In this episode of Asking for a Trend, host Josh Lipton explores the latest box office performances and top market trends.

The show kicks off with a focus on the recent box office boom, with animated sequels like “Inside Out 2” and “Despicable Me 2” demonstrating particular strength in the summer movie season. To provide expert insight into these summer box office trends, Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian joins the program.

Transitioning to financial markets, Yahoo Finance reporter Jared Blikre takes center stage to break down the day’s top three market takeaways following a hot jobs print.

This post was written by Angel Smith

Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to ask you for a trend.

I’m Josh Slip in for the next half hour.

We’re gonna be breaking down the trends of today, that’ll move stocks tomorrow.

There’s a lot to keep track of.

So we’re focusing on what you need to know to get ahead of the curve.

Here are some of the trends we’re gonna be diving into.

It’s been stock market, Christmas in July, the major indices finished the week higher, setting new records as investors and raise the prospect that, that June Jobs report will push the Federal Reserve closer to a rate cut.

But this is no surprise as July we know has historically been one of the strongest months for the markets, plus the box office is back and Sequels are the story of the summer.

Once again with despicable me for and inside out to leading the charge can the Sequels come to the rescue once again and electric air taxis are nearing launch and you could soon be flying above traffic for the same cost as an Uber at least according to Joby Aviation Madison Mills traveled to Joy’s manufacturing facility in to get a closer look at what to expect from this emerging sector.

But we begin here with the summer box office which is heating up with Sequels leading fourth of July weekend inside out too is crossing the $500 million mark domestically and despicable me for opening strong on Wednesday with a gross of $27 million.

We could also see a potential Barben Heimer 2.0 later this year for more on the state of the box office we’re bringing in Paul de de Gared senior media analyst at to score Paul.

It is good to see you.

So maybe you start off.

Got a big picture here, Paul, you know the box office this summer, how we doing, Paul?

How healthy does it look to you relative to what we saw last summer?

Well, Josh, if we were sitting here about a month and a half ago, I would have said, well, it’s pretty bad because we got off to a rather slow start for the summer of 2024 with the Fall guy, a great movie, but open to $27.5 million.

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Comparing control asked that with the opening weekend of the summer in 23 with Guardians of the Galaxy volume three opening to 100 and $18 million.

We then had a rather slow memorial weekend and by rather slow, I mean, one of the slowest memorial weekends at the box office in history.

But what a difference?

A month or a month and a half can make.

And uh we saw signs of life in early June with Bad Boys Ride or die opening.

Uh beyond expectations, about $57.5 million.

But then the big one inside out to it opened about four weekends ago.

It’s coming into its fourth weekend that films at $1.12 billion in global box office as we speak, Josh pretty and we, and now we have despicable Me.

Four already has earned almost $50 million domestically heading into its first weekend having opened on Wednesday.

Uh those the the two day number is close to 50 50 million.

We’re expecting perhaps another 80 million at com score this weekend for that film.

And that could be 100 and 20 100 and $30 million opening five days for Despicable Me four.

So it is the summer of Sequels, no doubt more to come.

So it sounds like summer Sequels and maybe some better performances than, than maybe someone had initially expected, Paul.

I’m just curious when you, when you do though, look at the overall box office, the industry, Paul, how does it stack up pre pandemic?

Yeah, that’s a, that’s a different story and it, it really is the impact of, of course, the pandemic impacted everything in terms of box office, but we’re, we’re definitely recovering but then the strikes hit and that threw the release calendar into disarray and that effectively kind of um you know, it disrupted the calendar so much this year that we really didn’t get started in terms of big box office to early June.

I mean, we had some big movies early on like Dune Dune Two and others, but we, the comparisons to last year were really tough.

So right now we’re running about 18.8% behind last year, year to date at this point.

But just about six weeks ago, we were running down near, we were down nearly 28%.

So in the court, what a difference, a few movies and some time makes in terms of knocking down that year to date deficit.

Of course, we have Twisters on the way.

Deadpool and Wolverine is gonna be uh the next 100 million dollar opener of 2024 and inside out too so far, the only movie to open with over $100 million domestically this year.

But that’s gonna change here with, uh Deadpool and Wolverine and Twisters, I think is a total sleeper, although maybe not now because we’re talking about it.

Do you think Paul though something kind of structurally has changed though?

Just bigger picture.

There’s just so much good content now at home, right?

I mean, what I can stream, you know, thanks to, for example, that I don’t know if you saw it.

I mean, Baby Reindeer Amazing, Paul, right.

Ripley Ripley Incredible.

And I don’t own Netflix stock just viewers.

This is pure, pure, you know, pure neutral reviews by Josh Lipton.

But it’s such good content, Paul that’s available now to the consumer, how much is harder it is to get Josh Lipton off his couch to schlep to a theater which by the way isn’t all that cheap either.

Well, I think it’s relatively inexpensive to other outside side of the home activities.

If you look at traveling, you know, to another uh state country, uh island somewhere, um it’s very expensive to travel.

Also sporting events, uh concerts, very expensive if families are taking themselves and all the kids out this weekend to, to see despicable Me Four or Inside out too.

Again, it’s a relative bargain but apropos to what you asked, I think there is more selectivity on the part of consumers who have so much choice.

And you just mentioned a lot of great shows.

I love streaming as well, but you’re not gonna sit out going to the movie theater for a movie like Dune two inside out two.

Despicable Me Four.

I mean, it really is that differentiator is that communal and immersive experience in theater?

But I agree with you.

It takes a lot more to get people off their couch and out to the movie theater.

But when it happens, I mean, look at Barben Heimer last year, that phenomenon you alluded to this in your opening is that, you know, Wicked and Gladiator Two are opening on the same day, November 22nd.

Could there be another Barben Heimer in the offing?

I don’t know that anything will be that.

But certainly it’s cool to have those two movies and, you know, opening on that same date and it creates a conversation around going to the movies.

That’s something you can only get going out to the movie theater.

It’s that communal experience and also these experiences go viral.

I mean, the movie theater is a hub of social influence and we saw that play out with Barbie last year, certainly in Oppenheimer and there’s more good movies on the way.

I think the fall and holiday are really loaded with great films.

You got another joker film coming out, you got Moana Two, which was gonna go streaming now going to the committed to the movie theater, a lot of other great movies, the mix, wicked Gladiator Two among others.

All right, Paul, you can you convince me maybe I need to get out of the house more.

I have to get out the house more often.

My wife tells me the same thing, Paul.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Have a great weekend.

Thank you, Josh.

You too.

Have a good one coming up.

Flying taxis are closer than ever to reality.

Young finance spoke with industry investors, officials and analysts and traveled to Joy’s manufacturing facility to get a closer look at what to expect from this emerging sector that is next on asking for a trend.

The S and P 500 NASDAQ post record closes to end this holiday shortened week.

Investors embraced the idea that the June Jobs Report may push the fed closer to that rate cut.

Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blick joins us here with more on the train day takeaways, Jared.

Well, thank you, Josh.

I think the mega caps, you know, we talk about concentration, you can’t talk about it a month enough.

So I’m saying record mega cap highs.

We had four today.

A Mi Christmas in July.

That’s a reference to the seasonality, this bullish seasonality that we’ve had.

So I’m not gonna show any, any seasonality maps, but I do wanna show the Mega Caps and four out of these four out of the seven magnificent seven posted records today, Microsoft alphabet Apple and Meta Amazon just missed it by less than a dollar in videos read there.

But I just think that it kind of tells the whole story there.

We have this bish seasonality and what do markets have the tenacity to do go higher?

And that’s what we’re saying.

Is it just big Tech Jared?

Is that all we have?

No, and there’s more to the story.

Well, you know, I’ve been seeing software catch up recently, so I like IGV as a software ETF that just is just shy of record highs.

So we are seeing it’s kind of spread into some other areas but is software that different from tech, you know, the whole A I story.

Um Let me just show you this is the NASDAQ 100 versus A Russell 2000.

This goes all the way back to the late 19 eighties.

Here is the.com bubble and what you will notice is we are higher.

So small caps are even at less evaluation premium to the large caps.

And I’m using the NASDAQ 100 in the Russell 2000 proxies then that tech bubble that we had 24 years ago.

So something is a little bit different.

All right, Jared blucky point number two, intervention is it n in Japan?

Nigh.

I don’t hear that word very often.

You don’t hear, you know what?

Also I, I like the intervention.

You could just make a Portman toe out of that.

Um I did bring some charts and here we have the Japanese 10 year bond versus its target its range.

So in purple, we have the bond.

This goes back to 2016, 2017.

And these blue dotted lines that is the bank of Japan.

That’s where they’re trying to keep it contained.

As you’ll notice here, they’re not really keeping it contained.

They keep trying to keep it in there, but then they are forced to capitulate and as they are playing this as this is playing out, the yen has been weakening, the yen has been weak yen.

How is that playing to the yen has been weakening to levels that we haven’t seen since 1986.

So this is the US dollar versus the yen.

Um And let me put a max chart on.

So you’ll see this goes back to the late 19 nineties.

Um And here we are, we are at the highest point that we’ve seen on this entire chart.

Torsten Slack Apollo, Chief Global Economist.

He says that the yen would be at 140 it’s at 160 now.

Uh it would be at 140 if the, if the Bank of Japan were not pulling all these levers.

So there’s a big, there’s a big dislocation in there.

And the worry is is that there’s this dislocation that kind of hits the market all at once.

You spread things out.

Generally it’s OK.

But sometimes uh you get, you hit some problems here if it all comes at once, last blier point, you know, we gotta talk about crypto crypto never sleeps and we are facing another what, two day, 48 hours here without prices in, in but not in crypto.

So I’ve been tracking this crypto crash that we’ve had kind of a big deal because Bitcoin itself has broken through a trading range that is held for seven, several months here.

I’m gonna get our crypto heat map up and there we go.

So you’ll see Bitcoin in the red for three percent.

Uh It kind of broke down yesterday and we got this news about Monk Ox we also have Germany all in all, something like Irish headlines short, 190,000, Bitcoin.

So you multiply this price times 190,000, you’re gonna get 10 billion, something like that.

That is a potential maximum amount of selling that’s going to hit the market doesn’t mean it’s all going to happen at once.

But I think it’s instructive that we are breaking down through this range.

So Bitcoin kind of famous for false breakdowns if we’re back above 60,000 by Monday, I would say that’s another one, but probably that is not my base case.

So I think we’re in some for a little bit more prolonged downturn here with respect to crypto overall all levels to watch.

Thank you, Jared.

Thank you, appreciate it.

You could be flying above traffic to the airport in an electric air taxi for the same cost as an Uber by 2025 at least according to job B aviation, electric, vertical takeoff and landing vehicles promise efficient battery power transport akin to urban Ubers or Lyft in the sky.

Yahoo Finance spoke with industry investors, officials and analysts and traveled to Joy’s manufacturing facility in Marina California to get a closer look at what to expect from this emerging sector.

So we’re at the downtown Manhattan heliport and what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna take off.

All I want you to do is pull back with your right hand that will make you go up, just pull back hard.

Yeah, there you go.

Now you’re flying, I’m flying, we’re not actually flying above the Statue of Liberty.

That’s a simulator from Joby Aviation, which is used to train traditional pilots on how to fly this battery powered aircraft with the backing of Toyota and Delta.

It’s one of the largest companies looking to bring battery powered air taxis to market.

These aircraft are called EV Tolls which stands for electric, vertical takeoff and landing.

At first, it may look like a helicopter with extra propellers on top.

But unlike choppers, viols run off electricity rather than fuel.

This is for charging.

It took us about six minutes to get from JFK to downtown Manhattan.

Over $22 billion in investments over the last 20 years, from names like Uber, STIs and Honeywell have now made this kind of a commute closer than ever.

Thanks to advance in technology, high performance propeller blades that are very light.

In addition to Delta major aerospace names like United and Boeing, see the potential and have invested with the hopes of one day adding eal rides to their list of offerings getting and now makes sense.

One research firm estimates the air taxi market could be worth more than $65 billion by 2028.

Well, the tech has proven to work and it could be closer to commercial launch in Europe here in the US regulation.

Lack of infrastructure and customer affordability could be what keeps these companies from taking off.

Yahoo finance went inside jobs 130,000 square foot assembly facility to learn more about how the company hopes their aircraft and their business strategy will win the air taxi race.

This is what’s next in the business of electric, air taxis flying above traffic in a congested city.

Sounds like fiction from the Jetsons.

But air taxi companies believe they can make this a reality as soon as 2025 this is as close as we’ve seen.

I think in terms of the technology coming together to make something that you could use on a daily basis to go where you want to go and do the things that you want to do, which is kind of what a car is all about.

I think that is something that’s to be practical and available to people in the pretty near term.

The jobby aircraft has completed more than 1000 test flights.

The aircraft can fly five people including the pilot up to 150 miles.

What can you do with the way you design and build an aircraft if you have a world class electric propulsion system available, which no other aircraft have really been designed around in some ways.

The six motors on the aircraft are powered by four batteries which were developed by a team of ex Tesla employees.

What that lets you do is fly very, very efficiently, which makes all electric work and makes all electric safer too.

Redundancy was built into the aircraft.

Everything has backups in place.

So this is a battery.

This is a battery does that exist on the other side too?

So the air has got four batteries.

You’ve got that redundancy, you can afford to.

I mean, we can lose a battery and we still fly perfectly fine.

Electric aircraft face similar challenges to electric vehicles which don’t have the added hurdle of launching into the sky.

Among those challenges, battery charging times, Joby can go up to 100 miles on a single charge, meaning it could do two trips back and forth to JFK from NY CS downtown Heliport before needing a recharge.

Joby says almost all of their trips and target markets would allow for recharging that takes about as long as de boarding and boarding passengers.

According to one report, ol batteries would ideally charge in under 10 minutes about as fast as Tesla’s latest superchargers.

Ol companies hope safety measures will give them a leg up as they try and bite into the 10,000 traditional rotor craft trips per day happening in the US.

But first up getting cleared to fly.

A representative from the Federal Aviation Administration told Yahoo Finance that while tolls could launch commercially as early as 2025 2028 could be more realistic, at least for a scaled and competitive market.

The Fa A’s innovate 28 initiative outlines requirements for the launch that includes hitting certain safety criteria and flying under a variety of conditions.

It’s the same approach applied to traditional aviation.

Still certification is not guaranteed.

We don’t know when certification for FAA will happen for any aircraft.

The FAA changed them to special condition aircraft essentially putting more rigorous uh certification processes on top of that.

So I can’t imagine that we’re going to see an eal in the air certified flying around folks in 12 months time does pre 2030 seem realistic.

I do think late in this decade, we’ll have that until then.

Tolls are focusing on countries with looser regulations.

Joby plans to launch flights in Dubai by 2025 through a deal that was supposed to be exclusive though Archer Joy’s main competitor later announced their own plans in the region back in the States.

Joby is on track to hit the FAA S proposed line for approval.

They’ve just completed stage three of a five stage trial but with testing comes setbacks.

The US National Transportation Safety Board released a report on a Joby crash from February of 2022.

I know that there was a test flight that did end in a totaled Joby aircraft.

Can you talk to me a little bit about what happened there and how you as a leader kind of transitioned the tech moving past that we were flying pretty high and really fast, right, the edge we were doing it remotely though.

So that’s actually one of the really interesting early use cases of autonomy that I think is a little underappreciated, taking care of it in all of the future designs.

But we found it earlier because of the use of that remote piloting and autonomy in a way that I think ultimately is pretty beneficial.

I think autonomous has its own issues, right?

The fact that people will feel comfortable not only getting in an aircraft that they’ve never been on before and having it have no pilot seems like the riskiest proposition.

Still, autonomous flight could boost profits.

Pilot salaries aren’t public, but the average annual wage for commercial pilots in 2022 was a little over $100,000.

That’s according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we think that’s definitely going to come.

We just don’t think it’s the right way to go to market to start with because this gets us to market as fast as possible.

And then that’s something that will make it even better down the road for now.

Joby is partnering with companies like Toyota and even Uber, which sold off their own air taxi unit to Joby.

Back in 2019, I led the Uber elevate team which was Uber’s effort to build a flying car in some sense, ecosystem of different companies.

We actually demoed this with helicopters in New York City in 2019 when we launched.

Maybe you remember there was something called Uber car, you’ll be able to, to in our app or in the Uber app essentially choose Joy, a joy flight as one of the types of products.

But it won’t just be a flight alone.

It’s actually a multi modal integration.

That integration will be needed since Jobby won’t have many locations available for flights at the start.

Here’s how it would work in one of their first target markets.

New York City users would open the Uber app and select the air taxi option.

Then a car would come to the customer’s door, drive them to the nearest Verti port which is a converted heliport that can handle the charging and storing of tolls from there.

Users would hop in the to and land at a nearby airport.

Joby says in New York City, the flight would take about seven minutes.

Uber isn’t the only major company getting in on the action.

Toyota invested nearly $400 million into Joby and Delta invested 60 million.

Archer Joy’s biggest competitor has a $1 billion conditional order from United Airlines and raked in 100 and 50 million from STIs as well as some well known investors including Kathy Wood via her arc innovation.

ETF and serial entrepreneur, Mark Laurie, major air taxi firms, Joby Archer and Lilliam have all had gains on the S and 500 this year to see this investment put to work.

Yahoo Finance went inside Joy’s assembly facility which following the Toyota investment now runs a lot like a car assembly line.

So this overall is our final assembly facility.

So we are bringing in all sorts of parts, all of the many different parts that go into the aircraft, many of them get built here.

And then we have a process where we put them sequentially in the right order in some sense onto the aircraft to build out that full aircraft, we are vertically integrated, we build the parts and then we assemble the parts together into structures.

And so what we have behind us is one of our structural assemblies for a fuselage, which is the body, the main body of the aircraft.

That vertical integration is part of what attracted Delta to Joby.

We spent at least 18 months looking at over 20 different Vaal start ups really looking what each one had to offer because of the technological strength that joy had the financial strength that they had as a start up.

We felt that that made a great match for us to be able to collaborate.

It’s not just airlines chasing the future of aviation.

Honeywell broadly known for things like thermostats has an aerospace unit that’s now making parts for e tolls.

What they’ve done is basically taken their partnerships onto EV tolls by becoming a supplier.

And that sounds like big investment dollars from Honeywell but not so much because they’re not touching their 27% operating margins.

But instead what the company has done is tell partners that if they would like Honeywell to partner with them, they could invest in Honeywell’s product innovation.

We don’t know like the background of those agreements for major airline carriers like delta future investments into Joby are based on them, achieving regulatory and financial milestones.

We have a specific performance criteria for us.

It really is um the performance metrics is just getting them to market and making sure that we’re comfortable and integrating a seamless experience for our customers.

There’s more than one path to get this to market rather than partnering with airlines.

Some eal companies like Liam are looking to sell to them directly.

The German based business which offers a larger seven person ev to plans to focus its efforts on manufacturing and maintaining its aircraft instead of owning the end to end experience like joy regardless of the business model or investment.

Some common obstacles exist for all viol companies including infrastructure and adoption of the over 6000 heliports in the country.

New York City is poised to be the first to transition one into a verte for s the effort’s not cheap though one firm’s model suggests costs could range anywhere from $3.5 million to $12 million for a leading global city.

Of course, that depends on a variety of factors like size and location.

Ok. What we are looking to do on this site with a number of tolls is how do we embrace new technology pivot to all electric, significantly reduce noise pollution.

So the end goal is a full pivot.

The end goal is a full pivot.

Infrastructure.

Operators are putting in bids to transition this heliport into an electrified verte.

One of two operated by the city.

The plan is to convert both within a year of FAA certification.

According to the mayor’s office, we won a very significant federal award.

So some money will come from them.

Some money will come from the bidders who will have a long term contract to manage the site.

And some will come from the E DC once they get FAA approval and find a way to build up verte reports.

The next obstacle for the industry scaling enough to keep costs down for riders.

So our goal is to actually launch this service at something like Uber block pricing on a per seat basis, though not on a per vehicle basis.

We think that as we are able to build up those muscles, the way the technology is able to efficiently batch people into the aircraft and, and make the whole operation work more and more efficiently, we’ll be able to drive down toward Uber X like pricing on a per seat basis.

I think that really starts to get into that realm of like everyday flight.

According to Uber, the average price of a trip from Manhattan to JFK is $135 for an Uber Black and $87.

For a regular Uber.

However, Jeffries estimates that at launch that joy Ride could cost around $200.

Do you have an idea of how many flights per day per week?

Yeah, we haven’t, we haven’t really announced any of the details on that one.

Consulting firm estimates the cost per passenger kilometer will decrease by more than two thirds between 2025 and 2040.

But that’s partially due to an expectation of autonomous flights in the future, which isn’t without its own set of challenges.

So monitoring the FAA certification is the number one.

What, what are the number two and number three headwinds that investors should be thinking about for second would be infrastructure.

I think we don’t have an infrastructure in place right now.

Really?

Um where could you take this aircraft from?

Could you take it from on top of your building?

Will your building have the infrastructure for it if you have to commute 30 minutes to the terminal that has it?

Does that defeat the purpose of just taking the Uber third?

I think it’s just customer apprehension to try an easy to um you know, we just seek more customer awareness, Joby detailed these headwinds and many more in an sec regulatory filing from February, the company notes, they have enough cash on hand to support the initial launch of commercial operations in 2025.

But after that, if they’re not generating sufficient cash flow, they’ll use a combination of equity and debt financing to fund the business.

Despite the financial obstacles and competition.

If the viol industry gains adoption, it has the potential to transform the way we travel.

And that goes beyond just how we get to and from the airport.

It’s easy to be negative on an industry that hasn’t really taken off yet.

Right.

So we want to be supportive of innovation, we want to be supportive of, but we also want to be cognizant of the current regulatory environment.

There will be other things that we can do with these technologies that we’re certifying.

We’re really building toward the future in a lot of ways as well.

We’re building all of these capabilities, all of these vessels of the company, not just to build one revolutionary airplane but to build the future of zero emission aviation time.

Now for what to watch before you look at what’s on deck.

Next week, President Joe Biden is doing an interview with George Stephanopoulos later tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern.

This will be the first interview since fine debate with former president Donald Trump.

And now looking ahead to next week on Thursday, we’ll be getting the latest consumer price index or CP I for June.

And on Friday, we’re also getting fresh data on the producer price index for June, new CP I and PP I prints will be key inflation readings as the fed continues to decide on potential rate cuts this year and moving over to earnings on Thursday, names such as Pepsi progressive Delta and can agra to report their earnings.

And on Friday, big banks to kick off another earnings season.

JP Morgan Wells Fargo and city to report their quarterly results, providing investors more color on the state of the financial sector.

That is a wrap on today’s asking for a trend.

Be sure to come back Monday at 4:30 p.m. Eastern for all the latest market, moving stories affecting your wallet.

Have a great weekend.