Elton's Farewell
Elton John is ending his touring career with a bang! The Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour has officially become the highest-grossing concert tour ever. It first kicked off in 2018 and has since grossed $817.9 million after performing in 278 shows, according to Billboard. John surpassed Ed Sheeran's 2019 The Divide Tour, which raked in $776.4 million. But it's not over yet, as the shows will continue through July 2023.
Lil Wayne on Road
Also in touring news, Lil Wayne announced a slate of shows set for Spring 2023. The Welcome to Tha Carter tour is set to kick off in Minneapolis in April and will run through May with the final show in Los Angeles. The news comes days after the Recording Academy revealed that Wayne would be one of four recipients of its Global Impact Award at the 2023 Grammy Awards.
DC Cinematic Universe
The DC Universe is kicking it into high gear with a newly announced full slate of films and shows. DC Studios heads James Gunn, co-CEO with Peter Safran, unveiled the 10 projects in a new first chapter which he called "Gods and Monsters," with the titles being connected to each other in the same universe (unless otherwise labeled like Matt Reeves' The Batman). Some of the new titles revealed include the film Superman: Legacy, to be written by Gunn and slated for a July 2025 release, and TV projects Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow and Lanterns.
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know for Friday, Feb. 1, 2019.
Actress Samira Wiley has a promise for fans of her character Moira in "The Handmaid's Tale:" She's both in season three and alive. At least for now. "We should just be happy that's a thing," she told Cheddar Thursday.
The appearances of model Iskra Lawrence and actresses Busy Phillips and Jameela Jamil have all been dramatically altered by retouching in photographs. And all three are have joined forces with American Eagle's Aerie line for a new campaign to show women that reality is a beautiful thing.
PopSockets, the company behind the massively successful grips attached to the back of mobile phones, is eyeing a potential initial public offering, CEO and Founder David Barnett told Cheddar Thursday. "We are considering an IPO. We're considering all options," Barnett said in an interview with Cheddar Thursday.
Airbnb has become the largest player in the lodging market and is growing by about twice the rate of traditional lodging chains as new travelers come onto the platform and existing users book more reservations, e-commerce analyst Ken Cassar told Cheddar Thursday. Cassar, the vice president of strategy and insights at Rakuten Intelligence, said Airbnb now boasts a 25 percent share of the lodging market and reported a growth rate of 40 percent.
Nick Cannon is a busy man. The multi-talented host, producer, rapper, actor, and comedian is in Atlanta for this weekend's Super Bowl in between his gigs hosting "The Masked Singer," the new hit singing competition on FOX, and filling in for Wendy Williams on her eponymous talk show. Cannon told Cheddar he built his career by following a simple maxim: "Say no to anything that sounds like work."
When you got to a sporting event or a concert, you always see a much longer line for the ladies' room than the men's. So why hasn't anyone fixed the problem? Joe Pinsker, staff writer at The Atlantic, joins us to break down some of the possible solutions.
Facebook's year of scandal is a thing of the past ー at least according to Wall Street, Meridian Equity Partners' Jonathan Corpina told Cheddar. Wall Street's positive response to Facebook's impressive earnings show 2018's scandals are old news, Corpina said. "That's an old story; we are in 2019 now. It seems like investors have shrugged off all those negative headlines."
NorCal is on a mission to be a juggernaut in the California cannabis market, and the company has $27 million dollars in fresh funding to help it achieve that goal.
"It brings our total capital raise since inception to well over $50 million. We'll be deploying that capital across the value chain," said NorCal CEO Doug Cortina in an interview on Cheddar.
Step aside, Siri and Alexa. VR studio Fable is relaunching as a "virtual beings" company to bring the public its first A.I.-powered character with whom users can have a two-way relationship. According to co-founders Edward Saatchi and Pete Billington, the rebranding ー which the two announced at the 2019 Sundance Festival ー is partly an effort to educate consumers about machine learning.
