🔥Johnny's Links #3🔥
Stub rent, Beyond Meat, Brightline Trains Florida & More.
Johnny is back, ladies and gentlemen, after spending the last several hours pondering how 2016 vibes are kinda like 2026 vibes — at least in the world of bankruptcy. After all, ‘16 was the year of the massive SunEdison chapter 11 bankruptcy. Nearly a decade later and solar continues to fill bankruptcy court dockets … see, e.g., Tonopah Solar Energy LLC, which filed a chapter 11 case earlier this week in the District of Delaware (coverage to come).
Anyway, Johnny is back with some link whimsy. Feel free to share your own links or comments in Substack’s native comment section.
📼What We’re Watching (1 Vid) 📼
1. Stub Rent (Long Ransom Payments). We definitely love how RX professionals are leaning into various distribution channels to get content out there to potential clients. Here is a video by Lowenstein Sandler’s Andrew Behlmann and Daniel Besikof — both looking like they’re being forcibly compelled to face the camera by one of the Sopranos — addressing a recent Rite Aid decision out of Judge Kaplan in the District of New Jersey. That decision applied the billing date rule to the treatment of rent, holding that stub rent is an administrative expense that does not have to be paid on day one of a chapter 11 case. This is a favorable take for a would-be retail-debtor concerned about liquidity or, as the gentlemen from Lowenstein Sandler put, “New Jersey has made itself a desirable venue for retail debtors — a clear, predictable, debtor-friendly ruling on stub rent and Section 365(d)(3) will reinforce that trend for retailers with large lease portfolios.” We wonder if Judge Kaplan realized that when he made the ruling, 🙄. We also love how Mr. Besikof — based in New Jersey — is straight-up talking his own book, 😉. Still, the video is a quick three-minute primer that is worth watching — especially if you’re a landlord with retail tenants. The bit at the end that Mr. Behlmann breezed over about how this ruling may “…subject landlords to the risk of delays and administrative insolvency” — something that never happens in retail, nooooooooooooo — is a real show stopper that probably warranted more than a mere Sopranos-style driveby-mention.
🔗What We’re Reading (8 Reads)🔗
1. Beyond Meat (Long Waveriding). It’s been a minute since we last talked about Beyond Meat Inc. ($BYND). That last time was here when we bemoaned the fact that the turd kept reappearing in the news after doing a highly dilutive LME — in that instance by delaying its financial reporting due to material weakness. It remedied that issue shortly thereafter and reported results … results which were bad … like very bad … like, as bad as the fake meat they manufacture. In that vein, we look forward to their next quarterly report. Before then, though, the company is hopping on the protein bandwagon, recently announcing a sparkling protein beverage on its e-commerce platform, Beyond Test Kitchen. Johnny will most definitely not be navigating his browser over there but you sure can. Suffice it to say that investors don’t seem that jacked up on the news. The stock was trading at $1.32 in our last report back in November; it is now sub-$1/share and wasn’t even buoyed by two straight days of market rip.
2. Brightline Trains Florida (Short Sub Muni Bonds). The Fortress Investment Group-backed and FL-based passenger rail operator skipped its second interest payment on $1.2b of subordinate muni bonds. We’re old enough to remember certain pros talking up Florida as the next venue du jour:
And Sailormen Inc. already filed there earlier this month:
Will this name eventually add to the action down south?
3. Drone Delivery (Long Walmart’s Experimentation). Invest in a helmet folks, we predict falling drone lawsuits. Drone delivery company Wing recently announced an expanded partnership with Walmart Inc. ($WMT). From Wing:
“We are scaling ultra-fast service to an additional 150 Walmart stores over the next year, bringing the convenience of drone delivery to more than 40 million Americans. Walmart and Wing will establish a network of over 270 drone delivery locations in 2027, stretching from Los Angeles to Miami. The question is no longer if Wing and Walmart will deliver to your city, it’s when.
As we work together to rewire the retail delivery experience, this expansion builds on the success of our operations in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and Metro Atlanta, where customers have already made drone delivery a normal part of their everyday lives.”
Trucking companies have been struggling mightily over many months. This 👆 will not help.
4. Francesca’s (Short Retailers With Zero Reason to Exist, Part I). R.I.P. It seems the ‘20 chapter 11 bankruptcy filing by this company didn’t infuse a raison d’exister.
5. Hollywood (Long Local Bankruptcies). Is Hollywood f*cked? That’s a question Governor Gavin Newsom must be wrestling with — even after signing into law new lucrative tax incentives for film and TV. It appears that filmmakers will cherrypick filming locations much like debtors cherrypick venue; they’ll go where things are most or increasingly favorable and, consequently, New York, New Jersey and Illinois are all seeing large increases in both film count and product spend. What does that mean for LA? Well, per the Hollywood Reporter:
“In the fourth quarter of 2025, California saw a 20 percent decrease in movie and TV projects filming in the state year-over-year, with production spend from those projects similarly down 22 percent, according to the Q4 report from industry tracker ProdPro released Jan. 16. Total production spend in the quarter amounted to $1.35 billion.”
They add a silver lining and then sh*t all over it a moment later:
“One slight silver lining: In Los Angeles, overall filming days in the fourth quarter were up about 6 percent from the prior quarter, permitting office FilmLA disclosed on Jan. 15. But L.A. shoot days overall throughout the year were down 16 percent from 2024.”
This can’t mean good things for local businesses dependent upon film production.
6. J.C.Penney (Short Retailers With Zero Reason to Exist, Part II). Sit down folks because the sentence that follows might shake your head dizzy: J.C. Penney sucks. That’s right, y’all, you heard it here first. According to RetailDive, JCP’s total Q3 net sales fell 3.8% YOY, gross margin contracted by 0.7%, and the company’s net loss widened 488% to $100mm. The company spit some talk about positive trends yada yada yada but color us unconvinced this thing survives another few years.
7. Third Party Releases (Long Thought Pieces). We covered this ground in Links #2 …
… wherein 52% of respondents indicated that opt-out releases are legitimate while the remainder declared that they’re “horsesh*t.” While Olshan’s Adam Friedman and Dean Oswald don’t weigh in to that debate, they do share a summary of the (somewhat) recent GOL Linhas Aéreas Inteligentes S.A. ruling that sparked the question. We include it here for those, like us, who are obsessed with this topic.
8. Supreme Court (Short Certiorari). The highest court in the land is swatting bankruptcy-related petitions for writ of certiorari all over the place. A small group of dissenting claimants challenging confirmation of the Boy Scouts of America chapter 11 reorganization plan got booted and the Court also denied Hertz Global Holdings Inc.’s ($HTZ) attempt to avoid paying bondholders roughly $320mm in interest and legal fees related to a make-whole provision (leaving a ‘24 Third Circuit ruling against the company intact). The company’s stock is down roughly 4.7% as of January 20, 2026.
🔥X of the Week🔥
We realize it’s probably high time for all of y’all to hit your ski boondoggles so be careful out there:
📚Resources📚
We have compiled a list of a$$-kicking resources on the topics of restructuring, tech, finance, investing, and disruption. 💥You can find it here💥.
The BYND pivot to protein beverages feels like peak desperation tbh. I actually tried one of their earlier products when the hype was real back in 2019 and the taste wasn't bad, but the price point never made sense for everyday consumers. Launching beverages when ur core product line is struggling seems like a classic case of spreading resources too thin instead of fixing what's broken. Sub-$1 territory says itall.