Word: bigs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...movies were football teams squaring off for a big game, New Moon would not have covered the spread against that dogged underdog, The Blind Side. The inspirational sports drama, made for just $29 million, earned a stalwart $41 million in three days and $57.5 million in five. Whereas New Moon's revenue fell 70% from last weekend's neck-swiveling $142.8 million take, The Blind Side's tally increased about 18% in its second weekend. Word of mouth has been great - CinemaScore's poll of exiting moviegoers gave it a gold-star A+ - and Sandra Bullock's recently burnished star...
Chalk up part of The Blind Side's success to a condition that might be called seasonal affection. With the big college teams fighting for conference championships and audiences in a beneficent holiday mood, the mass audience must have figured it was downright Thanksgiving-y to see a real-life uplifter about a crack addict's son who is adopted by a nice white couple and pulls himself up to be a star tackle at Ole Miss. (Sort of Rudy meets Precious.) It doesn't hurt that the movie's subject, Michael Oher, graduated impressively from college...
...already having an impact. In Britain, big supermarkets send unsold and expired meat to companies that convert it into fuel to heat homes. Since 2001, the German biofuel company Saria takes greasy animal fats and cooking oil from caterers and restaurants and then turns it into renewable energy used for power stations and manufacturing plants. Saria found using animal oil instead of vegetable oil is not only a cheaper alternative, but it also produces less harmful emissions, delivers better engine efficiency and reduces noise pollution...
Once available only to big corporations, off-site automatic backup is starting to catch on with consumers. According to the market-research firm Mintel, 36% of North American computer users surveyed expressed interest in online backup, which, by the way, can only be used by people with high-speed connections...
...Shelby wants to impose strong regulation on financial firms to prevent them from getting "too big to fail." He agrees with Dodd that there should be a consolidated regulator for banks, though perhaps not the single supervisor Dodd envisions. But Shelby opposes Dodd's plans for eventually doing away with the 150-year-old division of regulation between state and nationally chartered banks. And he also opposes Dodd's plans for a systemic risk council, which he sees as redundant since bank regulators already are tasked with curtailing overall risk...