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Shares of Dave & Buster’s Entertainment (PLAY -16.12%) were taking a dive today after the “eatertainment” chain missed estimates on the top and bottom lines.

As of 10:08 a.m. ET, the stock was down 16.2% on the news.

Image source: Getty Images.

Dave & Buster’s falls behind

The arcade operator reported flat revenue in the quarter at $557.4 million, which missed estimates at $562.7 million. Comparable sales fell 3% in the period, showing that D&B appears to be losing customers.

On the bottom line, the results also disappointed as adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) fell from $151.6 million to $129.8 million. Adjusted earnings per share, meanwhile, fell from $1.12 to $0.40, which was well below the consensus at $0.92.

Dave & Buster’s brought on a new CEO toward the end of the quarter. Tarun Lai comes to the company after serving as an executive at Yum! Brands for 25 years, most recently as president of KFC.

Lai said, “My immediate focus is clear: reinforce our guest-first culture, deliver memorable experiences, and drive meaningful growth in sales, cash flow, and shareholder value.”

What’s next for Dave & Buster’s

Looking ahead, Dave & Buster’s didn’t offer guidance in the earnings release, but the appointment of a new CEO should offer some hope for a turnaround.

Restaurant chains have been broadly struggling this year due in part to weak consumer sentiment, concerns about tariffs, and a softening labor market, so that may partly explain Dave & Buster’s challenges. However, the stock has struggled for years despite being the leader in its category.

If the new CEO can return the company to growth, the stock has significant upside potential, but that’s likely to take time, if it happens.

On Sunday at approximately 2 a.m. Tehran time, seven B-2 stealth aircraft attacked the Iranian nuclear facilities in Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan, strikes enabled as much by the belief that Iran had this coming as the particular technology of the American bombers. A drawling President Trump put it in stark terms shortly after the operation ended. “For 40 years, Iran has been saying death to America, death to Israel. They have been killing our people, blowing off their arms, blowing off their legs, with roadside bombs. That was their specialty.”

Convention drives coverage of Iran in the United States, from stock images of anti-American murals to the enduring menace of “Iranian-backed militias.” Now there is an emerging consensus that overthrowing the government in Tehran will accomplish what Israeli and U.S. missiles and air assaults have not: an end to Iran’s nuclear program and that country’s destabilizing aspirations for regional hegemony, not to mention an end of the oppressive Islamic Republic itself. A series of headlines, analysts and politicians have in recent days presented regime change as a natural certainty, nothing less than a magic bullet. This too is seen as Iran’s due.

Very few of these expert voices have taken the next step by asking, “Then what?” Where does the magic bullet land? Sovereign imperatives await the next group to come into power. Democratic or otherwise, the government that replaces the current regime will be laser-focused on Iran’s survival. And there is very little reason for Israel or the U.S. to think that a reconstituted Iran will become more conciliatory toward either country once the war ends.

The reality is that nationalism, not theocracy, remains what what the historian Ali Ansari calls the “determining ideology” of Iran. There is a robust consensus among scholars that politics in Iran begins with the idea of Iran as a people with a continuous and unbroken history, a nation that “looms out of an immemorial past.” Nationalism provides the broad political arena in which different groups and ideologies in Iran compete for power and authority, whether monarchist, Islamist or leftist.

And that means that the patriotic defense of Iran isn’t a passing phase, produced under the duress of bombs, but the default position, the big idea that holds Iran together, hardened over the last two centuries of Iranian history and the trauma of the loss of territory and dignity to outside powers, including the Russians, the British and the Americans.

Getting rid of Islamic rule won’t change this dynamic; it is almost sure to guarantee that something worse will come along, sending Iranian politics in unexpected and more corrosive directions. Americans, after all, need only look to their current administration (or past interventions in the Middle East) for examples of how populist responses to foreign invasions, real or imagined, can lead to unthinkable outcomes.

“Trump just guaranteed that Iran will be a nuclear weapons state in the next 5 to 10 years, particularly if the regime changes,” Trita Parsi of the U.S.-based Quincy Institute wrote Saturday night. This is especially true if a new regime is democratic. The promised “liberation” of the Iranian people through devastating bombing campaigns presents the worst-case scenario for Israel and the U.S., as no future elected government would survive unless it sustained, and perhaps surpassed, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s current belligerence.

There is tragedy here. Ordinary Iranians, like most people, want peace and security, preferably through diplomacy and dialogue. The unprovoked attacks of the last week and their subsequent justification by not only the U.S. but also nearly all of the European Union, a disastrous sequence that began with Trump’s wanton violation of President Obama’s Iran deal in 2018, have convinced an increasing number of Iranians that the restraint of arms, nuclear or otherwise, is national suicide.

Insofar as the Islamic Republic can claim that it is the only Iranian government in more than 200 years to have lost “not an inch of soil,” it continues to cling to power. Of course, such legitimacy comes with a dual edge. This regime may survive in the short term, but if and when it does fall it will be because its leaders failed to keep Israeli and American arms out, munitions that have already killed more than 800 of their fellow citizens in less than a week, according to the Washington-based group Human Rights Activists.

One of the most common conventions when it comes to Iran, typically presented as a gesture of grace, is to draw a distinction between its government and the people, to lay blame on “the mullahs” and not the country’s long-suffering citizens for their country’s status as a rogue actor. As a way to appeal to Iranians of the righteousness of his cause, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his surrogates have deployed tropes of civilizational greatness that would make even the most ardent Persian chauvinist blush. On Thursday, the Israeli prime minister announced that the time had come for the Jews to repay an ancient debt: “I want to tell you that 2,500 years ago, Cyrus the Great, the king of Persia, liberated the Jews. And today, a Jewish state is creating the means to liberate the Persian people.” Regime change, by this logic, is a project of recovery and revivalism, a surefire way to make Iran great again.

Iranians are proving to be less nuanced, and unconvinced. The distance between the Iranian state and society has in the last week been reduced to almost nothing. Across the range of experience and suffering, from imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureates and formerly imprisoned Palm D’Or winners to working-class laborers left behind by the revolution, the overriding sentiment today in Iran is clear: These clerics may be scoundrels, but they’re our scoundrels, our problem to solve.

Nearly 50 years into an unwanted dictatorship, Iranians have developed a refined capacity for identifying bad faith. They know who has Iran’s interests at heart and who is trying to save his own skin.

Iranian American Shervin Malekzadeh is a visiting assistant professor of political science at Pitzer College and author of the forthcoming book, “Fire Beneath the Ash: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Democracy in Iran, 2009-2019.”

US President Donald Trump says he is still weighing his options regarding United States military intervention amid escalating hostilities between Israel and Iran.

Standing on the South Lawn of the White House on Wednesday, Trump said, “The next week is going to be big,” adding that Iranian officials are eager to negotiate. However, he warned them that “it’s very late to be talking,” after they reached out to him.

Officials and experts have suggested that the US’s 30,000-pound (13,000kg) bunker buster bomb is the only weapon capable of destroying the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, a facility believed to be central to Tehran’s nuclear programme and carved deep into a mountain.

The United States is the only country to possess these bombs, which it delivers using B-2 bombers. If deployed against Iran, it would represent a major shift from primarily intercepting missiles on Israel’s behalf to conducting active offensive strikes against Iran.

What are bunker buster bombs?

“Bunker buster” is a general term for bombs designed to destroy targets located deep underground that conventional bombs cannot reach.

The US military’s most powerful bunker buster is the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator. Weighing about 30,000 pounds (13,600 kg), including a 2,700kg (6,000-pound) warhead, this precision-guided bomb is made of high-strength steel and built to penetrate up to 200 feet (61 metres) underground before exploding.

The B-2 Spirit, a US stealth bomber, is currently the only aircraft designed to deploy the GBU-57 and can carry two bunker buster bombs at a time. The US Air Force says multiple bombs can be dropped sequentially, either by the same aircraft or by several, allowing each strike to burrow deeper, amplifying the overall impact.

Israel also operates US-made bunker busters, including the GBU-28 and BLU-109, which are typically dropped from fighter jets such as the F-15. These weapons, however, have a much shallower penetration range and are not capable of reaching extreme depths of fortified sites like Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility. In 2024, Israel reportedly used successive BLU-109 bombs to kill Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in his underground headquarters in Beirut.

How deep is Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility?

Iran’s Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, located about 95km (60 miles) southwest of Tehran, is built into the side of a mountain, reportedly up to 80-90 metres (260-300 feet) underground, to survive air strikes and bunker buster attacks.

Construction of the Fordow facility is believed to have begun in about 2006, and it became operational in 2009, the same year Iran officially acknowledged it.

Under the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA, Iran agreed to halt enrichment at Fordow and convert the site into a research centre. However, after the US withdrew from the agreement in 2018, Iran resumed uranium enrichment at the facility. Iran has insisted its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes.

Fordow is reportedly defended by Iranian and Russian surface-to-air missile systems, though those defences may have already been targeted in Israel’s ongoing strikes.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has framed the campaign as a mission to dismantle Iran’s missile and nuclear capabilities, describing them as an existential threat. Officials have confirmed that Fordow is a key target.

“This entire operation … really has to be completed with the elimination of Fordow,” said Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, in an interview with Fox News.

Other nuclear sites targeted

Israel is believed to have destroyed the above-ground section of Iran’s uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, the country’s largest nuclear site.

According to the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the resulting power loss may have also caused damage to the underground enrichment halls at the facility.

Before and after satellite imagery reveals the extent of the damage at Natanz.

Israeli attacks have also damaged the Isfahan enrichment facility in central Iran.

Potential nuclear and chemical contamination

On Monday, Rafael Grossi, the head of the UN nuclear watchdog, said there was a possibility of both radiological and chemical contamination from the damaged Natanz site.

Speaking at an emergency IAEA session in Vienna, Grossi said radiation levels remain normal outside Iran’s Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites, both of which were hit in Israeli strikes. However, he warned that ongoing military escalation increases the risk of a radiological release.

Fordow is located about 32 kilometres (20 miles) south of the city of Qom, Iran’s seventh-largest city with a population of some 1.4 million and a major religious and political centre.