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Yahoo
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Disney's 'Lilo & Stitch' becomes Hollywood's first $1-billion movie of 2025
Walt Disney Co.'s live-action adaptation "Lilo & Stitch" has now generated more than $1 billion in worldwide box office revenue, becoming the first U.S. film of the year to do so. The movie, based on the 2002 animated film of the same name, made $416.2 million in the U.S. and Canada and an additional $584.8 million internationally. It is the highest-grossing Disney live-action film ever in Mexico, where it brought in $67 million. 'We knew there was a lot of love for 'Lilo & Stitch' with audiences around the world, yet we never take that for granted," Disney Entertainment co-Chairman Alan Bergman said in a statement. "We're proud of how this new film has connected with people." The Burbank-based media and entertainment giant has already announced that a sequel to "Lilo & Stitch" is in development. The movie was released on May 23 and hauled in $183 million domestically during its opening weekend, a total that edged out 2022's "Top Gun: Maverick" to claim the mantle of biggest Memorial Day weekend opener ever. Read more: The first 'Lilo & Stitch' wasn't a blockbuster. Disney's remake might be one of the year's biggest The original animated movie was only a modest box-office performer at the time, bringing in $273 million. Yet over time, Stitch has become increasingly popular, ranking in the top 10 bestselling Disney franchises, alongside stalwarts like Mickey and Minnie Mouse, the princesses, Star Wars and Marvel, Disney has said. Sales of Stitch-themed merchandise totaled about $2.6 billion last year. And before the new film was released, the 'Lilo & Stitch' franchise, which includes animated series, TV films and direct-to-video movies, drove 546 million hours of global viewership on Disney+, with the original movie accounting for more than half of that. Bergman said in May that the popularity of the little blue alien "definitely" played a role in greenlighting the live-action film. The success of "Lilo & Stitch" comes as family-friendly movies have ruled the box office. The momentum began in April with Warner Bros. Pictures' "A Minecraft Movie," which has now made $955 million worldwide, and continued with "Lilo & Stitch" and Universal Pictures' live-action adaptation "How to Train Your Dragon," which released in June and collected more than $564 million globally. "Lilo & Stitch" is just the most recent Disney film to cross the $1-billion mark. Last year, Disney and Pixar's animated "Inside Out 2," Walt Disney Animation's "Moana 2" and Marvel Studios' "Deadpool & Wolverine" each made $1 billion in global box office revenue. Globally, the biggest film of the year remains "Ne Zha 2," a Chinese animated juggernaut that grossed more than $2 billion in ticket sales, the vast majority of which came from its home country. Sign up for our Wide Shot newsletter to get the latest entertainment business news, analysis and insights. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. Solve the daily Crossword
Washington Post
7 days ago
- Business
- Washington Post
Disney sues Hong Kong company it says is selling illegal Mickey Mouse jewelry
LOS ANGELES — The Walt Disney Co. on Wednesday sued a Hong Kong jewelry company it accuses of selling illegal Mickey Mouse jewelry. The international media and entertainment conglomerate filed a lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles against the Red Earth Group, which sells jewelry online under the name Satéur.
The Star
01-07-2025
- Business
- The Star
Marc Benioff says AI does 50% of Salesforce's work, calls himself the 'Taylor Swift of tech'
Artificial intelligence now performs up to half the internal work at Salesforce, according to founder and CEO Marc Benioff, who says his company is spearheading a "digital labor revolution" that will reshape the future of work. "AI is doing 30% to 50% of the work at Salesforce now," Benioff said during an episode of The Circuit with Emily Chang last week, citing software engineering and customer service as key areas transformed by automation. He added that the company's internal use of AI has helped reduce hiring needs while boosting productivity. Benioff's bullish stance on AI is centred around a new platform called Agent Force, which deploys "digital employees" to handle tasks ranging from customer service and analytics to marketing and branding. Salesforce seeks to reach one billion active agents by the end of the year. "It's the fastest-growing, most exciting thing we've ever done," Benioff said, noting that more than 5,000 customers are already using the technology. Benioff said the company's flagship AI agent has reached 93% accuracy in customer interactions, including with major clients such as Walt Disney Co. Still, he emphassed the importance of vigilance, especially around security and misinformation. "You have to be completely paranoid," he said. At 59, Benioff continues to embrace his role as a tech industry disruptor. A self-taught programmer who sold his first software product as a teenager, he worked under Larry Ellison at Oracle before founding Salesforce in 1999. The idea for the company, he said, came to him while swimming with dolphins in Hawaii. Salesforce went on to revolutionise enterprise software by delivering it via the Internet, pioneering the software-as-a-service model and becoming a global CRM leader with clients including Apple, Amazon and Boeing. Now, Benioff says the San Francisco firm is transforming for the AI era. Despite his enthusiasm, he acknowledged the technology's disruptive impact on labour. Salesforce has already cut more than 1,000 jobs, and Benioff predicts that today's CEOs may be the last to manage entirely human workforces. He estimates AI could unlock US$3 trillion (RM12 trillion) to US$12 trillion (RM50 trillion) in global productivity. Benioff said he meditates daily, weaves Hawaiian spiritualism into company culture, and once spent more than US$20mil (RM84mil) to license physicist Albert Einstein's likeness for Salesforce's AI branding. He proudly describes himself as "the Taylor Swift of tech." To illustrate his embrace of AI, Benioff said he co-wrote the company's latest business plan with an AI assistant – an exercise he described as making the CEO job "less lonely." He is also blunt when it comes to competition. Benioff dismissed Microsoft's Copilot as "repackaged ChatGPT," drawing a contrast with Salesforce's more autonomous Agent Force platform. He supports breaking up Big Tech, saying the industry has "probably been too big." While facing criticisms over shifting diversity initiatives and political opportunism, Benioff remains committed to corporate responsibility. You can "do well and do good," he said, referring to Salesforce's 1-1-1 model, which pledges 1% of company equity, product and employee time to philanthropic causes. As for his hometown, Benioff rejects claims of San Francisco's decline. "I think it's a false narrative," he said. "The people who are creating the future are here. This isn't the first gold rush we've been through." – San Francisco Chronicle/Tribune News Service
Yahoo
28-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Salesforce is using AI for up to 50% of its workload, and its AI product is 93% accurate, says CEO Marc Benioff
Salesforce CEO and founder Marc Benioff said the company now relies on artificial intelligence for 30% to 50% of its entire workload. Coco Gauff and Emma Grede team up to help small businesses I've become an AI vibe coding convert Tech layoffs June 2025: Microsoft, Google, Disney, ZoomInfo join the list of companies said to be shedding jobs The software giant, like many other tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Microsoft and Google, is going all in on the AI boom. 'All of us have to get our head around this idea that AI could do things, that before we were doing, and we can move on to do higher-value work,' Benioff told Bloomberg, including positions like software engineering and customer service. 'It's these agents, these digital laborers, digital employees who are out there doing this work servicing the customers, selling to the customer, marketing to the customer, partnering with me to do the analytics, the marketing, the branding.' Benioff said he even writes his yearly business plan with an AI partner, along with a 'human' Salesforce executive, adding that the company was on track to have one billion of these 'agents' before the end of the year. (Sixty-five percent of companies are now experimenting with AI agents, according to an April KPMG survey.) Benioff also estimated that Salesforce has reached 93% accuracy with the AI product it's selling to customers, including Walt Disney Co., which was developed to carry out tasks such as customer service without human supervision, according to Bloomberg. Benioff added that it's not 'realistic' to reach 100% accuracy, and that other companies are at 'much lower levels because they don't have as much data and metadata.' The software giant was ranked the No. 1 customer relationship management (CRM) software provider in 2025 for the 12th consecutive year by the global market intelligence firm IDC. Salesforce's clients include Apple, Boeing, Amazon, Walmart, and McDonald's, to name a few. According to Bloomberg, AI is ushering in a new era of 'the tiny team.' Gone are the days when Silicon Valley companies rapidly hire as they scale; now tech companies are in a race to the bottom, competing to see who can manage the lowest head count in an effort to cut costs and increase efficiencies. The AI boom comes at a time when many tech companies are slashing jobs, in part to keep up with inflation and increased economic uncertainty, spurred on by the Trump administration's tariffs and conflict with Iran. Salesforce Inc. (NYSE: CRM) was trading up less than 1% on Thursday in midday trading, at the time of this writing. In the company's latest round of earnings for the first quarter, which ended April 30, the company reported revenue of $9.8 billion, up nearly 8% year over year, beating analyst expectations, and it raised guidance 'by $400 million, to $41.3 billion, at the high end of the range.' Earnings per share (EPS) came in at $2.58, topping estimates of $2.55. Benioff said Salesforce has 'built a deeply unified enterprise AI platform—with agents, data, apps, and a metadata platform . . . with Agentforce, Data Cloud, our Customer 360 apps, Tableau, and Slack all built on one trusted, unified foundation, [so] companies of every size can build a digital labor force—boosting productivity, reducing costs, and accelerating growth.' The company had a market capitalization of $257 billion at the time of this writing. Its next earnings report is scheduled for late August. This post originally appeared at to get the Fast Company newsletter:
Fast Company
26-06-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Salesforce is using AI for up to 50% of its workload and its AI product is 93% accurate, says CEO Marc Benioff
Salesforce CEO and founder Marc Benioff said the company now relies on artificial intelligence for 30% to 50% of its entire workload. The software giant, like many other tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Microsoft and Google, is going all in on the AI boom. 'All of us have to get our head around this idea that AI could do things, that before, we were doing, and we can move on to do higher value work,' Benioff told Bloomberg, including positions like software engineering and customer service. 'It's these agents, these digital laborers, digital employees who are out there doing this work servicing the customers, selling to the customer, marketing to the customer, partnering with me to do the analytics, do the marketing, the branding.' Benioff said he even writes his yearly business plan with an AI partner, along with a 'human' Salesforce executive, adding the company was on track to have one billion of these 'agents' before the end of the year. (65% of companies are now experimenting with AI agents, according to an April KPMG survey.) Benioff also estimated that Salesforce has reached 93% accuracy with the AI product it's selling to customers, including Walt Disney Co., which was developed to carry out tasks such as customer service without human supervision. Benioff added that it's not 'realistic' to reach 100% accuracy, and that other companies are at 'much lower levels because they don't have as much data and metadata.' The software giant was ranked the No. 1 customer relationship management (CRM) software provider in 2025 for the 12th consecutive year; its clients include Apple, Boeing, Amazon, Walmart and McDonald's, just to name a few. According to Bloomberg, AI is ushering in a new era of 'the tiny team.' Gone are the days when Silicon Valley companies rapidly hire as they scale; now tech companies are in a race to the bottom, competing to see who can manage the lowest headcount in an effort to cut costs, and increase efficiencies. The AI boom comes at a time when many tech companies are slashing jobs, in part to keep up with inflation and increased economic uncertainty, spurred on by the Trump administration's tariffs, and conflict with Iran. Salesforce by the numbers Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM) was trading up less than 1% on Thursday at the time of this writing in midday trading. In the company's latest round of earnings for the first quarter, which ended April 30, the company reported revenue of $9.8 billion, up nearly 8% year-over-year, beating analyst expectations, and raised guidance 'by $400 million to $41.3 billion at the high end of the range.' Earnings per share (EPS) came in at $2.58, topping estimates of $2.55 by $.03. Benioff said Salesforce has 'built a deeply unified enterprise AI platform—with agents, data, apps, and a metadata platform… with Agentforce, Data Cloud, our Customer 360 apps, Tableau, and Slack all built on one trusted, unified foundation, [so] companies of every size can build a digital labor force—boosting productivity, reducing costs, and accelerating growth.' The company had a market capitalization of $257 billion at the time of this writing. Its next earnings report is scheduled for late August.
