New movies revive

global box office

“Wicked” and “Gladiator II” have debuted in theaters with a combined $270 million in ticket sales. Their worldwide performance breathed fresh life into global box office results that have struggled lately. Together the films turned the moviegoing weekend into one of the busiest of the year. Jon M. Chu’s lavish big-budget musical “Wicked,” starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, debuted with $114 million domestically and $164.2 million globally. Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator II” is a sequel to his 2000 best picture-winning original and launched with $55.5 million in ticket sales. “Moana 2” is being released Wednesday, so it seems Hollywood might be looking at historic sales over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Carmakers recall 

electric vehicles

Hyundai and Kia are recalling over 208,000 electric vehicles to fix a pesky problem that can cause loss of drive power, increasing the risk of a crash. The recalls cover more than 145,000 Hyundai and Genesis vehicles including the 2022 through 2024 Ioniq 5, the 2023 through 2025 Ioniq 6, GV60 and GV70, and the 2023 and 2024 G80. Also included are nearly 63,000 Kia EV 6 vehicles from 2022 through 2024. The affiliated Korean automakers say in government documents that a transistor in a charging control unit can be damaged and stop charging the 12-volt battery. Dealers will inspect and replace the control unit and a fuse if needed and update software. Owners whose vehicles were recalled earlier this year to fix the same problem will have to visit their dealer again.

Amazon to invest

$4B in AI startup

Amazon is investing an additional $4 billion in the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic as major technology companies rush to fund generative AI. This will bring Amazon’s total investment in Anthropic — which began last year — to $8 billion. Anthropic, an OpenAI rival, said the Seattle-based tech giant will maintain its position as a minority investor. Under the deal, Amazon said the San Francisco-based Anthropic will now name Amazon’s cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, as its “primary training partner.” It will also use two AWS chips to train and deploy its future foundational models.

Bath & Body Works

sees strong sales

Bath & Body Works fiscal third-quarter performance topped analysts’ estimates thanks to strong sales, and the retailer boosted its full-year outlook. The owner of Victoria’s Secret, Bath & Body Works and other chain stores earned $106 million, or 49 cents per share, for the period. The performance beat the 46 cents per share that analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research predicted. Revenue totaled $1.61 billion, up 3% from $1.56 billion a year earlier. The results topped Wall Street’s forecast of $1.58 billion.

— Bulletin wire reports