructure and AI. So it's just very much a chameleon that has adapted to the new ways we work and has become just this absolute juggernaut that at one point became the most valuable company in the world. While also, I will say it's had more impact on culture than maybe we give it credit for. I know Apple is like the cool tech company that everyone wants an iPhone. But think about what Microsoft has done. Gaming.
22:17It's got Xbox, Halo, Gears of War, some of the biggest franchises in history. The memes you can't overlook either. I mean, everyone knows Clippy, even if you never really interacted with Clippy. WordArt just has this second life on the internet as well. And then also, shout out to Encarta, which it invented. It was basically Wikipedia before there was Wikipedia. So there's just, you cannot talk about the tech or really even the modern world without talking about Microsoft. It's just that big of a player. And what's remarkable is it kind of missed the internet and mobile. I mean, Steve Ballmer in 2007 has this very infamous quote where he says there's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.
22:56Microsoft Internet Explorer, their browser, was completely eaten by Google Chrome, and yet they continued to persist. Their stock took a beating for a while, but then Satya Nadella came in in 2014, wrote the stock price, got juiced by 10x over his first 10 years in the company. Now, you know, they made a$13 billion investment in open AI and they are seen as one of the leaders in AI. Before we leave Microsoft, The Verge, a tech publication, ranked their top five things that Microsoft has ever created. I'm just going to run them down and I want your take, Toby. Number five, Windows XP. Thought it'd be higher, honestly.
23:34Number four, Xbox 360. Oh, that's good. That's solid. Number three, the Surface Pro 3. the things that they look at on the sidelines of nfl games that's number three it's number three number two is halo which is perhaps the killer app for xbox when it came out in 2001 and number one windows 95 that introduced sort of the modern desktop as we know it with file explorer the taskbar notification area the start button recycle bin now i think one thing that's missing from this list is Bliss, the wallpaper from Windows XP. Oh, yes, that is iconic too. Yes, I forgot about that. But honestly, a pretty solid top five list, but they did my boy Clippy a little dirty right there.
24:18I think he's top five material. If you're looking for a way to kill time and bond with your 12-year-old nephew this weekend, maybe we suggest heading to see the Minecraft movie this weekend. Starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa, it's hitting theaters today as the best-selling video game of all time looks to see if you can translate that success to the big screen. Minecraft is massive. 140 million monthly players, over$3 billion in lifetime revenue, 1 trillion YouTube views of its content. Just by virtue of its subject matter, the Minecraft movie is shaping up to be one of the biggest box office swings in gaming to film history.
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24:53It has all the raw ingredients to be a billion dollar franchise. A global fan base that spans generations, marketing firepower from a big studio, and some beloved IP has usually been a recipe for success if you look across this genre. The most recent Sonic the Hedgehog movie pulled in$500 million running a similar playbook, while the Super Mario Bros. movie grossed over$1.36 billion worldwide, making it the most successful video game adaptation of all time. Now, will this movie be good? Who knows? Rolling Stones described it as exactly what you think it will be and less. It's got Jack Black and is directed by the dude who made Napoleon Dynamite.
25:32So it's at least going to be weird, that's for sure. But weird might just be the ticket to the next billion dollar movie game app, video game adaptation, Neil. Minecraft owned by Microsoft, by the way, another sign of some of those savvy acquisitions made by the company we just talked about. What's interesting about Minecraft that differentiates it from the other video game adaptations that we've seen be successful in recent years is that it doesn't have a narrative structure. The game has become so successful because it's called a sandbox game. You go in and play, and it's a really choose-your-own-adventure.
26:04You can do whatever the heck you want. So every person's experience who plays Minecraft is completely different. So there's not a popular set of characters like Super Mario Brothers can rely on, or there's not a propelling narrative that these filmmakers can use. So they said, we're calling it a Minecraft movie because we're respecting the fact that there's no one story that drives the game. We're not the official story. We're not canonizing anything. We're just one of a zillion stories. So that's what makes this a little bit different. But this is a very interesting IP because it really hasn't been tested outside of the video game sphere now.
26:41But there's been a run of successes in video game to movie adaptations. And we'll see whether this run can continue. And expectations for it have slowly risen. Three weeks ago, box office projections were sitting at around 58 million. Those slowly creeped up to 60 million. Now they're sitting at about$75 million. conservatively. So there's clearly been some indicators in previews that it's going to get off to a hot start. But also maybe people are talking crazy forecast right now because it's been a pretty long time since the movie industry has had a hit. I mean, only one weekend to date in 2025 has exceeded$100 million across all titles.
27:16And that was when Marvel's latest, you know, Hulk Abomination movie came out. And so maybe some of this is manifestation on the movie industry's part that we're like, finally, we got some like reliable IP that we think can generate a big hit so we'll see if it gets out of the gate pretty fast but then that lack of you know narrative structure might lead it to fizzle or maybe the the fan service that it provides will bring in this global audience so i can see it going a lot of different directions one thing is for sure is jack black has his weirdness factor turned up to 11 everything i've read and everything i've seen he's going hard in this movie yeah and apparently he went full method because the director handed out Minecraft to everyone on set for their trailers, and he just went full in.
27:59He logged more than 100 hours playing Minecraft and was just obsessed with the game. You can imagine that every kid out there this weekend is going to be tugging on their parents' shoulder being like, we need to go see this movie, we need to go see this movie. So I am bullish on a Minecraft movie. Let's wrap it up there. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us. Have a great Friday and an even better weekend. For any questions, comments, or feedback, send an email to morningbrewdailyatmorningbrew.com. We love hearing from you. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer.
28:30Raymond Liu is our producer. Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake are our associate producers. Yuchenawa Ogu is our technical director. Scoop Stardaris is on audio. Hair and makeup needs a nap after that crazy week. Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. I wish you all well. Thank you.
From the publisher
Episode 554: Neal and Toby recap the big effects from Trump’s latest baseline tariffs on countries all over the world, mainly with everyday goods likely to see price increases. Then, Apple’s manufacturing hubs throughout Asia are hurt the most while tech stocks are suffering one of their worst selloffs resembling the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Plus, how countries are responding to the US tariffs. Meanwhile, Amazon throws its bid to buy TikTok as the list keeps growing. Also, Microsoft turns 50 and the ‘Minecraft’ movie hopes to give the box office a jolt.
00:00 - NYC updates its subway map
3:00 - New tariffs in town
8:50 - Pricer goods coming?
11:30 - World leaders react
15:00 - TikTok deadline coming up
18:45 - Microsoft turns 50
23:00 - Minecraft movie
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