Your commercial news round-up: Barbenheimer, windsurfing, wildfires, X, green man

Reading time: four minutes 

From unlikely cinema pairings to surfing on plastic bottles and a social media rebrand, which is more than just a name change, we’re covering a range of commercial news stories this week to help expand your knowledge – so, buckle up and enjoy the ride.  

• Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past month, you’ve likely been unable to avoid the mention of new films Barbie and Oppenheimer, or ‘Barbenheimer’, as the pair have become known on social media. Their releases coincided, but rather than film fanatics choosing between the two, the films have become a delightful pairing, creating what the UK Cinema Association has called “the most successful weekend for cinema-going since 2019”. Both films have also been a huge success in the US and Canada where financial takings have made opening weekend the biggest opener of 2023 so far in that region. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie took an estimated $155 million, according to Warner Bros, while Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer made $93.7 million. The success of both films has been a welcomed relief for cinemas, which have been struggling since the pandemic. 
   
• If you were planning to sail across the ocean, you’d presumably want to ensure two things:
  •  that you were sailing with the wind and current; and 
  • that your vessel of choice was made of the highest quality materials possible.

​Dutch environmental activist and windsurfer Merjin Tinga, however, did neither of these things. Battling the elements, Tinga’s journey saw him sail from Norway’s capital Oslo to the heart of England to raise awareness about plastic pollution. How did he make this journey you may wonder, using a board made from plastic bottles found floating in the Thames in London. Tinga’s mission was first inspired when he had found plastic bottles from England and the Netherlands littering the shores of the Swedish coast. Following this, his campaign to lobby for a deposit system on small bottles began. Tinga was granted special permission to windsurf up the Thames, allowing him to complete his journey at Tower Bridge where he handed his petition for a nationwide bottle return scheme to Environment Minister Rebecca Pow. Demonstrating the heroic efforts some will take to save our planet, Tinga said: "To me, it is important to show that we should [put in] an extra effort to combat things like plastic pollution, and you can actually change something." 

• From fighting climate change to the effects of it, the Mediterranean is burning. More than 40 people in Europe have died as wildfires continue to spread destroying homes, land and nature reserves. Temperatures have exceeded 44 degrees Celsius  in some areas of Greece causing wildfires that have spread to Portugal, Turkey, Italy, France, Croatia and Spain. Thousands of fire fighters have been deployed to contain the blazes and the entire island of Rhodes, in Greece, has been put into a state of emergency for six months. The Met Office has warned that these high temperatures will increase the frequency and severity of: 
  • droughts; 
  • grassfires;
  • and downpours. 
     
• Social media users have had quite the shakeup this week as Twitter became X. The rebrand is yet another step in the ongoing transformation of Twitter since Elon Musk became its owner. Musk has been persistently vocal about transforming Twitter into an ‘everything app’, much like China’s WeChat, and this latest change to the platform is another step in this direction. The billionaire has insisted that “this isn’t simply a company renaming itself” and that the name change stands for so much more. He said: “The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140-character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.” 
   
• Our final story takes us back to being green but not in an environmentally conscious way. The green man at pedestrian crossings could have its time extended to give people more time to cross the street in England. Transport officials are considering extending the time that pedestrians have to cross the street to seven, rather than six, seconds. Current guidance is based off calculations made in the 1950s that suggested pedestrians had an average walking speed of 1.2 metres per second. However, research conducted by University College London in 2012 found that 76% of men and 85% of women had a walking speed slower than this standard. Chief executive of Active Travle England, Stephen Edwards, said: "Millions of older people, disabled people and families with children struggle to cross the road in the time given." He added: "If people don't feel safe crossing the street, they simply won't make the journey or will make it in a less sustainable and less healthy way." 

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