🎬 Stephen Chow still knows how to fill seats

"Kung Fu Soccer" topped China's box office again July 17–19, adding $73.7M for a nine-day total of $214.3M — No. 2 globally behind Nolan's "The Odyssey."

Pearl Studio's animated "All Wishes Come True!" debuted second at $30.6M; drama "A Part of Me" opened third at $13.6M.

Weekend total: $132.9M. 2026 year-to-date: $2.97B — down 35.3%. Nolan's "The Odyssey" arrives August 15. The market is clearly saving a seat for him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-HE-g5YwZE

Source: Variety

💸 A wallet for a billion people

Telegram — 1 billion users, zero crypto wallet. Until now.

Pavel Durov announced a native non-custodial Gram wallet arriving this summer: instant transfers, no fees. He called it "the largest rollout of a non-custodial crypto wallet in human history." No firm date yet.

Gram was Telegram's original 2018 token, killed by an SEC settlement in 2020. The TON blockchain is now renaming its coin back to Gram — and the wallet follows.

The regulator buried it once. Gram just came back through a billion front doors.

Source: Cointelegraph

💸 Bitcoin rides chips while the yen sinks

No crypto catalyst needed — semiconductors are doing the work.

BTC holds near $66,300, a two-week high on $31B daily volume. The U.S. chip index jumped 5%+ Tuesday, Korea's Kospi surged 5%, and last week's Chinese AI scare is fully reversed.

The yen just broke 163 per dollar — weakest since 1986. Japan's Finance Minister promises bold intervention; the dollar disagrees.

Bitcoin as a debasement hedge is a great story. It's just tracking Nvidia, not the yen.

Source: CoinDesk

📌 Итоги дня · 22.07

🤖 GPT-5 found a zero-day and just got online
⚽ 51 million Americans watched Spain stun Argentina
🎬 Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Soccer prints $214M in nine days
💸 Telegram drops a free crypto wallet for a billion users
💸 Bitcoin coasts to two-week high on chip stock euphoria

Whoever had their head down all day genuinely needs this — pass it along

💸 Even Apple's biggest fans are doing the math

Memory and storage upgrades doubled in price, and analysts see no relief before 2028.

A 9to5Mac poll — hardly a crowd of skeptics — found 90%+ changing habits: 38% upgrading less often, 14% waiting for sales, 12% dropping products entirely.

The only thing likely to bring prices down is exactly what Apple is now building: a demand problem.

Source: 9to5Mac

🎬 Na Hong Jin returned after a decade — and took two-thirds of Korea with him

"Hope," his sci-fi survival thriller, opened Jul. 17–19 with $11.3 M from 1.5 M admissions — a 66% market share. Cast includes Hwang Jung-min, Fassbender, and Vikander. Cumulative gross: $16 M. The overall weekend market jumped to $17.1 M from $8.2 M the week prior.

One film doubling a national market isn't a release — it's a weather event.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkKiiaCxeD4

Source: Variety

🎬 Marvel lost Blade — and Feige is saying so out loud

Announced in July 2019, the Mahershala Ali Blade went through two directors, five-plus writers, and quietly vanished from Marvel's release calendar in fall 2024.

Feige called himself "a gigantic loser and failure" over it. His diagnosis: the Disney+ overexpansion era, when quantity beat quality "for the very first time ever." When standards tightened, Blade didn't make the cut.

Ali still wants the role. Marvel didn't want to just put him in leather. So nobody went anywhere.

Source: Variety

📚 Your book is on Apple Books — you just didn't write it

Joanna Stern published *I Am Not a Robot* and found ten AI clones on Apple Books within days — same cover palette, $9.99–$20.99 each. Removed them; three more appeared.

NYT's Kashmir Hill found a fake biography of herself on Amazon. The "author" published ten such bios in one week; his photo was a stock image. One creator admitted: a few hours in ChatGPT per book.

The platforms are losing to a problem 2005 spam filters would've caught.

9to5Mac

🔋 EV batteries barely degrade — says the used-EV dealer

Top electric cars retain 95%+ capacity after 100,000 km, claims a new study. Kia e-Niro leads at 97.25%; Tesla Model 3 drops to 88.2% on Panasonic cells vs 93.3% on CATL.

Nearly 10,000 checks, Sweden, 2022–2026 — solid until you notice the study comes from Carla, a used-EV retailer. Methodology unpublished, sample skews toward top models, Sweden's climate is unusually mild.

Peer review wanted.

📌 Итоги дня · 23.07

💸 Apple fans are buying less as prices bite hard
🎬 Na Hong Jin's comeback swallowed two-thirds of Korea's box office
🦇 Feige admits Blade was Marvel's most spectacular slow-motion failure
📚 AI clones are flooding bookstores with books you never wrote
🔋 EV batteries hold up great — according to the EV sellers

Someone you know had a long day and missed all of this — their loss, your forward button

🎬 X-Men are in the trailer. Still not in the MCU.

*Avengers: Doomsday* brings back RDJ as Doctor Doom, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen as Professor X and Magneto, plus Channing Tatum's Gambit. The nostalgia is real.

So is the frustration. The MCU still hasn't made an actual X-Men film — just cameos and crumbs since the Fox era ended.

Out December 18, 2026. Nobody teases like Marvel. Nobody makes you wait like Marvel either.

Collider

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irVNGjRFZGk

💸 The US Army's "unlimited" AI lasted six weeks

In May 2026, the DoD announced unlimited AI access for 3.5 million employees. By mid-June, the tokens were gone.

The Army runs Ask Sage — Gemini, Llama, ChatGPT — for official work. Users got 200K tokens/month with auto top-ups, and light users were nudged to spend more. Someone mathed that wrong.

"The whole Army burned through a year of tokens for one service," an employee told WIRED anonymously.

Unlimited was doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Ars Technica

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $64,978 📉 -1.2% (24h)
Ξ ETH $1,884 📉 -2.3% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 28 — Fear

🎬 Elon Musk will fix The Odyssey. With AI.

Musk has feuded with Nolan's epic since before it existed — called Lupita Nyong'o's casting as Helen of Troy "an insult to Homer." Now he's promised Grok will release a "historically accurate" full-length Odyssey by year's end.

*Doctor Strange* director Scott Derrickson on X: "Musk doesn't know shit about cinema. His opinions on art are worthless."

Nolan's film: $264M opening weekend, sold out for months. Homer survives again.

Variety

💸 Sony is about to erase a $7 billion market

The global used game market was worth $7.2 billion last year, headed for $13.8 billion by 2034. Then Sony announced that all new PlayStation games go digital-only from January 2028.

Analysts at Morningstar and Wedbush are blunt: the pre-owned market will eventually disappear, physical retail is doomed. Sony's logic is equally blunt — digital sales return 100% versus ~65% on disc.

A disc can be resold or played in 20 years. A licence can't. That's not nostalgia, that's ownership.

IGN

🤖 The next big AI trade might not be Nvidia

While markets pile into chipmakers, Franklin Templeton and Circle are pointing elsewhere: blockchain as the infrastructure layer for the agentic AI era.

Agentic AI doesn't answer prompts — it autonomously pays for API calls, buys compute, books services. Many transactions are fractions of a cent, which breaks traditional rails where fees exceed the transaction itself. Blockchain fixes this with programmable settlement and no intermediary.

Franklin Templeton's Sandy Kaul says investors are missing the infrastructure that will run machine-to-machine commerce. Circle CEO Allaire goes further — agentic AI and blockchain are one shift, not two. Agents become economic actors; subscriptions die; pay-per-task wins.

An AI trade with zero Nvidia in it, via Business Insider.

CoinDesk

📌
🎬 X-Men crash Doomsday trailer but skip the MCU entirely
💸 US Army burned through unlimited AI tokens in six weeks
🤖 Musk wants Grok to rewrite Homer before New Year
🎮 Sony goes digital-only and quietly kills used game market
⛓️ Blockchain quietly positioning as the real AI infrastructure play

Forward this to whoever spent the day in meetings — they missed a lot

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $63,972 📉 -2.6% (24h)
Ξ ETH $1,857 📉 -2.6% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 27 — Fear

💸 OpenAI is building a city for AI

$750 billion through 2030 — up 25% from earlier estimates. With Stargate losing steam, the company's next move is Project Camellia: 1,400 acres northwest of Savannah, Georgia.

🔸 at least 3.2 gigawatts from Georgia Power
🔸 50% property tax break for 15 years
🔸 power from 2028 — first GPU could light up sooner

To lead construction, OpenAI hired Brett Mayo, who built xAI's Colossus in Memphis at record speed — a site now facing an NAACP lawsuit over unpermitted gas turbines. As TechCrunch reports, neither company will say how Camellia gets powered.

"Green AI" remains a better slogan than a plan.

💸 The exchange that invented the perpetual swap is shutting down

BitMEX — the platform that created perpetual futures in 2016, now a fixture on every major exchange — is closing after nearly 12 years. Its token marked the occasion with a 90% crash, from $0.06 to $0.002, per CoinGecko. It started dropping an hour before the announcement. The market always knows.

By shutdown, BitMEX held just 0.08% of Bitcoin futures volume — $84M a day. Owners had explored a $1B sale before choosing an orderly wind-down, per Cointelegraph.

The instrument BitMEX invented now drives billions across its competitors. The inventor closed with 0.08%. Crypto has a way of eating its own parents.

💸 The million-dollar pass

Weird Al Yankovic — the parody legend — already made headlines this month for rejecting an AI ad deal. Turns out that wasn't his only recent "no."

He told TribLive he was offered a seven-figure sum for a single show at the Riyadh Comedy Festival, a state-sponsored event under Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Chappelle, Burr and Louis C.K. all went; paydays reportedly reached $1.6M per show, with restrictions barring jokes about the government or religion.

"I don't need to take any amount of money if it makes me feel icky — and that kind of did."

Turns out his price was zero.

Variety