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Audiences like to believe they decide what succeeds. They buy the tickets, share the clips and make the stars. But the verdict usually belongs to whoever controls the screen: the studio, the sponsor, the state broadcaster, the man holding the booking sheet.
Popularity earns a hearing; ownership gets the final cut.
Elizabeth Holmes ⬆
Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary about the disgraced Theranos founder, You Can See Everything, took in $15 million, nearly double what had been forecast and the biggest nonconcert documentary debut since Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.
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Holmes, who is serving an 11-year federal sentence, finally beat her projections and the numbers were real.
Alex Gibney ⬇
The Oscar-winning documentarian’s four-hour Musk opened to just $69,321 with its video-on-demand release moved up by nearly three weeks.
Gibney gave Musk four hours; audiences gave Gibney one weekend.
Elon Musk ⬆
The Tesla CEO reportedly put about $1 billion into Skydance’s combination of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, including HBO, which holds the streaming rights to the documentary about him.
Musk handled this particular headache by buying into his landlord.
Sacha Baron Cohen⬇
Campaigners flooded theater chains with tens of thousands of emails urging them to ban the comedian’s Ali G: Who Iz I?, and not one complied.
Then Amazon opened it in 23 theaters, refused to report the grosses and put it on Prime Video five days later.
Protesters couldn’t get a single chain to drop Ali G; Amazon did it for them.
Kylian Mbappé ⬇
The Real Madrid striker and France captain said on a talk show that his favorite meme put his face on "some guy—I think he’s a Chinese dictator."
Three Chinese sponsors dropped him, state broadcaster CCTV pulled La Liga off the air, and he apologized in French, Chinese and English.
He complained the dictator memes had gone too far; China agreed.
Jay-Z ⬆
The NFL announced that the rapper will headline February’s Super Bowl halftime show, which his company, Roc Nation, has produced and helped cast since 2019.
The league hired him to find the talent, and it took him seven years to look in the mirror.
Originally a staple of Newsweek's print edition, Conventional Wisdom used arrows to track whose stock was rising or falling in the political circus. We're reviving it in the digital age because the problem it lampooned—hyperbole and partisan certainty masquerading as insight—has only intensified.
CW assigns arrows—up, down, or sideways—to the figures and forces shaping current events. The arrows don't predict the future or claim special insight. They capture the prevailing winds of the moment, uncluttered by tribal howling. In an era when partisan media reinforces rather than questions assumptions, CW operates from the center—skeptical of left and right alike, committed to puncturing inflated reputations and recognizing overlooked truths.
Do you agree with our editors on which way the political winds are blowing? Send us a message here.
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