☕ Curtains up

Is the movie business finally back?

June 30, 2025 View Online | Sign Up Presented By It's Monday. Competitive-eating legend Joey "Jaws" Chestnut is set to return to Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest on Coney Island after a contract dispute involving Chestnut, Nathan's, and the plant-based meat company Impossible Foods kept him away from the event last year. Whew—we were worried there for a minute. PS: Our offices are closed this week for our annual summer break, but we're still sending newsletters to you to help you beat the heat. In today's edition: Business is boomin' Toolin' around Goin' for a swim 🩱 —Jennimai Nguyen, Patrick Kulp, Alyssa Meyers ENTERTAINMENT Big money Illustration: Brittany Holloway-Brown; Photos: Adobe Stock, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures Picture this: It's December 2019. Little Women has just come out, and Timothée Chalamet is still an artsy, French-leaning, burgeoning movie star. The domestic box office is shaping up to reach nearly $11.4 billion. Cinephiles everywhere let out a satisfied sigh. It was a pretty good time to be in the movie business—and now, five years later, the movie industry is still trying to get back to those good old days. After the pandemic brought record low attendance, Hollywood has had a difficult time convincing patrons to go to the movies the way they did just a few years ago. With waning interest in franchises that were once a sure bet, slowdowns in content due to the dual writers' and actors' strikes in 2023, and more movies available to stream at home sooner, it's been something of an uphill battle. But with 2025's history-making Memorial Day weekend box office, which brought in an estimated haul of $325 million, it seems the movie industry could finally be on the rebound for real this time—though the price may have been trading in artsy Timothée for pro sports fan Timmy. With more summer movies on the way, the multiplex seems poised to regain its dazzle through the summer, and Manu Singh, chief data and innovation officer at National CineMedia (NCM), believes marketers should be priming to take advantage, especially as the cinema could prove a cultural focal point amid an otherwise fractured entertainment landscape. "Moviegoing is the No. 1 shared activity experience out there," Singh told us. "This is now the new watercooler, because there is no other watercooler that exists." Continue reading here.—JN Presented By BlueOcean Marketing strategy on speed dial Marketing comes with a lot of questions, and too often, the answers cost hours you don't have. It's not like there's a Magic 8 Ball for marketing strategy. Unless…there kind of is. BlueOceanAI's agentic AI platform delivers smarter, faster decisions using proprietary data and always-on brand intelligence. It helps you by: giving every member of your team a marketing-trained strategy agent tracking how sentiment and trust shift in response to messaging and media benchmarking your brand's performance against competitors using 3,000+ real signals uncovering gaps in your narrative where your creative just isn't working Forget the Magic 8 Ball and generic GPTs. Consult BlueOceanAI to help create the right strategy for your brand instead. Build a brand that leads, not follows. See BlueOceanAI in action + book a demo today. AI Double or nothing Anna Kim ChatGPT and its ilk seem to be taking on ever more work in modern offices. A new survey from Gallup finds that AI use at work has been accelerating. Nearly one in five workers now say they use it a few times a week, and 8% of respondents report daily AI interactions. Both those numbers have essentially doubled from Gallup's first measure in 2023. But not all workers use AI equally. The surge is mostly among white-collar workers, for one; production and frontline staffers have actually seen a slight dip in usage over the past couple of years (from 11% to 9%). Sectors with the highest concentrations of workers frequently turning to AI included the tech industry (50%), professional services (34%), and finance (32%). BYOAI: Like other surveys have shown, AI usage among employees has also continued to race ahead of employer planning and leadership on the tech. That can create security headaches and lead to a lack of consistent guidelines for workplaces. While the number of organizations that have communicated a clear plan for integrating AI improved from 15% to 22% in the past year, "it's still quite low," according to Jim Harter, Gallup's chief scientist of workplace management and well-being. Read more on Tech Brew.—PK FROM THE ARCHIVES Summer lovin' Illustration: Francis Scialabba, Photos: Poolsuite, Vacation This week, we're running our favorite summery stories from our archives. This story from Alyssa Meyers, first published in July 2022, digs into Poolside.fm, the internet radio station that helped spawn the sunscreen brand Vacation. What do an '80s-themed sunscreen brand and an NFT have in common? Both ideas started with an internet radio station. No, this isn't a Mad Lib. It's the story of Poolsuite, an "internet leisure corporation" that began as Poolside FM, the aforementioned radio station playing channels of retro summer songs meant to conjure the vibes of "ridiculous '80s beach movies," said founder Marty Bell, who came up with the idea for the site in 2014 on a rainy day in the Highlands of Scotland. "It had tons of traction since day one," Bell told Marketing Brew. "[It] blew up on Twitter. I had no followers, no internet following at all. But Poolside FM blew up just because it felt nostalgic and happy and infectious." Poolside→ Poolsuite→ Vacation: The site was a passion project for Bell, who at the time had recently co-founded a DTC sunglasses brand called Tens, and went on to co-found fintech company Nude. In the years since Poolside FM went live, Bell has heard pitches to tie the site to products from beer to swimwear to pool floats. They all felt "very obvious and not particularly exciting to me," he said. Then Bell met Lach Hall and Dakota Green. The pair were working on an '80s-inspired line of sunscreen, partially motivated by the music and community of Poolside FM, now known as Poolsuite due to a trademarking issue, according to Bell. He said he'd "been down the rabbit hole of '80s sunscreen brands" many times before he met Hall and Green. "All those same brands still exist, but they're these very sad versions of their former selves," Bell told us. The potential to experiment with elements like smell and packaging in "a pretty boring space" was intriguing to Bell, so the three started the Vacation sunscreen brand in April 2021 as an extension of Poolsuite. Continue reading here.—AM Together With Podglomerate Ready to scale your podcast? The Podglomerate is the answer. They've helped brands like The Boston Globe, Hubspot, CVS, and Substack reach millions of listeners through customized strategies—from publicity and cross-promotions to app features and targeted ads. The Podglomerate has a proven track record for growing audience easily, efficiently, and affordably. Find out how. Level up your career with these resources from our sponsors! Get a sneak peek at the athletes + marketers featured in Stagwell's Cannes Sport Beach lineup Add some AI to your creator marketing with insights from Kantar's Cannes Lions 2025 panelists Forget about team size—could AI be the great equalizer for small teams? FRENCH PRESS Morning Brew There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren't those. Come one, come all: A guide to using social ads and paid search for event promotion. Press pause: What headphone brand Bose learned from pausing search ad spend in half of its US markets. Creators, innit? A collection of tips for creators out of SXSW London. Ask agentic AI: Got questions about creating an action plan for your brand strategy? BlueOceanAI's got answers. Their agentic AI platform has the insights + data you need to help make better, smarter decisions.* *A message from our sponsor. SHARE THE BREW Share Marketing Brew with your coworkers, acquire free Brew swag, and then make new friends as a result of your fresh Brew swag. We're saying we'll give you free stuff and more friends if you share a link. One link. Your referral count: 0 Click to Share Or copy & paste your referral link to others: marketingbrew.com/r/?kid=77999182 Written by Jennimai Nguyen, Patrick Kulp, Alyssa Meyers, and Kelsey Sutton Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here. Take The Brew to work Corporate: CFO Brew   HR Brew   Revenue Brew Tech: IT Brew   Tech Brew Retailers: Retail Brew Healthcare: Healthcare Brew Get smarter in just 5 minutes Business News: Morning Brew Money & Career: Money With Katie   Bossy   Brew Markets   The Playbook Interested in podcasts? Check out ours here ADVERTISE // CAREERS // SHOP // FAQ Update your email preferences or unsubscribe here. View our privacy policy here. Copyright © 2025 Morning Brew Inc. All rights reserved. 22 W 19th St, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10011