There aren’t many writers exploring pop culture through the lens of data—and there are even fewer that I enjoy reading. Stephen Follows’ newsletter, Decoding the World Through Data, is one of the few exceptions; I really love his writing. He’s published some awesome data essays about the film industry, including:

• What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all

• Which colours dominate movie posters and why? (Note: he is British, so colors is spelled correctly here!)

• Was Harvey Weinstein thanked more often than God at the Oscars?

For this week's post, I am featuring one of Stephen’s pieces on great movies people never want to rewatch. I really enjoyed this essay, and I hope you do too. If you like what you read, check out his newsletter.

Check Out Stephen's Newsletter

Intro: Requiem for a Dream, an Un-rewatchable Classic

If you ask most people about Darren Aronofsky’s drug-fuelled mad 2000 classic movie Requiem for a Dream, they will say the same thing:

Wow, such a great movie. I’m never watching it again.

So much so that it has become shorthand among film fans for ‘A great movie that doesn’t attract repeat viewing’.

When you stop to think about that concept—an objectively great movie that people avoid—it’s quite strange. If you like watching great movies, and you think that Requiem for a Dream is indeed a great movie, why wouldn’t you want to watch it again?

Added to that, there are loads of mediocre and bad movies that we all collectively choose to re-watch, despite knowing (either from experience or their reputation) that better movies are available.

I’m going to tackle the notion of “re-watchability” in a future article, but today I’m going to focus on the following question:

What is the element that, when present in a great movie, means that audiences never want to watch it again?

To do this, I built up a dataset of 19,821 movies which appeared at least once on 530 user-created lists on Letterboxd, centered around the theme of ‘Movies you’ll only watch once’. I then narrowed down to the most oft-cited movies and their ratings.

In doing so, I think I have worked out what it is that is driving the ‘One and Done’ approach to viewing some great movies.

The Archetypal One-Time Gem

Let’s start by studying our principal example to ensure we know what we’re looking for.

Requiem for a Dream was directed by Darren Aronofsky and adapted from Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1978 novel of the same name. It follows four characters in Brooklyn whose lives gradually unravel through different forms of addiction.

The film is about one’s options narrowing and the inevitability of a bad outcome, even as the characters seek escape. The way it’s shot only adds to this, with lots of repetition, escalation, rapid editing, extreme close-ups, and an insistent score to reinforce the sense of momentum without release.

The movie consistently gets high ratings from people of all types.

• Critics give it an average of 71 out of 100 on Metacritic.

• 80% of the 128 critics on Rotten Tomatoes gave it a positive review.

• 43.8% of the cinephiles on Letterboxd who rated it gave it 4.5 or 5 out of five.

• 75.9% of IMDb users gave it a rating of 8 or higher out of 10.

Despite its universal acclaim, when I built a list of Letterboxd user lists along the lines of ‘great films you don’t rewatch’, Requiem for a Dream appeared on 99.2% of lists.

That’s right—it seems almost impossible to make a list of one-time masterpieces and not include Requiem for a Dream. The next most frequently mentioned films were way behind and were:

• Mysterious Skin (2004)

• Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

• Dancer in the Dark (2000)

• Come and See (1985)

• Oldboy (2003)

• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

• Funny Games (1997)

• Irreversible (2002)

• Schindler’s List (1993)

• Beautiful Boy (2018)

• Manchester by the Sea (2016)

One Theme to Ruin Them All

I wanted to see if I could deduce a theme running through the long list of movie titles.

My first thought was bleak intensity. Requiem for a Dream is exhausting, bleak, and emotionally punishing.

But when I looked at what made the films on the list stand out, there didn’t seem to be any difference in this regard from many other movies.

Many violent, upsetting, or emotionally heavy films attract repeat viewings, with some even becoming comfort watches for certain audiences.

• The Shining (1980) has sustained dread, violence, and psychological collapse.

• Alien (1979) is claustrophobic, violent, and relentlessly tense.

• Se7en (1995) is so bleak—to the extent I think many people forget just how grim it is until they rewatch it. (Not to mention nihilistic).

• Jaws (1975) has sustained dread, violent deaths, and existential fear.

• Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is all about intense paranoia and violation.

• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is relentless and stressful.

So I don’t think that bleak intensity alone reliably indicates whether people come back.

And then I found a thread that ran through many of these one-and-done classics.

Powerlessness.

What Requiem for a Dream does so well is place the viewer in a position where effort and insight offer no protection. The film does not invite you to anticipate improvement, recovery, or escape. Each character moves forward with a sense of inevitability, and we as the audience are carried along.

Unlike bleak, intense films such as The Shining, Alien, Se7en, or Jaws, knowing where the story ends does not make the experience easier. With those films, as we become more familiar with them, we experience an added sense of orientation and control. Our knowledge of the movie helps us turn fear into anticipation, making it manageable.

The opposite applies to films like Irreversible, Come and See, Dancer in the Dark, and Grave of the Fireflies. In each case, knowing what is coming does not provide comfort or control. It removes any remaining distance. The outcome is fixed, the damage is unavoidable, and we are required to sit with that knowledge during the movie.

So that’s my theory—great films that people don’t want to re-watch often elicit an intense feeling of powerlessness in us.

Notes

The user-generated lists I gathered for this research all had two criteria:

1. They claimed to contain films that were good, high quality, and/or admired (which I then verified via user ratings); and

2. Were films the author would not want/choose to watch again.

To give you a flavor, here are a few:

• Amazing, but never again

• Best movies that I’ll never watch again

• Great films I’ll never watch again

• Movies everyone should watch once that I’m never watching again

• One-Time Masterpieces

The language people use to name and describe these lists is fascinating. They fell into three categories:

1. Refusal. This was the “Never again” type, which implied that the author was adamant they were not going back.

2. Once only. This summed up the ‘single viewing’ perspective in a fairly neutral way.

3. Must see. This was the smallest group, but still present. They framed it almost as a duty to watch these movies.

If you enjoyed this article, you can check out Stephen’s newsletter here:

StephenFollows.com - Using data to explain the film industry

I use data to understand how the film industry works and then share that to help filmmakers get their films funded, shot and seen.

By Stephen Follows

Welcome to the Monday Roundup (sent on Tuesday this week because of a U.S. national holiday)!

The Monday Roundup is a weekly bonus edition featuring data-driven culture stories, curated datasets, and recommended reading.

Your regular Wednesday essay stays free for everyone—this is strictly additive.

Today’s edition has six new data stories. Free readers get the first two; paid subscribers get the full thing, plus datasets and recommended reading. Enjoy!

In Today’s Roundup:

• Original Data Stories: Shrinking TV season gaps, newsroom layoffs, the economics of sequels and reboots, the music-catalog gold rush, Hollywood’s endless M&A cycles, and music’s physical media resurgence.

• Recommended Reads: Notable data journalism and pop culture reads from around the web.

• Unique Datasets: Ten publicly available datasets, covering everything from AI music catalogs to how artificial intelligence is depicted in movies.

Trend 1: Is the Time Between TV Seasons Going Up or Down?

In the early days of the streaming wars, showrunners were encouraged to take their time developing and shooting a second or third season, because increased quality could (conceivably) net Apple TV or Peacock thousands of incremental subscribers. The result was an era of ever-ballooning gaps between seasons. Alas, industry consensus has shifted—quite drastically, I might add.

In a recent interview with The Wrap, WME TV co-head Erin Junkin discussed a renewed industry-wide focus on TV season wait times, claiming that Netflix and Apple are “trying to figure out a way to cut down on the time it takes for their shows to come back.”

To this, I say: hallelujah. I’m tired of watching explainer videos before a new TV season because the previous one aired 33 months ago (i.e., Severance).

Some of the best TV shows of the 21st century have taken nearly four years between installments, including personal favorites like Stranger Things, Fargo, and Atlanta.

Alas, these ever-growing wait times may finally be coming to an end. After weathering an industry-wide spending binge, a global pandemic, and the 2023 writers’ strike, studios have begun shrinking the gaps between TV seasons.

Personally, I still think 15 months between a first and second season is too much. I’d take a nominally worse final product in return for not having to do active research on why I liked a show in the first place.

Trend 2: Newsroom Layoffs

I try to strike a balance between dispiriting trends and uplifting stories. Unfortunately, this particular analysis focuses on newsroom employment, and is therefore not an “uplifting story.” In fact, pretty much the opposite.

Pick any moment in time over the last decade, and you’re likely to find a bummer anecdote about mass layoffs at a once-reputable newsroom. One such case: two weeks ago, New York’s WNBC eliminated its investigative reporter position as part of an ongoing wave of job cuts.

Legacy news outlets have had a rough 25 years, with current employment levels below 20% of what they were in the early 1990s.

Newspaper publishing is one of many media industries “eaten” by the internet, along with radio, periodicals, and broadcast television. In fact, if you want to see Silicon Valley’s impact on the media landscape, look no further than this chart, where the aforementioned verticals shrink whilst tech grows.

Information acquisition has become more efficient, in the broadest sense, but that efficiency has come at a cost. What economists typically call “productivity” could also qualify as “economic destruction that is counterproductive to human flourishing.”

Trend 3: The Sequel Sweet Spot: Too Soon or Too Late?

Tom Cruise has gone back to the well, mounting another legacy sequel to a hit film from the 20th century (à la Top Gun: Maverick). This time, Cruise will be starring in a sequel to the racing movie Days of Thunder. If you’re unfamiliar with this slightly-above-average film, don’t worry—your dad, or your dad’s dad, will be awaiting this reboot with bated breath.

Days of Thunder 2 is the latest entry in a surprisingly not-so-terrible lineage of legacy sequels, alongside the aforementioned Top Gun, Mad Max: Fury Road, Blade Runner 2049, and Twisters. The currently untitled Days of Thunder sequel is slated for 2028, meaning there would be a 38-year gap between the newest installment and its predecessor—the third-largest gap among an ever-expanding cohort of franchise reboots.

On the one hand, a large gap between installments comes with risk, as franchise devotees may age out of moviegoing (because older folks are less likely to go to theaters). On the other hand, conventional wisdom is that a gap between a sequel and its originator can prove beneficial, with a franchise’s prolonged absence heightening nostalgia and making its return feel more like an event. So where is the sweet spot? When is a reboot or sequel too soon—or too late?

Read more

Quick Programming note: Next week’s Monday Roundup will be published on Tuesday, since Labor Day is a U.S. national holiday.

Intro: A New Type of Ad

The first movie trailer ran in November 1913 and, somewhat ironically, advertised a Broadway show rather than a film. Screened at a handful of New York City movie theaters, the short promotional reel featured backstage footage from a musical called The Pleasure Seekers. The following year, this same formula was applied to an upcoming Charlie Chaplin film, teasing audiences with snippets of footage from an impending release. What began as a marketing stunt quickly became standard industry practice, and by 1917, the trade publication Moving Picture World declared that the trailer had “come into use extensively of late.”

More than a century later, trailers represent a thriving niche within the entertainment industry. Moviegoers routinely endure 25 minutes of previews before a screening (along with two insurance commercials), and major trailers rack up tens of millions of views online. Over the past five years, the prototypical studio film has released two trailers on average, while big-budget projects produce roughly five promotional spots over the course of an entire marketing campaign.

It’s with all this in mind that I’ll pose a rather annoying question: does this century-old marketing tool actually work? Do trailers meaningfully influence whether people buy movie tickets, or are they simply an expensive ritual Hollywood has never bothered to question?

So today, we’ll investigate Hollywood’s movie-trailer industrial complex and determine whether this lucrative cottage industry actually moves the needle.

Do Movie Trailers Actually Sell Tickets?

In 2012, a promo for Marvel’s Iron Man 3 set a YouTube record for video views within a trailer’s first 24 hours, garnering over 20 million plays. As you can imagine, this figure has since been surpassed several times over, with the current record holder being 2026’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which received nearly one billion views in its first 24 hours.

The Hollywood movie trailer has proven a natural fit for YouTube, where the average preview attracts tens of millions of views from internetgoers seeking a two-minute escape from boredom. Among videos that appear on YouTube’s daily Top 200 trending chart, movie trailers generate more collective viewership than any other content category.

People are watching these things, racking up billions of hours of viewership, which begs an uncomfortable question: does any of this matter? Are trailers the entertainment in and of themselves, or does this attention actually translate into box office?

To this, I say: ¿Por qué no los dos? (Translation: Why not both?)

To start with the simplest view, there appears to be a meaningful correlation between YouTube trailer views and a film’s worldwide box office gross.

If we’re willing to accept that correlation equates to causation, then we can wrap up this analysis early. One pretty cool chart, one thoroughly answered question, and absolutely no gray area or ambiguity surrounding this topic.

Just kidding—if only it were so simple! The apparent relationship between YouTube trailer views and box-office performance is muddied by a major confounding factor: film budget. Bigger movies tend to spend more on marketing, rack up more trailer views, and earn more at the box office.

The higher the profile of a film, especially one that is connected to existing intellectual property, the more ravenously its trailer is consumed. A promo for a third-rate franchise like Masters of the Universe garners greater YouTube activity than, say, a dirt-cheap A24 movie.

If a studio spends heavily to produce a film, it will also spend heavily to promote it. So how do we separate a movie’s budget from its trailer’s effectiveness?

One approach is to rerun this correlation exercise, grouping our key metric by budget cohort. For this view, we’ll look at two different trailer-centric statistics:

1. Trailer views: pre-release video plays, as reported by YouTube.

2. Trailer “like rate”: the share of YouTube viewers who give a trailer a thumbs-up.

The results suggest that raw trailer views matter most for lower-budget films and considerably less for blockbuster releases. Trailer “like rate,” meanwhile, shows a stronger correlation with box-office performance across all budget tiers, which makes intuitive sense: the more audiences like what they see, the more likely they are to buy a ticket.

For an indie film, online enthusiasm is evidence that the movie has broken through the noise and found an audience. An expensive franchise release, by contrast, already comes with built-in awareness; its trailer simply has to convince people that the latest installment won’t be bad.

Putting it all together, we can run numerous variables through a regression model to see how factors like promo views, trailer “like rate,” and online acclaim predict box-office performance, both on their own and when combined.

The unsatisfying answer is that no single metric determines whether a movie succeeds. Instead, box-office performance appears to depend on an alchemical mix of factors, including:

• Budget

• Online acclaim (the quality of the filmmaking)

• Whether the trailer was well-received (“like rate”)

• Whether the trailer was able to generate hype, in the form of mass YouTube consumption

Each factor explains some portion of a film’s commercial performance, but the model becomes far more predictive when it considers how those variables interact.

In summary, I’m happy to report that movie trailers are indeed worth it, especially for smaller films that benefit from the kind of algorithmic kismet only YouTube can provide.

Final Thoughts: The Best Type of Advertisement

At its most basic, the movie trailer is a glorified commercial, its intended purpose no different from a State Farm ad or a Disneyland promo. But consider this admittedly unrealistic thought experiment: what would we lose if movie trailers ceased to exist?

For Disney or State Farm, fewer commercials would mean less brand awareness and, eventually, lower sales. Q3 earnings might suffer, and few people outside Wall Street would care. But if movies lost the trailer, the consequences would extend beyond a simple decline in ticket sales.

When I was eleven, I became obsessed with movies. There were countless things that drew me in, but what I found most enticing was the idea of a broader movie culture. I loved that there was a historical lineage of films just sitting there, waiting to be watched. I loved the common language cinephiles used to talk about flops, cult classics, and six degrees of Kevin Bacon. And I loved watching movie trailers.

During my early internet years, I scoured IMDb and YouTube for promos. It didn’t matter whether the trailer was for an upcoming blockbuster or some forgotten movie from the 1970s. I would watch them all the same.

I admit that everything about this next sentence reeks of personal bias, but movie trailers—which are just extended commercials—may be the only form of advertising that transcends its primary purpose.

Which raises an intriguing question: when is an ad more than just an ad?

• When a meaningful portion of the moviegoing public shows up early to a screening because they “like the trailers.”

• When thousands of people dissect a two-minute advertisement on Reddit, trying to determine whether the movie will be any good, make any money, win any awards, or somehow manage all three.

• When I consciously decide not to see a movie but am still glad I watched the trailer because now I understand what everyone else is talking about.

YouTube has allowed this culture to flourish far beyond the theater. Yesterday, for example, I watched two trailers online: one for an artsy Oscar contender called Fjord and another for a follow-up to The Social Network called The Social Reckoning. The first convinced me to buy a ticket. The second looked heinous, likely to besmirch the legacy of my favorite movie.

At the most immediate level, these trailers accomplished exactly what advertising is supposed to accomplish: they influenced a purchasing decision. But a few hours later, I was still thinking about both of them. People online were still chattering about how terrible The Social Reckoning looked, and reading those reactions made me feel both pleased and seen.

That experience captures both the measurable and intangible value of a movie trailer. On one level, I made a straightforward consumer decision based on whether I liked an advertisement—like all the other data points featured in my charts. In the other instance, a trailer gave me something to think about, argue about, anticipate, and discuss with a community of movie-lovers (and in this case, I guess, -haters).

Perhaps that is what captivated those original trailer audiences more than a century ago. A trailer does more than sell the experience of watching a movie. It allows the prospect of that movie to live rent-free in your head long before the lights go down and long after that film leaves theaters.

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Like movies? Follow me on Letterboxd

Welcome back to the Monday Roundup!

The Monday Roundup is a weekly bonus edition featuring data-driven culture stories, curated datasets, and recommended reading.

Your regular Wednesday essay stays free for everyone—this is strictly additive.

Today’s edition has six new data stories. Free readers get the first two; paid subscribers get the full thing, plus datasets and recommended reading. Enjoy!

In Today’s Roundup:

• Original Data Stories: Dolly Parton as America’s most (quantifiably) beloved cultural figure, social media’s anti-AI-slop crackdown, an alleged CD revival, Netflix poaching YouTube creators, the R-rated movie renaissance, and the celebrity docuseries boom.

• Recommended Reads: Notable data journalism and pop culture reads from around the web.

• Unique Datasets: Ten publicly available datasets, covering everything from NYC filming locations to global fishing activity.

Trend 1: Dolly Parton—America’s Most Beloved Cultural Figure

Americans love to disagree with one another, with this discord greatly magnified by a media apparatus that thrives on polemicism. Open [news site of your choosing] and you will find yet another topic on which Americans have differing opinions. This steady drumbeat of news coverage obscures the myriad issues Americans actually agree upon: Nerds Gummy Clusters, freedom, McDonald’s french fries, the awesomeness of the Super Bowl, and, of course, Dolly Parton. Americans have loved, and always will love, Dolly Parton, who passed away this past week at the age of 80.

Parton was a unique cultural hybrid in an American public sphere that favors political extremes, blending her humble beginnings, country credibility, bipartisan openness, and disarming self-awareness into a universally endearing persona. In fact, over the years, Parton frequently polled as America’s most beloved public figure.

Take, for example, YouGov’s March 2026 study of American polarization, which measured the partisan divide in how Democrats and Republicans view a wide range of celebrities and political figures. Parton was the survey’s most favorable figure by a large margin, with virtually no difference in partisan acclaim.

America is an incredibly diverse nation in a perpetual state of introspection, forever assessing the prospects of the Great American Experiment and debating what it means to be “an average American.” If I can be willfully reductive for a second: Dolly Parton may have been one of the few public figures to thoroughly understand these concepts and to use this boundless empathy for the betterment of others. This is all to say: RIP Dolly Parton, an American treasure.

Trend 2: Social Media’s AI-Slop Crackdown

The platform currently known as X announced a new “anti-AI-slop” policy, replacing its short-lived “Creator Revenue Sharing” program with an “Original Content Rewards” program. According to the announcement, the site-formerly-known-as-Twitter will rearchitect its payouts to favor creators who “personally write, film, design, or produce” their own content—which sounds nice on paper but difficult in practice.

X is the latest social media site to join the fight against AI slop, with platforms like Spotify, YouTube, and Substack also announcing changes to the way AI content is labeled and circulated across their sites.

Each platform has selected a different approach to AI content regulation, addressing the issue across three distinct domains:

1. Algorithmic recommendations: Will AI-detected media be deprioritized within a platform’s personalized recommendations and newsfeeds?

2. Payouts: Will payouts to AI-centric creators be penalized?

3. Labels: Will sloppy AI content and accounts be flagged within the application?

So far, all major social media sites have opted for labeling, while a handful of platforms have delved into algorithmic penalties and demonetization.

Two major winners have emerged from this enforcement wave. The first is “people who use the internet,” who can take in memes and music absent the threat of AI slop. The second is a startup called Pangram, which, to date, is the only AI detector that really works, making it the go-to partner for many of the aforementioned platforms.

In short, nature is healing—and by “nature” I mean social media.

Trend 3: Are CDs “So Back”?

Every year the world readies itself for the resurrection of the compact disc, and every year it never really happens.

Those who follow the music industry are subject to a steady drumbeat of media coverage surrounding the format’s viability. One such example: last week Olivia Rodrigo mounted a surprise CD release of her new single “Serena Joy,” selling a limited supply of 500 discs at a small store in Tustin, California.

If you’re skimming the headlines, you see “CDs” and “Olivia Rodrigo” in the same breath and think, “CDs must be cool again!” So, in the year 2026, are CDs “so over” or “so back”? Which is it?

Read more

Intro: The Tale of Two Super Mario Movies

Adaptations of the beloved Super Mario Bros. franchise have twice served as major test cases for the commercial viability of video game movies. One was terrible; the other, paradigm-shifting.

We’ll start with the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie, which was a troubled production from the outset (to say the least). For some reason, filmmakers initially envisioned a darker, dystopian rendition of Nintendo’s signature property. But shortly before production began, studio executives grew concerned that the movie would alienate younger audiences and ordered substantial rewrites. The result was a cinematic Frankenstein: part grimy cyberpunk fantasy, part children’s comedy, punctuated with out-of-place dialogue catering to die-hard fans.

Critics panned the film, audiences rejected the slapdash adaptation, and it earned a disastrous $21 million against a $48 million budget. For years, Super Mario Bros. was the foremost cautionary tale against Hollywood video game adaptations.

In 2023, Illumination, the studio behind the ever-present Minions plague, released a faithful animated adaptation of the Super Mario Bros. universe that grossed over $1.3 billion. Its success arrived amid a broader wave of well-received video game adaptations across film and television, with projects like The Last of Us and Fallout demonstrating how gaming franchises could please fans and normies alike.

Over the past five years, superhero stories and comic-book properties have been cycling out of studio slates and streaming catalogs, replaced by a growing wave of video game–based projects. As someone who wants big-budget movies to be good—and has become exhausted with the artistic inconsistency of superhero films—my main question is whether video games will prove any better as source material. Should we expect higher-quality storytelling than the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has delivered in recent years? And, if so, what makes video games different?

So today, we’ll explore the rise of video game adaptations, investigate the massive pent-up demand for this format, and examine the unique demographic makeup driving the commercial (and artistic) potential of these projects.

Hollywood’s Video Game Era Is Here. Will It Be Any Good?

Over the last three decades, Hollywood has moved away from original screenplays and literary adaptations in favor of fictional universes with built-in fandoms—first through comic books and, increasingly, through video games. Amid a tumultuous post-pandemic box office, adaptations of superhero stories and gaming universes account for nearly half of the highest-grossing films of the 2020s (thus far).

Video game movies are poised to grow their share of box office in the coming years, with some of Hollywood’s most exciting filmmakers now attached to major gaming properties: Zach Cregger of Weapons fame is adapting Resident Evil, Ex Machina’s Alex Garland is bringing Elden Ring to the big screen, Mission: Impossible’s Christopher McQuarrie is making a Battlefield film, and Yellowstone’s Taylor Sheridan is attached to a Call of Duty movie. The shift recalls the early days of the MCU, when rising filmmakers like Ryan Coogler and Taika Waititi were handed major franchises like Black Panther and Thor.

Projects centered around intellectual property (IP) are usually resource-intensive, laden with visual effects and lengthy post-production cycles. So whenever a promising filmmaker gets tied up adapting someone else’s fictional universe, my mind drifts to the same question: Will this actually be worth it?

With video games, the answer may be an enthusiastic “yes.” Consider the sheer size of the underlying fandom: Americans spend roughly $60 billion a year on video games, compared with just $2 billion on physical comic books.

This $60 billion of spending spans hundreds of games, making breadth a unique facet of the gaming space. It’s a robust market rife with distinct niches and storytelling styles.

Earlier this year, a YouTuber named Markiplier adapted an indie game called Iron Lung into a feature film, released it without a major studio, and the movie ultimately grossed $51 million. The underlying IP was nowhere near the scale of Fallout or Minecraft, but its fan base was devoted enough to turn a relatively obscure game into a significant box-office win.

Markiplier’s success is uniquely instructive, highlighting the growing convergence of gaming, social media, and theatrical exhibition.

For better or worse, social media now sits at the center of modern moviegoing: a 2024 Fandango survey found digital buzz to be the biggest single driver of theatrical attendance.

And when respondents were asked which platforms were most likely to get them into theaters, YouTube ranked first for film discovery. If the dueling 2026 successes of Backrooms and Obsession have taught us anything, it’s that YouTube can indeed put butts in movie-theater seats. And guess what category dominates YouTube’s trending videos more than any other? Yup, you guessed it: video games. By a large margin, in fact.

That makes YouTube’s enormous gaming audience a natural target for theatrical adaptations, especially when movie trailers are primarily consumed on the same platform. Someone who regularly watches Resident Evil gaming content, for example, is already primed to watch (and rewatch) a trailer for its upcoming big-screen adaptation.

For many, the widening cultural influence of video games is probably a no-brainer. But for me—a younger millennial who never quite vibed with Call of Duty or Rocket League—statistics like these are genuinely surprising. Has this cultural shift simply been brewing under my nose, hiding in plain sight? Is this further evidence of how disconnected I’ve become from popular culture?

This cultural blind spot initially left me skeptical of both the sheer proliferation of video game adaptations and their above-average quality.

And then I watched both Fallout and The Last of Us and found each series extremely compelling—especially The Last of Us, whose third episode easily qualifies as the best television I’ve watched in the past five years.

I’m hardly alone in my enthusiasm. So far, the video game adaptations of the 2020s have been surprisingly well received by critics, with recent releases surpassing comic-book stories in online acclaim.

I strongly believe that video games have a higher ceiling for storytelling quality. There are several reasons underlying my newfound evangelism: a larger built-in audience, a more robust market with hundreds of games appealing to many different types of fans, and, most importantly, demographic variability.

Consider these two surveys taken 80 years apart on the age groups that engage with comic books and gaming. You’ll notice the comic book survey did not target respondents above age 30, which is informative in and of itself. In contrast, video games see weekly engagement across all age groups, with 32% of respondents in their 80s claiming to play video games at least once a week.

I understand that the demographic makeup of the average comic-book fan has changed in the intervening 80 years, but I think the gist underlying this data point holds: superhero stories traditionally cater to younger audiences. The result is a Marvel Cinematic Universe largely devoid of sex, graphic violence, and adult themes—a franchise engineered for adolescents and tweens.

Video games, by contrast, aren't tied to one specific age group or storytelling mode. The medium has Minecraft and Roblox for younger players, while games like Grand Theft Auto and Resident Evil appeal to teens and adults. That range produces source material with vastly different tones and narrative sophistication, giving filmmakers the space to tell nuanced stories without infantilizing their audience.

Final Thoughts: Jangling Keys

There are certain colloquialisms I’ve long accepted at face value—phrases like “curiosity killed the cat” or “bite the bullet”—whose origins I’ve never thought deeply about. And then occasionally I’ll come face-to-face with the literalization of these phrases, and I’ll realize why the saying caught on in the first place. Case in point: I often use the term “jangling keys” when referring to cheap fan service in movies built around intellectual property—usually comic book adaptations—but I’ve never really understood the phrase’s meaning out of context. I heard someone else say it, thought it sounded cool, and here we are. And then one day my son—an adorable infant—got cranky.

We were out on a walk when he hit his end-of-day tired spell and started giving me a devastating little pout. I went through all of his toys, which he quickly rejected one by one, and so, as a last-ditch effort, I began jangling my keys in front of his face.

It was at this point that my son became thoroughly entranced by the chiming of car keys and that I finally understood the meaning of a phrase I use weekly.

I write about film and television a lot, which means I write and think about intellectual property a lot. Since introducing my kid to the wonders of a key chain, I can’t help but think of his primal delight and our animalistic drive to chase that feeling for the rest of our lives—oftentimes through art.

People crave wonder and awe. And perhaps the easiest shortcut to feeling wonder is invoking a prior experience where we felt this very amazement. Which brings me back to “jangling keys.” Deep down, we all want this. We wanted it when we were six months old, and we want it today.

Everyone has their proclivities—their cultural Achilles’ heel—where if you can find a new way to experience that pastime, you will. For some it’s a superhero movie; for others it’s seeing the game Resident Evil on the big screen (three weeks from now); for my dad it’s a biopic about Bruce Springsteen; and for me it’s anything about the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

But just because we crave that sense of childlike wonder does not mean we need to be infantilized in the process.

And so we arrive, once more, at video games. I know it would make for a better essay if I were really grumpy about Hollywood’s impending video game era, but I’m not. I’m kind of excited.

I’m excited for people to feel the sense of awe only a movie can provide, without being coddled. If the next 15 years of popular culture are going to be built around video games, then maybe it marks an opportunity for everyone to get exactly what they want: movies made for adults, blockbuster box office, above-average investor returns, high-minded art, a thriving entertainment industry, and, most importantly, the ever-wonderful jangling of keys.

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Welcome back to the Monday Roundup!

The Monday Roundup is a weekly bonus edition featuring data-driven culture stories, curated datasets, and recommended reading.

Your regular Wednesday essay stays free for everyone—this is strictly additive.

Today’s edition has six new data stories. Free readers get the first two; paid subscribers get the full thing, plus datasets and recommended reading. Enjoy!

In Today’s Roundup:

• Original Data Stories: The end of The Simpsons, Myspace’s zombie-brand revival, Hollywood’s Chinese box office collapse, Suno’s landmark AI licensing deal, the inflationary economy of concert ticket resale, and the global rise of microdramas.

• Recommended Reads: Notable data journalism and pop culture reads from around the web.

• Unique Datasets: Ten publicly available datasets, covering everything from wildfires to the Billboard Hot 100 to human lifespan by century.

Trend 1: The End of The Simpsons?

Every fall, I watch grown men play a gladiator sport that may not exist in a few decades—or, as we Americans call it, “football.” And every so often, while watching this not-at-all-problematic sport, an advertisement for a new Simpsons episode will run, at which point football viewers across America—of all cultures and creeds—will voice their surprise at the continued existence of this 36-year-old show. Yet this annual tradition may soon be coming to an end.

In early August, Nancy Cartwright, the longtime voice of Bart Simpson, went on a podcast called Inside of You and speculated that America’s preeminent animated comedy would air its final episode in 2029, following the conclusion of its 40th season. This podcast interview, along with the return of some Simpsons Fortnite characters, sent the show trending across Reddit and YouTube.

Personally, I think this show needs to end. Just because The Simpsons was once great doesn’t mean it is still great, nor should it coast on cultural nostalgia. Despite the program’s immaculate reputation, The Simpsons saw a considerable drop-off in quality after its seventh season, which was over two decades ago—with online acclaim bottoming out around season 30.

Cable viewership for the show has also reached an all-time low, but that’s pretty much the case for all cable series in general. If the show is indeed canceled after its 40th season, it won’t be because of declining cable viewership, but because the program simply never found an audience on streaming.

The Simpsons has all the trappings of a streaming juggernaut: it’s accessible to kids and parents alike, boasts an endless catalog of episodes, and offers a timeless cast that never ages. And yet, for some reason, the show has never made the Nielsen Top 10 chart, even as animated successors like Family Guy, Bob’s Burgers, and King of the Hill have garnered meaningful viewership on streamers like Hulu and Disney+.

Somewhere between Gen X and Gen Z, the show simply lost its audience. It’s a missed opportunity for a legendary cultural object—the type of thing that makes you say “D’oh!”

Trend 2: The Return of Myspace

If I told you that “Myspace was trending on TikTok,” would you assume such news was an AI hallucination? Well, it’s not. Myspace—the defunct media platform, once the largest social network on the planet—announced that it would relaunch as a community oriented around “user creativity” and “customization,” which means it will either a) inhabit its previous form, or b) take shape as pretty much anything else.

Following this extremely vague relaunch announcement, #myspace began trending on TikTok, eventually peaking as the platform’s 5th most popular hashtag.

Myspace’s revival is the latest instance of a defunct tech brand being revived as an entirely different business. Over the last five years, companies like Napster, LimeWire, and Circuit City have been resurrected by opportunistic entrepreneurs who leverage a well-known brand in get-rich-quick schemes. In most cases, these zombie companies take the form of crypto products or AI tools.

It’s a dispiriting formula that pairs a nascent technology—one usually in the midst of an investment bubble—with a recognizable brand. This Frankenstein website is then used to make a few million dollars before the company is discarded again.

In the entertainment industry, nostalgia is frequently weaponized against sentimentalists via reboots and legacy sequels. In the tech world, this grift takes the form of a crypto token or an AI community focusing on “user creativity.”

Trend 3: Chinese Box Office—The Most Underreported Story in Entertainment

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey opened in China this past week, with an unusually large rollout across the country’s 800 IMAX screens and a premiere attended by Matt Damon and Nolan himself. China’s embrace of the film is a notable exception to Hollywood’s recent struggles there, as Beijing has sharply reduced approvals for Western films in response to geopolitical tensions between the United States and China.

China’s theatrical embargo of imported films has proven to be a massive issue for the American film industry. In fact, the enormity of this commercial shift is, in my opinion, the single most overlooked story in entertainment in the 2020s.

Read more

Intro: From One Option to Many Subscriptions

In the beginning, television was limited, composed of local stations broadcasting over the airwaves, typically affiliates of national services like ABC, CBS, and the BBC. Your access to the wonderful world of television depended on your location and antenna strength. And if you didn’t like the programming on these channels, well then too bad—you could always read a book or play hopscotch, or whatever else people did for fun in the 1950s.

Then along came cable television; suddenly the consumer had options. By the 1990s, millions of Americans paid monthly fees for bundles of specialized channels, such as HBO, MTV, ESPN, and CNN. While many voiced frustration over cable bundling—mainly the fact that customers were paying for channels they didn’t use—year-to-year cancellations remained low, because it was the only way to access an entire class of programming.

In 2007, Netflix launched its standalone streaming service, and the rest is history. People cut the cord and lost the ability to get all their content through a single subscription. Today, television consumers are subject to subscription fatigue, and platforms struggle to keep pace with this new direct-to-consumer model.

So today, we’ll chart a recent history of the streaming subscription, the economic ramifications of this new commercial contract, and how streamers are pivoting to a more sustainable (and familiar) version of this model.

How Streaming Regressed Into Cable TV

2007 marked the final year of the “before times.” Cable and satellite television reigned supreme, Netflix was laying the groundwork for the launch of its streaming service, and I didn’t have to pay for 8 distinct TV subscriptions in order to watch NFL games. And while cable and satellite providers spent billions of dollars promoting their unique value propositions, all these services did pretty much the same thing: you’d pay an annual fee and receive hundreds of channels in return. ‘Twas a simpler time.

People had their gripes with the cable bundle, yet cancellation rates remained relatively low because no viable alternative existed outside this arrangement. Prior to the widespread adoption of streamers like Netflix and Hulu, monthly retention rates for providers like Dish and DirecTV were both 1) high (relative to their predecessors) and 2) stable.

Netflix thoroughly disrupted this model by offering on-demand TV access unbound by programming schedules, advertisements, or physical media ownership—all for a cheap $7.99 a month.

Over time, Netflix’s ambition grew, and countless competitors entered the streaming wars. These platforms competed on content abundance and quality, and were forced to incrementally raise their prices to keep pace with breakneck spending.

Over the course of a decade, consumers went from paying one price for a bundle of cable channels to juggling several relatively inexpensive streaming subscriptions, only to watch the monthly cost of those same services steadily climb. Since launch, nearly every major streaming platform has—quite depressingly—doubled its initial monthly price (at a minimum).

And yet, amid all these price increases, something funny happened: the number of platforms consumers were willing to pay for stayed constant—at four subscriptions a month—which meant the average viewer was paying more in the aggregate.

At the same time, just because someone pays for the same number of streaming services does not mean they stick with the same platforms month to month or year to year. The result is a game of subscription musical chairs. Each quarter, streamers see a flurry of new sign-ups and cancellations, with cancellations increasingly close to overtaking new subscription volume.

A recent study from Antenna Research found that 42% of consumers who cancel a subscription will eventually return to that service within the next 12 months, meaning streamers are spending precious marketing dollars to acquire and reactivate the exact same customer—who may be returning to watch a single NFL playoff game before promptly canceling their subscription a second (or third) time.

At first glance, this may seem like an acceptable equilibrium for the TV customer lifecycle—until you consider that services like Netflix and Paramount+ spend somewhere between $40 and $80 per customer signup.

Fifteen years into the streaming wars, platforms are paying to acquire and reacquire the worst customers: those with little allegiance to any one service.

With subpar retention and a complete lack of customer loyalty, the economics of perpetual growth can go off the rails pretty quickly. So if you’re a streaming service, what do you do?

Hilariously, you look to the past and see what worked for previous iterations of television that you once set out to destroy. One practice that has come back into vogue is bundling, as streamers have started uniting forces so customers can pay one subscription price for access to multiple services, such as Hulu, Disney+, and HBO Max. This nascent cohort of bundles has seen significantly higher retention than standalone subscription signups—though nothing compares to the retention benchmarks we previously saw for DirecTV and Dish, which bundled hundreds of options together.

Consumers have responded by signing up for the very thing they once rejected as antiquated, and thus the share of new streaming signups coming via bundles has rapidly increased since the practice was reintroduced.

Most likely, this bundling will continue until the market effectively becomes a duopoly between Netflix and everything else, with “everything else” cobbled together through a hodgepodge of licensing deals, partnerships, and acquisitions (Paramount acquiring Warner Bros., for example, is essentially a bundle by another name).

The bundle addresses the burning issue of fickle customer retention, but it still leaves platforms with another major challenge: how to win over streaming holdouts. Each wave of subscribers is harder to acquire than the last, often requiring platforms to make product changes that bolster their appeal to holdouts. Industry consensus has long pointed to price as a major barrier to cord-cutting, which creates a seemingly impossible business conundrum for streamers: how do you attract price-sensitive customers while simultaneously raising prices?

The answer: advertising! Remember advertising? One of the things streaming services promised they would never do, but now it’s the single biggest driver of growth for these companies? Yes, exactly that thing!

And guess what? Consumers love it. In 2022, 60% of streaming activity went through ad-free plans and platforms; today, that figure has fallen to 25%, with subscription-free services like YouTube, Tubi, and Roku slowly gobbling up market share.

There is truly nothing new under the sun, as cable television has seemingly Frankenstein-ed itself back together, all whilst the entertainment industry has effectively shrunk in the process.

Final Thoughts: What’s the Upside?

I am not a Luddite, nor am I a technological NIMBY, nor am I any other stereotype of a person who resists change. I accept that culture evolves, even when that evolution renders something I love obsolete (like physical media). The world may have been “most awesome” when I was between the ages of 18 and 28, but that doesn’t mean it should remain frozen there forever. My tolerance for Silicon Valley disruption ultimately comes down to a fairly simple exchange of value: if something is going to die, then whatever replaces it should offer enough utility to justify that loss.

Google Maps cleared this bar because printing directions from MapQuest was a terrible system that still somehow ended with you lost in a suburban cul-de-sac. Spotify clears this bar as well: despite my insistence on collecting vinyl records, these albums take up space and force me to “own” dozens of songs I do not care about. TikTok, for better or worse, solves the bottomless human desire to never be alone with one’s thoughts.

Which brings me to streaming television: what was all of this for?

Many of the things streaming was supposed to liberate us from—advertising, bundles, and ever-inflating monthly bills—have become defining features of the medium in 2026. Consumers now pay more for access to an increasingly fragmented collection of services, while the American entertainment industry producing all that content has contracted. The old system was dismantled. So what, exactly, did we get in return?

You could argue that streaming ushered in an era of better television. But prestige TV predates Netflix’s transformation into an original-content factory: The Sopranos, The Wire, and Mad Men all emerged from an (allegedly) antiquated cable ecosystem. Meanwhile, a large segment of Netflix’s present-day output resembles the programming we’ve come to expect from cable mainstays like Bravo, TLC, or the History Channel: true-crime docuseries, reality competitions, and game shows. There is great television on streaming, but that doesn’t mean streaming was necessary for us to produce great television.

Which brings us to an uncomfortable counterfactual: In a universe where Netflix never disrupted Hollywood, would TV shows look similar to the ones we have today? If the answer is “yes,” then the streaming wars were never about reinventing television (in a sustainable manner). They were about rearranging who owns television.

A Silicon Valley company entered an established industry, subsidized an extraordinarily attractive product, seized market share, and forced incumbents into an expensive arms race. Other tech giants like Amazon, Apple, and Google followed suit, entering the streaming wars. Hollywood studios responded through imitation and consolidation, but lacked the scale required to compete. The most consequential change was not that television became available on demand, but that tech companies and erratic billionaires absorbed another swath of popular culture.

Seen through this prism, the inexpensive and convenient streaming subscription of the 2010s was simply a weapon of disruption. Consumers were offered an artificially attractive version of television long enough to abandon the old model. Then television regressed to its long-term equilibrium: a product marked by subscription increases, advertisements, and bundles.

In the end, we never actually got rid of the cable bundle. We spent a decade being convinced that it was obsolete, only for it to be resurrected under new ownership.

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Like movies? Follow me on Letterboxd

Welcome back to the Monday Roundup!

The Monday Roundup is a weekly bonus edition featuring data-driven culture stories, curated datasets, and recommended reading.

Your regular Wednesday essay stays free for everyone—this is strictly additive.

Today’s edition has six new data stories. Free readers get the first two; paid subscribers get the full thing, plus datasets and recommended reading. Enjoy!

In Today’s Roundup:

• Original Data Stories: Spotify’s AI crackdown, the franchise revival effect on streaming, TV’s biggest winners and losers of 2026, the speedy death of the blockbuster soundtrack, Marvel’s surprise superhero resurgence, and the immortal cultural relevance of “Mr. Brightside.”

• Recommended Reads: Notable data journalism and pop culture reads from around the web.

• Unique Datasets: Ten publicly available datasets, covering everything from Pokémon stats to college tuition to chocolate bars.

Trend 1: Spotify’s AI Strategy

Last week, Spotify announced it will tag AI-generated music with an “AI Persona” badge and subsequently remove these tracks from its algorithmic recommendations, to which I say: took you long enough!

The platform will utilize three different approaches to generative music detection:

1. Voluntary self-disclosure: This will likely yield a cumulative total of 10 profiles flagged as “AI Personas.” If I’m wrong, then I’d be fascinated to know why someone would upload a track to Spotify and then censor their own account.

2. Programmatic AI investigation tools: Using AI to detect AI!

3. Human moderators: Flagged accounts will be reviewed analog-style—by humans who possess the God-given right to make a bad decision.

This policy is in response to the mass proliferation of generative music on streaming platforms, with Spotify competitor Deezer flagging an estimated 90,000 AI-generated tracks per day.

A recent study estimated that 40% of new music uploaded to Spotify each week is AI-generated, with AI-produced tracks now accounting for 5% of the platform’s entire catalog.

And while many of these songs receive minimal streaming activity—amounting to a meager 0.3% of royalty payouts—there have been a handful of tracks that reached the Billboard digital charts and would have graced the Hot 100 absent the intervention of chart-makers.

It’s easy to take potshots at a multibillion-dollar tech company like Spotify—because they have a lot of money and I have significantly less money—but today is not one of those days. So it is through gritted teeth that I say the following to our foremost music-tech-overlord: good job on this particular thing!

Trend 2: The Franchise Flywheel (on Streaming)

There is a widespread stigma against Hollywood executives: namely, that they are bad at their jobs. I frequently receive emails from readers saying, “You should consult for [insert studio name]—then they’ll start making better movies!” And while I’m flattered that a few graphics and pithy remarks could inspire such confidence, the reality is that if I were making production decisions purely based on data (and nothing else!), I would find the behavior of Hollywood executives exceedingly defensible. Said differently, my data-driven advice would be: “Keep churning out franchise slop, no matter how artistically bankrupt!”

The franchise model thrives in today’s entertainment landscape for dozens of reasons. Consider, for example, what happens on streaming in the lead-up to a new franchise release: audiences routinely revisit earlier installments, turning every sequel into an advertisement for the films that came before it. Earlier this year, anticipation for movies like The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Spider-Man: Brand New Day saw fans fire up HBO Max and Disney+ to stream previous installments as a means of preparation.

This is what the not-at-all-cynical Bob Iger once called “the [franchise] flywheel effect,” where each installment in a cinematic universe supports a network of business assets that includes soundtracks, toys, theme parks, and earlier movie entries (which sit on a studio’s streaming platform). Gross!

As long as this behavior continues, we’ll keep getting franchises. The only heartening exception to this trend is Christopher Nolan, whose filmography is consumed and revisited as if it were one cohesive franchise. Every single movie within Nolan’s filmography saw a sizable jump in online activity in reaction to The Odyssey.

My great hope is that the interest surrounding Nolan’s work represents a new cultural pastime, one where auteur filmmakers like Jordan Peele, Ryan Coogler, and Quentin Tarantino are subject to a “director flywheel effect.”

Trend 3: TV’s Winners and Losers of 2026 (Thus Far)

Nielsen released its monthly Gauge report this past week, giving us insight into where Americans go for their daily dose of television. Now that we’re more than halfway through 2026 AD, I decided to use this data dump as an opportunity to highlight television’s biggest winners and losers of the year thus far.

Read more

Intro: Adam Sandler, Small-Screen Star

In 1999, Adam Sandler was the biggest movie star in America, if such a title exists. His irreverent humor and goofy voices propelled low-budget comedies like The Waterboy and Big Daddy to $375M and $465M in global box office (adjusted for inflation), despite Roger Ebert’s thorough disdain for both films—and the disapproval of nearly every other major critic.

From there, Adam Sandler was box office gold, with a run of hits that includes 50 First Dates, The Longest Yard, Click, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, Bedtime Stories, Grown Ups, and Just Go with It. Each movie cleared $100M, and each movie was savaged by critics.

And then his box office dominance began to falter. Following the back-to-back disappointments of That’s My Boy and Blended, Sandler gradually retreated from theatrical exhibition, eventually signing a lucrative deal with Netflix through his production company, Happy Madison.

Since then, Adam Sandler has mainly been a streaming movie star, barring a handful of exceptions—most notably all-time ulcer-inducer Uncut Gems. Over the past 5 years, Sandler has starred in a handful of films that feel borderline nonexistent despite being watched by tens of millions of people: Spaceman, Hubie Halloween, and You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah. All real, all number one on Netflix, and all subsequently memory-holed.

Sandler may be the foremost example of a streaming movie star: an A-list actor whose career has become increasingly oriented around the small screen. And while streaming films have existed for less than fifteen years, they have already produced a recognizable cohort of performers, led by a hodgepodge of one-time box-office draws and ascendant television actors.

So today, we’ll explore the rise of the streaming movie star, identify the performers who have embraced this newfangled format, and examine the forces that drove these actors away from theaters in the first place.

The Rise of the Streaming Movie Star

When you consider the streaming movie’s roots—such as the afterschool television special, the made-for-TV movie, or the Hallmark Christmas film—what Netflix and its competitors have built is actually quite remarkable. Hallmark, a greeting-card-company-turned-cable-network, cultivated a stable of D-list celebrities whose theatrical careers had long faded (or never really existed), while streamers have replicated this same model but on a grander scale, with A-list actors whose box-office appeal has only recently begun to wane.

As such, the actors with the most prolific streaming careers are box-office stalwarts from the 1990s and 2000s who are only a few years removed from their commercial peak, including Mark Wahlberg, Adam Sandler, Ben Affleck, and Eddie Murphy.

At the same time, making a lot of movies for Prime Video or Netflix does not necessarily make someone a “streaming movie star.” An actor like Adam Sandler or John Cena may simply be prolific, with some of their projects landing on streaming platforms.

So, according to this fledgling classification (that we are defining in real time), what puts the “streaming” in streaming movie star?

My argument is that this distinction comes down to a balance between theatrical and straight-to-streaming releases. Since 2019, only 8% of A-list actors with multiple leading roles have appeared exclusively in streaming movies, while another 22% have worked across both formats but tilt more heavily toward streaming. Taken together, both groups could reasonably be classified as streaming-movie performers.

To see this distribution in action, we can construct a Venn diagram separating streaming-only performers from theatrical mainstays based on their post-2018 movie output. On the theatrical side, we find Margot Robbie alongside a handful of action stars like Gerard Butler and Keanu Reeves. On the streaming end of the graphic, we get an odd mixture of one-time box-office draws, along with somebody named Sofia Carson (who we’ll return to in a second).

For the most part, the actors who lean toward streaming are well-known performers with careers that predate cord-cutting, with the exception of Sofia Carson, who belongs to an emergent class of actors made famous by Netflix who exclusively star in films that go straight to Netflix. Other performers who fit this amorphous category include Millie Bobby Brown (aka Eleven from Stranger Things), Joey King, and Zoey Deutch.

These are performers whose fame was either cultivated almost entirely through streaming or whose careers veered into the streaming ecosystem at an early stage. However, cases like Millie Bobby Brown and Sofia Carson are the exception, since the prototypical Netflix movie star is usually much further along in their career, having already established their box-office bona fides in the 1980s, 1990s, or 2000s.

This trend rests on a straightforward contract between platform and actor: a streamer leverages a performer’s considerable (yet fading) commercial capital; in return, the actor gets money, visibility, and a steady supply of work. It’s a fair trade. And yet the discourse surrounding straight-to-streaming movies often treats the participation of well-known actors as a kind of moral failure. This logic usually goes something like this: If these actors are so rich and famous, why can’t they simply choose better projects? Why settle for a format that is slowly eroding the very institution that made them famous in the first place—the theatrically released movie?

That may be true for some actors, particularly those sitting in the middle of our Venn diagram. But many performers have far less agency than we assume. The deeper I got into this analysis, the more I came to see the Netflix-performer relationship in reverse: actors don’t choose streaming so much as streaming chooses them.

Consider the share of streaming-only movies split out by genre: leading parts in comedy and romance skew toward Netflix, while action and horror movies are more likely to be released theatrically.

This helps explain why action stars like Keanu Reeves and Jason Statham remain firmly on the theatrical-only side of our Venn diagram, while comedic actors like Eddie Murphy and Adam Sandler have been absorbed into the broader Netflix ecosystem.

If you’re a comedy star from the 1980s or 1990s—or an emerging actor frequently cast in rom-coms, like Sofia Carson or Zoey Deutch—then streaming movies constitute the lion’s share of roles you’re offered.

Let’s say you fall into one of these buckets and you’re headed for a career of small-screen stardom on Netflix, Prime Video, or Hulu. Is that really such a bad thing? Does choosing a streaming-only movie over a glitzy theatrical release consign you to cultural irrelevance?

There is indeed a notoriety tax associated with a streaming release (versus a premiere in theaters), but it’s smaller than you might expect. When we examine how long a lead actor’s Wikipedia page trends amongst the site’s daily top 100 entries following a movie release, we find a meaningful—but hardly enormous—gap between theatrical and streaming films.

With the exception of 2020, when nearly every movie was a streaming movie, straight-to-streaming releases see a fairly consistent 12% drop in search interest—a penalty that feels surprisingly modest given the format’s subpar cultural reputation.

And if the goal is simply to remain visible, keep making movies, and continue collecting paychecks, then starring in a Prime Video production doesn’t seem like such a drastic compromise.

Final Thoughts: The Evolution of the B-Movie

While Netflix, Prime Video, and Tubi TV are relatively recent additions to the entertainment landscape, there is nothing particularly new about the straight-to-streaming movies that inhabit these platforms. This format is simply the latest evolution of a film category that has existed for decades.

In the beginning, there was the B-movie: schlocky genre fare produced for cheap that attempted to turn a nominal budget into a modest profit. These projects coveted performers who were slightly past their prime—recognizable names that came at a discount. From there, the B-movie has taken several forms: the made-for-TV film, the Hallmark original, the direct-to-video or DVD release, and eventually the low-budget titles that populated Redbox kiosks and cable-on-demand menus. For much of the 2010s, this was simply where Nicolas Cage dwelled—a strange liminal space between movie stardom and cultural obscurity.

Then along came Netflix, and for a while it seemed like the streamer would thoroughly blur the line between made-for-TV movies and theatrical releases. Films like Roma, Marriage Story, and The Irishman showed the promise of the streaming medium, particularly the ability to support ambitious, idiosyncratic projects that might struggle in a franchise-dependent studio system. But over time, the straight-to-streaming movie began to resemble its forebears—the Redbox fare where you’d see Jean-Claude Van Damme on the cover and think “oh, that’s what he’s been up to!”

The further I got into my research—and the more I came to understand streaming-movie stardom as a product of circumstance—the more one question nagged at me: Given the historical precedent for this kind of entertainment, why do straight-to-streaming movies have such a poor cultural reputation? If a popular comedic actor from the 1990s has few viable options outside of Netflix, why do we hold that against them?

My best guess is that animus is a form of misdirected cultural scapegoating. Up until the late 2010s, B-movies posed little threat to theatrical exhibition. Nobody decided to skip a night at the movies because of a direct-to-DVD Nicolas Cage thriller. The same cannot be said for a Netflix Original. These films are lower quality and erode the appeal of theatrical exhibition, and so we vent our frustration at the most visible faces of this operation—actors like Eddie Murphy and Adam Sandler who keep starring in these things.

We blame these performers for helping streamers chip away at movie theaters. Yet the causal nature of this relationship runs in the opposite direction. The reality is something closer to a devil’s bargain, one where streaming robs an actor of the ability to make movies for theaters and then offers itself as one of the few plausible alternatives. The end result is a slate of films that only seem to exist in theory (and on the Nielsen charts), where listing them reads like a game of two truths and a lie: Candy Cane Lane, The Do-Over, The Family Plan, The Pickup, Me Time, The Union, and The Family Plan 2. All starring a beloved Hollywood actor, all real—and yet also somehow not.

Enjoyed the analysis? Support Stat Significant and unlock the data behind the insights.

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Welcome back to the Monday Roundup!

The Monday Roundup is a weekly bonus edition featuring data-driven culture stories, curated datasets, and recommended reading.

Your regular Wednesday essay stays free for everyone—this is strictly additive.

Today’s edition has six new data stories. Free readers get the first two; paid subscribers get the full thing, plus datasets and recommended reading. Enjoy!

In Today’s Roundup:

• Original Data Stories: anime’s global dominance, the Netflix afterlife phenomenon, Latin music’s outsized presence on YouTube, a Dunesday box-office showdown, the WNBA’s remarkable resurgence, and ancient Greece’s return to the mainstream (following a 3,000-year hiatus).

• Recommended Reads: Notable data journalism and pop culture reads from around the web.

• Unique Datasets: Ten publicly available datasets, covering everything from music genre popularity to Nobel Prize winners to IMDb data dumps.

Trend 1: Anime’s Global Domination

The seventh-highest-grossing movie of 2025 was an anime film called Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle, which earned nearly $800 million worldwide. The astounding commercial success of Demon Slayer marked another mainstream moment for anime (though does something really qualify as a “moment” if that art form increasingly is the mainstream?).

This past week, Demon Slayer finally arrived on streaming, becoming available to all Crunchyroll subscribers, and quickly emerged as one of the most heavily reviewed films online.

And if that last sentence reads like absolute gibberish to you—especially the word Crunchyroll—then prepare to learn about a cultural phenomenon hiding in plain sight.

The past twenty years have seen anime embraced across the globe. Despite the industry’s commercial stagnation within Japan, the format has flourished abroad, growing from $2.5B in sales in 2009 to $14.3B in 2024.

Anime has become a pillar of global youth culture, with more than 42% of Gen Z Americans watching anime adaptations weekly.

One of the biggest drivers of this phenomenon is also its greatest beneficiary: a Sony-owned anime streaming service called Crunchyroll, which grew its subscribership from 5M in 2021 to 21M in 2026.

That’s 16 million paying subscribers added in 5 years, which is greater than the telecast audience of the Grammys, or the population of Belgium.

Trend 2: The Netflix Afterlife Phenomenon

If you check the Nielsen Top 10 charts right now, you’ll find that a 2010s cable TV series called The Last Ship is one of the most widely consumed shows on streaming.

This series had a fairly unremarkable run on cable television, debuting to mixed reviews and experiencing declining viewership with each successive season as cord-cutting customers abandoned linear television for Hulu and HBO Max.

So why is The Last Ship back in the cultural conversation? Presently, this once-obscure show is trending for two reasons:

1. The series boasts a full catalog of 56 episodes, each running 45 minutes.

2. All 56 episodes of this show were added to Netflix this past June.

The Last Ship is the latest entry in a rapidly expanding canon of dormant TV shows briefly resurrected by Netflix, joining a cohort of programs headlined by Suits, Animal Kingdom, and Dexter.

Given the continued existence of this Netflix-specific phenomenon, my hot take is this: there is a cohort of streaming subscribers who value volume above all else. These consumers have grown accustomed to binge-watching, and do not discriminate against cable TV programming or shows that predate the very existence of streaming.

If I were running an entertainment consulting business, my go-to advice would be: produce several seasons of an obscure cable television show, end that series, wait a few years, and then license it to Netflix.

Trend 3: YouTube Loves Latin Music

Two weeks ago, I launched a new dashboard to track the topics most frequently mentioned on YouTube, much akin to Google Trends. Before building the data pipeline, I made my best guess on the pop stars and movies that would top my rankings. Would Michael Jackson see the most mentions? What about Taylor Swift? Surely her music videos exist in a constant state of mass consumption.

Yet when my query finally loaded, I was left with an absolute head-scratcher.

Read more

Intro: The Peak of Peaks

If you had to pinpoint the peak of the Peak TV era, May 2023 would make for a compelling choice. Prestige mainstays like Succession, Barry, Ted Lasso, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel were airing their final seasons, while acclaimed newcomers like Yellowjackets, Beef, and Silo were gaining momentum.

These shows emerged from the post-pandemic production rebound and were filmed before Hollywood was upended by writers’ and actors’ strikes, industry-wide layoffs, and a disastrous Netflix earnings report that sent the streaming business into recession.

Flash forward to last week, when I opened my streaming dashboard and encountered a rather discouraging sight. Across the four most recent weeks of Nielsen Top 10 data, television was dominated by two categories: 1) syndicated cable series finding a second life on streaming and 2) shows adapted from existing intellectual property (IP). Not a single title was both recently released and wholly original. Yikes!

The most likely explanation is that this data offers a random, unrepresentative snapshot. Perhaps television simply experienced a few “down” weeks dominated by derivative programming. In that case, I’m overreacting. Silly me!

But what if I’m not overreacting? What if the shows breaking through each week have fundamentally changed, and today’s TV landscape is a far cry from that of May 2023? What if streaming has settled into a new normal?

So today, we’ll examine the rise of television’s slop era, the industry forces driving these programming decisions, and whether viewers are better off than they were 30 years ago.

The Rise of TV’s Slop Era

Thus far in 2026, television has been dominated by long-running syndicated cable programs like Grey’s Anatomy and SpongeBob SquarePants, along with adaptations of popular franchises such as House of the Dragon and Andor. Of all the TV shows to appear on Nielsen’s weekly Top 10 chart in 2026, just 20% qualify as “original,” meaning they are neither syndicated nor tied to existing intellectual property. Meanwhile, a paltry 4% of charting programs are new series that are also “original.”

This paradigm shift had been brewing since the early 2010s, as television saw a decline in long-running programs, a surge in new series, and a growing appetite for adaptations of novels, comic books, and video games (in short, IP).

You’ll also notice that during the early streaming wars, from 2017 to 2021, television saw a brief uptick in newly launched and entirely original shows. By 2025, however, this rare breed had fallen to an all-time low, accounting for just 13% of TV seasons.

So what happened? How did television become “newer” even as many of these “new” shows were adapted from non-new books, comics, and video games?

This programming change began in 2013, as nascent streaming services flooded the market with flashy series in a race for subscriber growth. As such, television production steadily increased through 2022, ushering in an era of content abundance.

Thus began a golden age for small talk. If you worked a boring corporate job, you could fill almost any awkward silence with a simple question: “Watching anything good right now?” The answer was always “yes.” Stranger Things, The Queen’s Gambit, Game of Thrones, Big Little Lies—there was rarely a dull week.

Of course, this unprecedented boom in original programming also produced plenty of flotsam. As streamers grew their catalogs with new programs, second-season renewal rates plummeted. A platform like Hulu might add 20 shows in a given year—20 brand-new tiles!—but only 8 of those tiles would make it to season two.

All the while, the budget for the average television show skyrocketed. When we examine the most expensive TV seasons of all time, nearly 80% fall within a ten-year period between 2015 and 2025.

So, to recap:

• New TV show volume increased.

• The price tag of this programming also increased.

• And the renewal rate of these new (and expensive) shows fell precipitously because many of these programs never found an audience.

So, let’s say you’re running a streaming platform—what do you do? First, you make fewer shows, an easy way to cut costs. Second, you reduce the risk of this diminished slate failing by betting on familiar intellectual property. And guess what? This content performs spectacularly because you’re preying on the nostalgia of Star Wars fans and comic book devotees. Now you get promoted—congratulations—and you can use your newfound riches to buy a jet ski or dinosaur skull. Well done!

This logic is how we end up with a soulless series like Elle, an origin story for Reese Witherspoon’s character in Legally Blonde and a worthy addition to an ever-expanding canon of “Who asked for this?” content.

If you’ve recently fired up [insert streaming platform of choice] and struggled to find a compelling selection, know you are not alone. With the exception of Netflix and HBO, pretty much every streamer has seen a marked dip in online acclaim over the last four years, as once-riveting television has given way to derivative, low-effort content.

In the absence of buzzy prestige programming, viewers are retreating to the past, bingeing the back catalogs of long-running cable shows like Grey’s Anatomy, Suits, and The Big Bang Theory. New series may come and go, but Big Bang’s Sheldon Cooper is eternal.

The phrase “peak TV” began as industry jargon, but has since come to define a distinct era in television history. TV’s golden age is over, and May 2023 marked its final flourish as television’s true “peak” came during a narrow three-year window, from 2018 to 2020, when the typical series was quantifiably above average.

Yet our expectations for television remain anchored to this fleeting 36-month period of artistic ambition and programming abundance. Every year, I tell myself, “This will be the year that TV returns to normal.” And every year I’m wrong. The uncomfortable truth is that TV has already returned to “normal.” 2019 was simply the exception.

Final Thoughts: Consider the Maximizer

Your view on the current state of television likely depends on whether you are a satisficer or a maximizer. I usually dislike theories that group all humans into one of two personality types, but I’m okay with this one because it conveniently works for the point I’m about to make.

• If you’re a satisficer: you are easily satisfied (unsurprisingly!) and enjoy whatever is put in front of you. When you fire up Netflix, you look no further than the Top 10 carousel because—heck—you’ll enjoy any show about a serial killer offing people in the American Midwest. If it’s good enough for the Top 10, it’s good enough for you!

• If you’re a maximizer: you know that somewhere out there is a Platonic ideal for superb TV programming—the perfect streaming show—and you will not rest until you find this elusive piece of content. Worse yet, you still remember the glory days of 2018 and 2019, when every TV series rocked. You peruse Netflix, Hulu, and Paramount+ for 15 minutes at a time, hoping that it will somehow open a portal to this golden age of television programming.

At first pass, you may think that I harbor some sort of disdain for the satisficer—that I consider myself better than a person who excels at being content. But, honestly, I’d rather be content.

Most likely, TV’s pre-pandemic high point will never be replicated because the economics no longer make sense, which means I will spend the rest of my life telling my children and my children’s children about a three-year period in my twenties when TV was slightly above average.

Had this explosion of high-quality television never happened, I’d have no complaints about today’s streaming landscape. I’d happily watch my Game of Thrones spin-off, my Yellowstone prequel, my beloved Sheldon Cooper, and my SpongeBob reruns without expecting anything more from television. I’d just be satisfied.

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*Note: For best results, open this link in a web browser while logged in to your Substack account.

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Welcome back to the Monday Roundup!

The Monday Roundup is a weekly bonus edition featuring data-driven culture stories, curated datasets, and recommended reading.

Your regular Wednesday essay stays free for everyone—this is strictly additive.

Today’s edition has six new data stories. Free readers get the first two; paid subscribers get the full thing, plus datasets and recommended reading. Enjoy!

In Today’s Roundup:

• Original Data Stories: Madonna’s cultural renaissance, the entertainment industry’s ongoing wave of layoffs, the Emmys’ fading cultural relevance, the hype surrounding Avengers: Doomsday, country music’s Billboard takeover, and the million-dollar jacket.

• Recommended Reads: Notable data journalism and pop culture reads from around the web.

• Unique Datasets: Ten publicly available datasets, covering everything from cataloged movie “jump scares” to Anthony Bourdain filming locations to Broadway attendance.

Trend 1: A Madonna Renaissance

Somehow, two things are true:

1. Madonna is back in the zeitgeist.

2. The year is 2026.

Over the past few weeks, Madonna has been the top artist trending on Reddit—and not for a tabloid scandal or a health scare, but for her music.

Among all legacy acts—that is, artists who released music before 1990—the queen of pop has seen the second-largest increase in monthly Spotify listenership in 2026.

The only singer to surpass Madonna in terms of newfound streaming interest is Michael Jackson, who is a) dead and b) the subject of an overwhelmingly sanitized biopic released this year.

Anyway, back to Madonna: how did a 67-year-old pop star find herself back in the cultural conversation? In short, she did the work.

Madonna has been on a press run for the ages in the lead-up to the release of her new dance album, Confessions II. The past few months have seen the ‘80s icon make a Coachella appearance with Sabrina Carpenter, perform at the World Cup halftime show, release a short film at the Tribeca Film Festival, stage an elaborate brand partnership with dating app Grindr, and mount several dance club pop-up performances.

The result has been a steady drumbeat of cultural interest, culminating in Confessions II debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart.

If there ever were a playbook for a cultural figure to reclaim their place in the zeitgeist—without releasing a derivative biopic—then Madonna may have executed on this roadmap to perfection.

Trend 2: Entertainment Industry Layoffs

There is no business like show business. Every year, tens of thousands of industry hopefuls—be they actors, aspiring executives, or prop department enthusiasts—descend upon Los Angeles with the hope of “making it.” And while Hollywood has always been a crapshoot, the degree to which the industry is a crapshoot can vary by the week. During the streaming boom, Hollywood saw a period of sustained expansion unlike any other time in its history. And then the streaming bubble burst.

In early 2022, Netflix reported its first subscriber decline in more than a decade, sending its stock price tumbling over 50%. That disastrous earnings call, coupled with mounting concerns about inflation, convinced Wall Street that streaming’s era of boundless growth was over.

Since then, the industry has seen a litany of job cuts, including a Disney layoff two weeks ago that slashed hundreds of positions.

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, LA entertainment employment peaked in 2023, before myriad layoffs and strikes sent this figure to a 30-year low.

And I’m sure you’re looking at this and thinking to yourself, “How can this get any worse?” Well, the answer is that it most certainly can (and will), assuming Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. eventually goes through. Most likely, the numerous “synergies” between the two historic studios will yield more job loss when Warner-Mount inevitably needs to cut costs to pay back the oil magnates who financed the takeover.

I have no pithy joke to close this section; this simply stinks.

Trend 3: Do the Emmys Matter?

Open almost any streaming app, and you’ll be greeted by a glossy tile promoting that platform’s 2026 Emmy nominees. Year after year, HBO, Netflix, and Apple prominently showcase the programs recognized by television’s most prestigious awards show. Which raises an obvious question: do the Emmys matter?

The boring answer is yes. As long as streaming services continue touting their Emmy pedigree across digital banners and real-world billboards, this 77-year-old institution can plausibly claim cultural relevance.

However, the degree to which the Emmys ever mattered, and how that significance has changed over time, is far more debatable.

Read more

Intro: From Hardware to Hard-Pressed

Prior to 2019, Apple was a hardware company—the force behind the iMac, the iPad, the U2-themed iPod, and so on. But on March 25, 2019, the company surprised both Hollywood and Silicon Valley by announcing Apple TV+, its entry into an extremely crowded streaming market. Unlike Disney or Netflix, Apple had neither a vast content library nor an established production apparatus. Inexplicably, the savvy, trillion-dollar hardware giant became a late entrant to a crowded, cost-intensive streaming battle.

Fast-forward to two weeks ago, when the 2026 Emmy nominations were announced. Alongside returning prestige heavyweights like The Pitt and Hacks was a new crop of Apple TV+ series, including Widow’s Bay and Pluribus, reinforcing the platform’s reputation for producing programming that is both expensive and acclaimed. On paper, 2026 appears to be another triumphant year for Apple’s streaming ambitions. But not so fast. This barrage of Emmy recognition obscures a far less flattering truth for the streamer: despite its critical dominance, Apple TV+ remains one of the smallest platforms in the streaming landscape, struggling to attract a mass audience seven years after its launch.

So today, we’ll examine Apple TV’s remarkable track record, its struggle to gain ground in the streaming wars, and how the world’s most valuable company became an unlikely underdog.

Apple TV+: Prestige Darling, Streaming Loser

When this year’s Emmy nominations were announced, the studios leading the field were familiar award-show mainstays. First came HBO, television’s foremost destination for prestige programming. Next was Netflix, the industry’s most prolific streaming service, releasing hundreds of new shows each year. Then came Apple TV+—a platform with neither Netflix’s vast output nor HBO’s decades-long reputation for quality.

Despite having existed for only seven years, Apple TV+ has produced an impressive slate of original series, including Ted Lasso, Severance, The Studio, and Widow’s Bay. Of my ten favorite streaming shows of the past decade, around ~50% appear on this list.

But apparently, I’m one of the few people watching. Apple TV has barely registered in Nielsen’s weekly streaming Top 10 since late 2023, aside from two small spikes when Severance managed to break through.

Meanwhile, a streamer like Paramount+, which received just two Emmy nominations this year, is doing just fine, having gone all in on Taylor Sheridan-produced content like Landman and Dutton Ranch—which people actually watch.

Apple TV+ has largely bought its way to Emmy acclaim. And if you read that last sentence and thought, “Don’t all streamers buy Emmys by spending money on shows?” The answer is “yes.” But Apple really, really wants those Emmys. Despite its brief existence and relatively small slate of originals, Apple accounts for over 13% of the most expensive television seasons ever produced, placing it third overall, just behind Netflix.

Plotting each streamer’s share of expensive television seasons against its presence in Nielsen’s weekly Top 10 places Apple alongside Amazon in the high-budget, low-viewership quadrant. Unsurprisingly, both services belong to tech behemoths for which streaming is little more than an expensive side quest.

Unlike Amazon, however, Apple has failed to translate runaway spending into widespread viewership. Each month, Nielsen publishes a breakdown of viewing share across major streaming platforms. I’ll save you the trouble of squinting at this chart: Apple TV+ has never attracted enough viewership to appear in the report, consistently falling below Nielsen’s 1% threshold.

It’s a confounding result for the world’s most valuable company, especially given Apple’s enormous reach. The tech giant can promote its programming across its entire ecosystem. Open the App Store, and you might see an ad for Ted Lasso or Severance. Rent a movie through Apple TV, and you may encounter a promotion for Widow’s Bay or The Studio.

Stranger still, Apple TV actually retains subscribers at a respectable rate relative to its streaming competition. Its monthly retention figures place the platform in the middle of the pack, suggesting that Apple’s biggest challenge is not keeping viewers but persuading them to subscribe in the first place.

My takeaway from all this data—from the Emmy nominations to the solid monthly retention figures—is that Apple is paying the price for being a late mover in an extremely competitive market. Netflix was the first streaming service and benefited from that advantage, while Apple was basically the last and may never make meaningful inroads for that very fact.

Final Thoughts: Don’t We Want This?

I am cursed to care about the entertainment industry, which means I am also cursed to follow its coverage. Trade publications like Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter often seem determined to punish those who dare to make commercial art. Make too much money from an artistically bankrupt project, and you are a cynical hack. Take a chance on something creatively ambitious, and you are an idiot.

I would like to believe this coverage has little influence on the industry itself, but that is far from true. Hollywood is governed by politics and popularity, and a studio can be publicly embarrassed into firing an executive or abandoning an entire creative strategy.

The result of this feedback loop is standardized art. The person green-lighting a script becomes preoccupied with their reputation and whether they might be chastised for trying something different.

Enter Apple TV+, the kind of entertainment company we claim to want: a studio that funds artistically ambitious projects and appears unconcerned with whether those projects immediately turn a profit. You may have read this entire essay assuming it was a takedown of the platform’s strategy. In fact, it is the opposite. Give me 100 Apple TVs!

Trade publications love ridiculing the streamer’s relatively small footprint, whether it’s Puck’s Matthew Belloni calling its lackluster viewership “the funniest and most underreported story in Hollywood” or Awful Announcing declaring that “Apple TV+ is a ghost town.” To these publications and their fellow haters, I have just one question: Why can’t we have nice things?

Why can’t we allow a trillion-dollar company to spend an infinitesimal portion of its wealth making excellent television? Why must we humiliate every Hollywood studio into conformity?

Steve Jobs once said that “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Perhaps this logic also applies to the television platform spawned by his beloved brainchild. So let’s hope people realize they actually want this thing—before it’s too late.

Enjoyed the analysis? Support Stat Significant and unlock the data behind the insights.

Become a paying subscriber to get bonus graphics, interactive dashboards, downloadable datasets, and to support independent journalism.

Paying subscribers get:

• Bonus Data Stories: Full access to the Monday Roundup, a weekly bonus edition with extra culture data stories, curated datasets, and recommended reads.

• The Public Dataset Directory (Updated Weekly): A curated directory of public datasets from around the web.

• Interactive Data Hubs: Interactive dashboards across Streaming TV, Movies, Music, Search Trends, Wikipedia, and more.

Upgrade to Paid

*Note: For best results, open this link in a web browser while logged in to your Substack account.

Want to promote your data tool or media publication to Stat Significant’s 26,200 readers? Email daniel@statsignificant.com

Need help with a data problem? Book a free data consultation

Connect with me on LinkedIn if you want to chat about a data project.

Like movies? Follow me on Letterboxd

Welcome back to the Monday Roundup!

The Monday Roundup is a bonus edition featuring data-driven culture stories, curated datasets, and recommended reading. Given the strong response to this format, I’ll be publishing it weekly for the foreseeable future.

Your regular Wednesday essay stays free for everyone—this is strictly additive.

Today’s edition has six new data stories. Free readers get the first two; paid subscribers get the full thing, plus datasets and recommended reading. Enjoy!

In Today’s Roundup:

• Original Data Stories: A James Bond drought, the end of music’s “loudness war,” the importance of opening day box office, the Falklands War revisited, a college for livestreamers, and generational adoption of closed captions.

• Recommended Reads: Notable data journalism and pop culture reads from around the web.

• Unique Datasets: Ten publicly available datasets, covering everything from Rotten Tomatoes scores to Big Mac prices to Spotify song composition attributes.

Trend 1: A James Bond Drought

James Bond is alive and well, despite the character’s absence from cinemas and the fact that we don’t even know who the next James Bond will be.

The latest installment of the 007 franchise is currently slated for 2028, which would make for a 7-year gap between that project and 2021’s No Time to Die—the longest Bond-related movie drought since the franchise’s introduction in 1963.

If you’re a bona fide Bond-head, don’t fret. Progress is being made. In June of last year, Denis Villeneuve—the filmmaker behind the Dune films, Sicario, and Arrival—was announced as the franchise’s new director.

Next in line: the world needs a new Bond. Prediction markets currently favor Callum Turner, a talented actor who is perhaps most famous for being married to Dua Lipa.

After all this time, it’s shocking that there is no consensus frontrunner for Bond succession, yet my hot take is that this is actually an asset for the franchise.

The past two decades have seen a deluge of films oriented around intellectual property. And perhaps the greatest sin committed by top franchises like Marvel and DC during this period has been an error of abundance. This abundance comes in the form of too many movies, too many toys, and too many streaming shows.

James Bond thrives on scarcity, meaning a 7-year hiatus may be the best thing that’s ever happened to the character.

Trend 2: Is Music Getting Softer?

Spotify has created its fair share of problems throughout the music industry, but it’s also solved a few as well. One such example is the “loudness war” of the early 21st century, a decades-long arms race among record producers to make their songs louder than the competition. This phenomenon reads like something invented by a local news anchor or a coalition of Concerned Parents, but the conflict—and its effect on recorded music—was very real.

If you want to see this decades-long struggle encapsulated in a single graphic, look no further than the average decibel level of Billboard-charting music, which rose from the late 20th century all the way up until the early 2010s.

Beginning in the late 1980s, producers increasingly relied on audio compression and limiting to make songs louder than the competition. The push toward music’s upper limit was driven by fourth-grader logic: the louder the track, the more likely it was to stand out on the radio or cut through the cacophony of background noise.

And which artists emerged as the winners of this proverbial war? A collection of musicians who saw commercial success during peak-music-loudness in the late 2000s.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers are my all-time favorite band, though perhaps this was the product of a psyop by Big Loudness.

The march toward maximal noise began reversing in the 2010s, as streaming services like Spotify adopted volume normalization, which brings songs to a consistent playback level and strips excessive compression of its competitive advantage.

Today, “loud music” is simply the result of a listener turning up the volume too high.

Trend 3: Christopher Nolan, and Why Blockbusters Live or Die on Opening Day

Against all odds, Christopher Nolan has turned a book from my 10th-grade summer reading list into a billion-dollar blockbuster. Anticipation for The Odyssey reached such a fever pitch that Universal opened ticket sales a full year before release. The strategy paid off: the film earned roughly $51 million at the U.S. box office on opening day alone—a staggering haul that reflects a broader shift in how modern blockbusters are consumed.

Over the past 25 years, a film’s theatrical life cycle has accelerated dramatically, with audiences consuming new movies faster than ever.

Read more

Intro: #StayInLA

The past decade has not been kind to Los Angeles’ entertainment industry. The combined shock of the 2023 labor strikes and the 2025 wildfires intensified fears that film and television production is migrating overseas, threatening a fragile ecosystem of below-the-line workers based in Hollywood.

In the days after the wildfires, filmmaker Sarah Smith and writer Alexandra Pechman organized a WhatsApp group of showrunners and industry workers, drafted a petition, and launched the grassroots #StayInLA campaign. What began as an emergency effort to help Los Angeles rebuild grew into a broader political movement, drawing more than 20,000 petition signatures, endorsements from prominent actors and filmmakers, and even the fleeting attention of Donald Trump—an actor himself, best known for his performance in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.

Having worked in the entertainment industry and lived in Los Angeles, I have long wanted to investigate this often-vague anxiety: to understand exactly where these productions are migrating and quantify the extent of Hollywood’s flight from, well, Hollywood itself.

So today, we’ll examine Hollywood’s great production migration, explore how these logistical shifts have reshaped the filmmaking process, and investigate whether outsourcing production has any measurable impact on the quality of the movies themselves.

How Hollywood Stopped Making Movies in Hollywood

The American film industry began concentrating in Los Angeles in the 1910s, drawn to the city’s year-round sunshine, varied landscapes, inexpensive land, and distance from Thomas Edison’s patent enforcement on the East Coast. By the 1920s, Hollywood had become the global center of filmmaking, with studios, skilled workers, and supporting businesses clustered together in a self-renewing ecosystem.

For decades, most American films were produced on Los Angeles backlots, where studios provided filmmakers access to turnkey sets and skilled crews. This mechanized approach kept costs low and enabled directors to crank out four to six movies a year. During this era, Hollywood operated much like Henry Ford’s Model T assembly line; studios were maniacally focused on speed and frugality.

LA’s stranglehold over movie production would ultimately be tested by two filmmaking trends:

1. The rise of the blockbuster: In the 1970s, box-office smashes like The Godfather and Jaws demonstrated the commercial potential of event cinema. By the 1980s, corporatized studios like Paramount-Gulf-Western were actively manufacturing blockbusters, pouring ever-growing budgets into spectacle-driven stories. Films like Predator, First Blood, and Raiders of the Lost Ark were shot on location in jungles, deserts, and other far-flung settings, as exotic locales amplified their sense of scale.

2. The rise of IP and tax credits: The 2000s and 2010s brought a surge in big-budget filmmaking built around familiar IP. Marvel’s vaunted Cinematic Universe and other franchises required considerable financial investment, leading studios to offset costs by relocating production to incentive-rich cities such as Vancouver and Atlanta.

The result of these production strategies was a slow-building migration out of Los Angeles and California altogether.

So where did all the movies go? Hollywood’s production exodus has benefited a small group of filmmaking hubs offering some combination of established infrastructure and financial incentives. London, for example, boasts world-class facilities such as Pinewood Studios, while cities like Atlanta and Vancouver provide generous tax credits and rebates that reimburse studios for their local spending.

The savings these destinations offer are substantial, making them an obvious choice for a superhero movie whose story could unfold almost anywhere—be it a generic cityscape or somewhere in outer space. For a major blockbuster, tax incentives equate to tens of millions of dollars, freeing up money for name-brand actors, elaborate set pieces, and unremarkable CGI effects.

As such, the larger a film’s production budget, the more likely it is to be filmed entirely outside the United States.

In some cases, this globe-trotting appears directly on screen, like when Mission: Impossible stages an elaborate car chase through Rome. In other cases, location choice is driven entirely by financial considerations.

The latter trend has created a widening gap between where stories are set and where they are filmed, as productions increasingly follow tax incentives and lower costs rather than narrative necessity.

Look closely, and you’ll spot Toronto’s skyline standing in for New York, or Prague’s streets masquerading as nearly every other European city. With each passing year, filming locations have become untethered from the places depicted on screen.

This disconnect has become a persistent grievance among film critics, particularly when it comes to streaming movies shot far from their narrative setting. Nearly every week, the hosts of my favorite movie podcast complain about some disposable Netflix rom-com ostensibly set in New York but unmistakably filmed in New Orleans. After hearing this criticism ad nauseam, I began to wonder whether shooting on location actually has a discernible impact on a film’s quality—at least in the eyes of viewers.

As a cinema purist, I believe movies should be filmed where they are set, even when that setting is outer space. Most audiences, however, either cannot tell the difference or simply do not care.

Perhaps I have gone to great lengths to prove something studio executives already know: the average viewer is not scrutinizing every frame for telltale glimpses of the Toronto skyline. More likely, they are glancing at Instagram while the film’s protagonists laboriously explain the plot for the narrative comprehension of multitasking viewership—at which point the authenticity of the location becomes irrelevant.

Final Thoughts: Cost Disease

My junior year of college, I scored an internship at Conan O’Brien’s late-night talk show. So, like Miley Cyrus circa 2009, I hopped off the plane at LAX with a dream and an unpaid internship.

Within a week, I’d discovered three things:

1. Entertainment internships are often glorified daycare for the children of industry executives: I could be classified as many things, but “nepo baby” is not one of them—which made me an exception among my intern class.

2. There was no work to do: The show had far more interns than meaningful tasks. I never even earned the privilege of fetching coffee.

3. The Warner Bros. backlot was eerily empty: I had grown up on movies like The Player and Singin’ in the Rain, where Hollywood appeared as a bustling factory of overlapping productions squeezed onto compact studio lots. Instead, I found emptiness.

This combination of things led to a bizarre summer where me and a posse of underutilized unpaid interns wandered a near-vacant Warner Bros. studio as if it were the Backrooms. This meant hanging out in the Central Perk set from Friends or cart-racing other interns from The Ellen DeGeneres Show on the street where they filmed Gilmore Girls.

My lasting impression was that Hollywood had become a collection of offices where white-collar workers decided how the sausage got made, while remarkably little sausage was actually being made there.

It was also during this summer that I learned of the hazards of cost disease.

Cost disease is an economic phenomenon in which labor-intensive industries with limited productivity gains—healthcare, education, live theater, filmmaking—become steadily more expensive over time. The quintessential example of this is Broadway, where the cost of living in New York City increases, leading wages to rise, but there remains a fixed set of theaters for Broadway shows to be staged, thereby limiting revenue growth. The end result is economic unsustainability, as these productions either curtail spending by employing fewer people or pass higher costs along to consumers through ticket pricing, often both.

My summer in LA was cost disease in miniature. I was paid exactly $0 to relocate to Los Angeles, where I then paid thousands of dollars to live in America’s third most expensive city. And this was the very bottom rung of entertainment’s corporate ladder.

Higher up the corporate hierarchy, cost disease takes different forms. For entry-level assistants, it means accepting low wages and paying high rent for the possibility—however remote—of eventually joining the executive class. For camera crews and VFX artists, it means becoming part of a traveling circus that chases tax incentives to Atlanta, Prague, and Vancouver. For studio executives, it means making do with smaller crews, outsourcing production overseas, and, eventually, using AI to replace some human labor.

If this has all drifted into bummertown, it’s because many of Hollywood’s problems can be traced back to a single economic theory of everything: the rent is too damn high. From there, everything else starts to unravel.

The end result is a peculiar version of Hollywood: a place increasingly devoid of physical production, populated instead by executives, AI art, and unpaid interns drag-racing golf carts through empty studio streets.

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Welcome back to the Monday Roundup!

The Monday Roundup is a bonus edition featuring data-driven culture stories, curated datasets, and recommended reading. Given the strong response to this format, I’ll be publishing it weekly for the foreseeable future.

Your regular Wednesday essay stays free for everyone—this is strictly additive.

Today’s edition has six new data stories. Free readers get the first two; paid subscribers get the full thing, plus datasets and recommended reading. Enjoy!

In Today’s Roundup:

• Original Data Stories: YouTube’s surprising gaming dominance, the IMAX boom, why hit tracks have a small army of songwriters, whether Disney’s live-action remake machine is losing steam, what Love Island reveals about reality TV’s low hit rate, and how Count Binface became Britain’s viral political star.

• Recommended Reads: Notable data journalism and pop culture reads from around the web.

• Unique Datasets: Ten publicly available datasets, covering everything from television episode plots to Pitchfork album reviews to eight decades of New York Times articles.

Trend 1: YouTube Is for Gamers

I recently built a Google Trends equivalent for YouTube to quantify the terms that most frequently appear in the site’s top videos. My initial guess was that this list would feature newly released trailers, music videos, and sports highlights. In essence, I was expecting data reflective of my YouTube homepage. But, as is always the case, my predictions never align with the zeitgeist.

In fact, when I reviewed my initial output, I barely recognized 50% of the top terms. And thus I found a new way to feel old. That’s because I am not, nor have I ever been, a gamer, and the most frequently used terms on YouTube revolve around gaming.

At first, I assumed this to be a mistake. But when I looked at the site’s top trending videos over the last few months, gaming content comprised anywhere between 55% and 70% of all entries.

In short, the most popular content on YouTube involves another person playing video games or hearing their hot take about a video game.

In fact, YouTube is the top destination for gaming discovery by orders of magnitude, above dedicated gaming platforms like Twitch or Discord.

To many, this fact is painfully obvious. To me, this was the find of the century.

The takeaway—and I pretty much believe this is always the takeaway when it comes to YouTube—is that the platform can be anything for everyone.

YouTube is the top place to go for gaming content, just as it’s the foremost destination for movie trailers, sports highlights, music videos, podcasts, late-night talk show clips, and videos of celebrities eating chicken wings.

Trend 2: IMAX Is the Present and Future of Moviegoing

Running a movie theater is brutal. You are essentially a middleman with little control over the product you sell. Your job is to create an experience compelling enough to lure people away from their living rooms—all while containing costs, relying on relatively low-wage labor, and competing with every other conceivable form of entertainment. Given those constraints, how can theaters sustainably grow when they do not control the movies themselves?

One of the few levers exhibitors do control is the viewing experience: the size of the screen, the quality of the sound, and the spectacle of the presentation. Over the past decade, theater chains have increasingly invested in premium formats such as IMAX, Dolby Cinema, and 4DX, offering audiences something they cannot replicate at home. And if premium formats had their own Super Bowl, World Cup, or Paris Fashion Week, it might look something like the recent release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

Since the pandemic, premium formats have become an increasingly important selling point for moviegoing. They are now on track to account for roughly 17% of U.S. ticket sales this year, up from 10% in 2019.

These formats also command significantly higher ticket prices, allowing exhibitors to grow revenue even as overall attendance declines.

The greatest obstacle to this strategy is scarcity. There are only so many IMAX screens, and building one requires substantial upfront investment—an especially difficult proposition for debt-laden theater chains and independent exhibitors operating on thin margins.

Still, this appears to be the direction moviegoing is headed. Do not be surprised if, 50 years from now, every theater is effectively an IMAX theater, forcing exhibitors to invent an entirely new premium tier to promote. They’ll call it Double IMAX, Triple IMAX, or Double-Triple IMAX 360+.

Trend 3: How Many Writers Does It Take to Make a Hit Song?

The 1970s saw the rise of the singer-songwriter, a genre headlined by the likes of James Taylor, Carole King, and Cat Stevens. If you wanted a nice lullaby to sing to your child, these were your go-to artists.

The process behind these hit songs was decidedly straightforward: artists wrote and performed their own tracks, and the end result was a unique product of that individual author-performer.

Today, very few, if any, songs have a single songwriter.

Read more

Intro: Project Popcorn

Few decisions have reshaped moviegoing more than the stupidly named “Project Popcorn.” For those unfamiliar with this deeply lame corporate initiative, Project Popcorn was WarnerMedia’s 2021 plan to release every Warner Bros. film on HBO Max the same day it arrived in theaters. It was a short-term decision with one obvious goal: juice streaming numbers.

The experiment began with Wonder Woman 1984, then expanded to an entire year’s worth of releases. Over the next twelve months, Warner Bros. jettisoned its most anticipated projects to streaming: Tom & Jerry, Godzilla vs. Kong, Mortal Kombat, The Suicide Squad, Dune, King Richard, The Matrix Resurrections, and many more.

Inspired by Warner’s short-term thinking, other studios pursued similar streaming-first strategies, and the economics of Hollywood subsequently went haywire. Christopher Nolan left Warner Bros. for Universal, where he eventually made Oppenheimer and The Odyssey. Scarlett Johansson sued Disney, alleging that the day-and-date release of Black Widow violated her contract. All across Hollywood, studios were forced to compensate talent for the sudden erosion of once-lucrative back-end deals.

Yet Project Popcorn’s defining legacy was not any single lawsuit or bruised ego. Its real impact was resetting audience expectations about how soon a movie should arrive on streaming. Where there had once been a 5-month window between theatrical release and home viewing, audiences were suddenly told they could get top-shelf entertainment with no waiting period at all.

Studios eventually reversed course, restoring theatrical windows of 45, 60, or even 90 days. By then, however, viewer expectations had already shifted—perhaps forever.

So today, we’ll examine the relationship between theatrical moviegoing and streaming activity, estimate how much money Hollywood is leaving on the table, and explain why theaters remain the smartest way to launch a film.

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Why We Stopped Going to the Movies

When VHS and Betamax VCRs arrived in the late 1970s, Hollywood feared audiences would abandon theaters for at-home viewership. Universal and Disney even sued Sony, Betamax’s manufacturer, in an unsuccessful attempt to curb the technology’s adoption. By the mid-1980s, however, the industry had embraced VHS, and home video became a lucrative market worth roughly $10 billion a year.

The late 1990s brought DVDs, which offered enhanced picture quality, greater portability, and interactive bonus features. The format quickly supplanted videotape as the dominant mode of home entertainment, with annual DVD sales peaking at roughly $16 billion in 2005.

This dependable revenue stream enabled studios to take bigger risks. If a film underperformed in theaters, strong DVD sales eventually allowed it to turn a profit.

Based on a handful of case studies from the early 2000s, DVDs generated revenue equivalent to roughly 50% of a film’s international box office.

Crucially, VHS and DVD purchases did not cannibalize ticket sales because studios preserved a theatrical window of at least five months. By the time a film reached home video, it had often faded from public attention, prompting studios to launch an entirely different marketing campaign around its release on physical media. This windowing system trained consumers to treat the two formats as distinct purchases: a theatrical ticket paid for a communal, big-screen experience, while a cassette or disc allowed you to own the movie and rewatch it at home, albeit in lower quality.

That carefully managed distinction would be dismantled by technological disruption and the chaos of a global pandemic.

In January 2007, Netflix launched its streaming service, giving consumers instant access to a vast library of film and television for just $5 a month. Movie watching was no longer bound by physical constraints, and DVD sales plummeted as streaming subscriptions, digital rentals, and digital purchases grew into a market generating roughly $60 billion annually.

In 2020, the pandemic shuttered theaters across the country and forced Hollywood studios to collapse their traditional exclusivity windows, most notoriously through WarnerMedia’s “Project Popcorn.” Instead of waiting 180 days to watch a movie at home, audiences might wait just 14 days—or no time at all—upending decades of consumer expectations.

The dependable revenue once generated by DVD sales gave way first to premium video-on-demand, where viewers could rent or purchase films through platforms such as Amazon and Apple, and later to subscription streaming bundles such as Netflix. Once a movie was folded into a monthly subscription fee, however, its financial return became increasingly abstract.

Although premium video-on-demand is more convenient, data released by Universal suggests it generates only a quarter of the revenue of physical media sales.

A digital rental costs between $3 and $20, with a single transaction covering an entire household—effectively turning four theatrical tickets into one purchase. For many consumers, waiting for a home release is therefore cheaper and logistically simpler. Recent case studies based on online review activity suggest that many—perhaps most—films now find their largest audience after leaving theaters, first through paid digital release and later through subscription streaming. This pattern is not universal, however, and varies considerably from film to film.

That said, across dozens of data points, the broader trend is clear: a sizable cohort of consumers has been trained to wait for streaming. The result is a new rhythm of movie consumption: theatrical releases generate a strong, sustained wave of attention; paid digital releases produce a sharp but fleeting spike in activity; and subscription services deliver a smaller second uptick.

Perhaps most revealing is the first week of premium VOD, when online activity surges—evidence of pent-up demand among viewers who never planned to leave home.

Worse still, consumers appear to prefer this newfound bargain. Online film ratings vary sharply across the three release windows, producing a rather dispiriting finding for anyone who still believes in the magic of da’ movies: the less people pay to watch a film, the more they tend to like it.

One caveat: these findings come from a limited sample of films released over the past six months, so I’ll revisit the analysis as more data accumulates. Still, the broader pattern is intuitive: a mediocre movie can be a rip-off when it’s a $35 trip to the theater, yet feel like a quaint diversion when bundled into an existing Netflix subscription. Price, in other words, may shape not only whether people watch a film, but how generously they judge it.

And if, like me, you still prefer seeing movies in theaters—even when surrounded by legions of tweens scrolling TikTok—take comfort in this: Hollywood still has a financial incentive to preserve the theatrical experience.

When we compare online review activity across distribution models and streaming windows, we find that films originally released in theaters consistently generate more engagement across all viewership periods—throughout their theatrical runs, paid digital releases, and eventual availability on subscription platforms—than movies released exclusively on streaming. This suggests that theatrical exhibition still serves as a signal of quality, giving audiences a reason to seek out the film later.

Perhaps theatrical audiences are not merely customers to be monetized, but early evangelists who will build enthusiasm among a cohort of late adopters who will watch the movie via digital rental. Marketing for theatrical releases may therefore accomplish two things at once: attracting committed moviegoers while seeding demand among hesitant at-home audiences.

Final Thoughts: Time, Money, and Diapers

In entertainment trade reporting, theatrical moviegoing is often framed as a noble pursuit, while those who wait for a home release are portrayed as ungrateful philistines who systematically destroy the arts with every Netflix selection. I never fully subscribed to this belief, but I didn’t exactly reject it either. Every time I went to a movie theater, I would pat myself on the back for doing my part—and reward myself with Cookie Dough Bites. And then I had a kid.

Before my son was born, people would offer unsolicited advice that I’d immediately ignore. They’d say things like, “Nothing can prepare you for how much your life will change,” “Time becomes a luxury,” or “Your world will never be the same.” One person even told me they had missed all seven seasons of The West Wing because they were “too busy having kids.” That’s seven full seasons—22 episodes apiece! I disregarded every warning and well-meaning recollection, thinking to myself: “You don’t know me!” Then I’d move on with my day, convinced that I was somehow above conventional wisdom.

Well, all these people were right, and I am a dingus. There is now a growing catalog of movies that I may miss because I am too busy having kids—or, at the very least, I will not see them in theaters.

There was once a meaningful trade-off between staying home and going to the movies. Theaters offered something you could not replicate in your living room: high-definition video, better sound, and access to a film five months before it reached physical media. That trade-off has largely disappeared. I can now watch Hollywood’s best movies on my above-average television within weeks of their debut, spend less money, and never miss my son’s bedtime. Unfortunately, everybody wins—other than movie studios.

At this stage of my life, moviegoing comes with more friction than it once did—a fact Christopher Nolan chose to ignore when he made The Odyssey three hours long. Three hours! Where exactly am I supposed to find a five-hour block required to get to a theater, watch an adaptation of a book I was forced to read in high school, and make it home again? Of course I will go. Once a film major, always a film major. But I have responsibilities now: a kid to put to bed, charts to make for your entertainment, and diaper trash to empty. This new diaper-trash-oriented existence does not easily accommodate three-hour epics, 30 minutes of trailers, an AMC promo featuring Nicole Kidman, and a post-trailer car insurance commercial.

I don’t entirely understand how someone could miss seven full seasons of The West Wing, but it was also a different time—a time before DVR, before TiVo, before Netflix, and before Project Popcorn. Now people don’t really have to miss anything. All they have to do is wait two to four weeks.

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Welcome back to the Monday Roundup

The Monday Roundup is a twice-monthly bonus edition featuring culture data stories, curated datasets, and recommended reading.

Your regular Wednesday essay stays free for everyone—this is strictly additive.

Today’s edition has six new data stories. Free readers get the first two; paid subscribers get the full thing, plus curated datasets and recommended reading. Enjoy!

In Today’s Roundup:

• Original Data Stories: Netflix is losing the streaming wars, Obsession’s crazy box office ROI, the Swift-Kelce wedding vs. Metallica, TikTok’s livestreaming campaign, Grand Theft Auto pre-sales, and Anna’s Archive.

• Recommended Reads: Notable data journalism and pop culture reads from around the web.

• Unique Datasets: Ten publicly available datasets, covering everything from YouTube trending videos to song lyrics to eighty years of weather data.

Trend 1: Netflix’s No-Good Year

In 2025, Netflix said goodbye to Stranger Things and Squid Game, two series emblematic of TV’s big-budget prestige era. And while correlation is not causation, I’m going to speculate that losing its two biggest shows didn’t help the platform.

For quantifiable proof of Netflix’s 2026 retrenchment, look no further than Nielsen’s streaming market share data, where Netflix has been slowly losing viewership since December of last year—which, go figure, is when Stranger Things finally ended.

Better yet, the two biggest streaming success stories in that same period are YouTube and the Roku Channel, which charge consumers precisely $0 a month.

The economics of the YouTube vs. Netflix streaming battle are pretty hilarious when you think about it: Netflix wins market share by spending more money on content, while YouTube grows stronger by simply existing, allowing its users to handle content creation.

When Netflix has a fallow programming period, YouTube gobbles up market share by simply keeping its servers running and selling ads. Unfortunately for Netflix, the past three months have brought fewer hit shows than usual and a shrinking presence in Nielsen’s weekly Top 10 program rankings.

Perhaps Netflix will rebound with a Stranger Things spinoff or an American adaptation of Squid Game, but that would require exactly what streamers now seem reluctant to do: spend more money and take more risks. When we chart TV’s most expensive seasons by premiere year, we see a sharp drop-off in high-priced productions beginning in 2025, while 2026 has yet to produce a show expensive enough to crack the list.

Trend 2: The Obsession Obsession

Imagine the year is 2025 AD, and we’re playing a box office guessing game. I ask you to pick the highest-grossing 2026 release from the following options: Scream 7, The Mandalorian and Grogu, or a $750,000 movie called Obsession, made by a first-time director with an unknown cast.

You would have picked Star Wars. If you say otherwise, you are lying.

And yet here we are in 2026, and an unknown horror-comedy acquired out of a film festival has become a box-office sensation.

Released in mid-May, Curry Barker’s Obsession has grossed over $400 million on a budget of just $750,000—roughly the cinematic equivalent of buying Apple stock in 1985. That places Obsession in exceedingly rare company: it now has the second-highest ROI of any film released since 1970, alongside microbudget classics like Halloween and The Blair Witch Project.

While much of the box-office reporting surrounding this movie focuses on its unprecedented success, there is indeed precedent. The list of high-ROI films has long been dominated by thrifty horror movies.

Trend 3: America’s Royal Wedding Has Captured Hearts, Wallets, and Metallica’s Scorn

The world’s biggest pop star married one of the NFL’s most dominant players, and if you were somehow out of the loop, well, now you know.

Taylor Swift’s wedding was conducted with a level of secrecy that would make the Freemasons jealous. In the absence of concrete information, the world did what it does best: speculate wildly. And wherever there is mass speculation, you will inevitably find a horde of degenerates eager to gamble on that uncertainty through prediction markets.

Read more

Intro: The Peak of Peak-Superhero

There was once a time when the single biggest thing in pop culture was a series of stories written for preteens about people dressed in form-fitting spandex. What we now recognize as peak-superhero was, at the time, touted by Marvel as “Phase Three” of its vast cinematic universe. And if one were attempting to locate the zenith of peak-superhero, that date would be April 2nd, 2019, when tickets for Avengers: Endgame went on sale.

When the presale window opened, AMC’s site crashed, causing its social media team to make a lame joke about Thanos “snapping” the website out of existence—a reference that the superhero-agnostic will simply not understand. According to moviegoing platform Atom Tickets, Endgame sold three times as many presale tickets in its first hour as Avengers: Infinity War had the year before. When the film finally premiered, the AMC in Times Square reportedly scheduled 41 opening-day showtimes, including screenings at 3:30 a.m., 4:30 a.m., and 5:30 a.m. Demand was so extreme that AMC kept 64 locations open overnight, with 17 theaters operating for 72 consecutive hours.

If you had lived your entire life loving superheroes, then this was your moment. Something that had once been niche, the province of nerds at sparsely attended Comic-Cons, had become one of the biggest events in pop culture history. Unfortunately, that moment did not last.

Fast forward to last weekend, a mere seven years after the premiere of Avengers: Endgame, when the newest comic-book adaptation, Supergirl, debuted to just $37 million at the U.S. box office, one of the weakest openings for a superhero movie in recent memory. And this follows a long string of underperforming titles, including The Marvels, Eternals, The Flash, Blue Beetle, and pretty much everything else released after 2020, with a handful of exceptions we’ll get to later.

Peak-superhero is over. The format is now in decline, like so many entertainment fads before it—though few pop-culture phenomena have matched the cultural heights, scale, or corporate engineering of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Which means the genre’s fall may be especially steep.

So today, we’ll quantify the rise and fall of the superhero film, examine the forces now plaguing the format, and consider the historical precedent for once-dominant genres falling out of fashion.

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How Superhero Movies Lost Their Power

In the mid-20th century, comic-book adaptations were considered lowbrow fare, confined mostly to janky television shows. The most prominent of these small-screen projects was the live-action Batman series, which ran from 1966 to 1968 and regularly punctuated its fight scenes with title cards shouting “BAM!” and “POW!”—or simply tilted the camera sideways to simulate Batman and Robin scaling a building. In fact, much of the show’s legacy centers on its thriftiness.

These adaptations achieved a level of camp no human being could earnestly replicate today—though that will never stop Ryan Murphy from trying his darndest.

The place of superhero stories in popular imagination changed dramatically with 1978’s Superman, starring Christopher Reeve, and again in 1989, when Tim Burton brought Batman to the big screen. Children who had grown up on Marvel and DC comics were now adults with credit cards, ready to buy tickets to see their childhood fantasies realized as blockbuster spectacle.

In the 2000s, comic-book stories increasingly took place in worlds that looked much like our own. Within a five-year span, audiences got Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, and Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man—three films that treated superheroes not as camp curiosities, but as vehicles for romance, crime drama, political allegory, and movie-star charisma. The success of these films, and more specifically the enormous box-office upside of their sequels, helped trigger a boom in superhero releases. At the height of this phenomenon, Hollywood was producing between four and eight comic-book adaptations a year. That is, until the pandemic.

The pandemic could hardly have come at a worse time for Marvel. The studio’s seemingly conclusive Avengers: Endgame arrived a few months before March 2020, and the chaos surrounding theatrical exhibition scrambled the studio’s transition into its next phase—assuming such a plan ever existed.

Between 2015 and the start of 2020, superhero films averaged roughly a billion dollars at the global box office (per release). After the pandemic, that figure fell off precipitously.

It is tempting, then, to conclude that COVID-19 made the superhero film obsolete. And to some extent, that is true. But the story is more complicated.

While the box-office value of comic-book IP declined during the pandemic years, interest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe actually peaked in 2021 and 2022, as Disney began turning comic-book stories into streaming series for Disney+. In the short term, this worked: Marvel stayed culturally relevant while theaters struggled to recover.

You’ll notice, however, that interest in Marvel began to fall in 2023, likely due to some combination of theatrical disappointments—such as Eternals and Shang-Chi—and the broader cheapening of the Marvel brand through the aforementioned Disney+ series, which undermined the scarcity of superhero storytelling.

And yet, comic-book movies still have one overwhelming bright spot: a single character who retains an unusually firm grasp on popular imagination—Spider-Man.

Over the past few weeks, the forthcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day has generated the most TMDB web traffic and the highest number of YouTube trailer views for any upcoming release, suggesting that even as the broader superhero machine sputters, this particular character retains cultural cachet.

Spider-Man: No Way Home grossed nearly $2 billion in 2021 despite lingering COVID-19 disruptions, while the animated Across the Spider-Verse was rapturously reviewed and earned nearly $700 million worldwide in 2023.

The success of these films gets to the heart of Marvel’s post-Endgame problem. Legacy characters can still summon something like event-level excitement; new ones, for the most part, cannot. Try as Disney might, it has struggled to introduce a fresh generation of heroes capable of replacing the original Avengers. Split the post-2019 superhero landscape into Spider-Man and non-Spider-Man films, or into legacy characters and new character launches, and the pattern becomes hard to miss: the holdovers still perform, while new mythology does not.

Throughout the 21st century, Hollywood has increasingly sought out stories with built-in audiences. For most of the 2010s, this meant adapting comic books and rebooting once-profitable franchises as nostalgia bait. But recently, commercial appetites have shifted.

Built-in demand still matters, but the sources of that demand are changing. Consider the 10 highest-grossing movies of the year thus far: a mix of video game franchises, music biopics, book-to-screen adaptations, and YouTube creators converting their online followings into theatrical audiences.

The box office is moving in a new direction—one that is indifferent to superheroes not named Spider-Man.

And if what I’m describing sounds inconceivable to you—because superhero films are simply too big to fail, and because they have defined the mainstream for the better part of 15 years—know that there is ample precedent for this cultural shift.

Genres and storytelling concepts come and go. Musicals and westerns were among the most popular genres of the 1950s and 1960s. Now, these formats are essentially extinct, while thrillers, action movies, and horror films have taken their place.

Sometimes I like to envision telling my son about the MCU, but in the past tense: how these films dominated the zeitgeist for a decade and how Avengers: Endgame offered one of the greatest moviegoing experiences of the 21st century, and how, when the enterprise came to its logical conclusion, people simply refused to let it go. And he’ll say something like “That’s interesting, I guess,” and then go back to scrolling on TikTok.

Final Thoughts: An Unfortunate Hangover

I have always been a casual consumer of comic-book content: if it’s good, I’ll go. So when a friend offered me midnight premiere tickets to Avengers: Endgame, I said, “Sure, why not? This seems like a big deal.”

And it was. When an MCU’s-worth of Avengers assembled during the film’s climactic battle, people in the theater stood up and started clapping.

As we walked out of the theater, I told my friends how impressed I was that Marvel had “ended on such a high note.” After a few moments of genuine confusion, they informed me that the Marvel Cinematic Universe was not, in fact, “done.” A Spider-Man movie was coming out in a few months.

This was not a bit. I simply assumed that if a franchise put the word “End” in the title, it meant some kind of actual ending. Had the film been called Avengers: We’ll Keep Making These Until We Go Bankrupt, I would have adjusted my expectations accordingly.

While I was thoroughly uninformed on this topic, I believe my misreading was a feature, not a bug. Marvel wanted to have its cake and eat it too: they got the box-office frenzy of a conclusive chapter without actually concluding anything. And yet something really did end with that movie. In many ways, the strategy resembled a booze bender: you borrow future happiness for the present, and in return, you wake up with a hangover. Unfortunately, this particular hangover is now enshrined across 25% of Disneyland.

All stories, whether standalone or serialized, require an ending. Even inside a sprawling fictional universe, there comes a point when the narrative simply runs out of gas. Marvel’s mistake was eventizing that logical endpoint so the film would make $3 billion.

What remains of peak-superhero is reheated leftovers: Robert Downey Jr. was paid $100 million to return for two Avengers films; Chris Evans is coming back despite his character dying; Hugh Jackman was also resurrected; Spider-Man remains the one beloved holdover; and audiences broadly refuse to embrace anything new.

It’s as if the year were 1972 and the world’s largest entertainment conglomerate bet its future on the eternal dominance of Hollywood westerns. Nothing lasts forever, no matter how hard Disney tries.

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Intro: A “Booming” Campaign for the Ages

In the 1920s, American pop music ran through Tin Pan Alley, a Manhattan district where songwriters, performers, and promoters gathered to turn simple melodies into mass-market commodities. It was one of the earliest examples of entertainment-industry agglomeration, a precursor to music factories like the Brill Building and Motown.

Tin Pan Alley eventually reached its cultural apex with the runaway success of 1923’s “Yes! We Have No Bananas.” For the uninitiated, the song is exactly as banana-centric as advertised, and is so overwhelmingly repetitive that it sparked brawls between those playing it endlessly and its unwilling listeners.

Yet this virality was hardly organic. Tin Pan Alley manufactured popularity by funneling sheet music to “song pluggers,” who performed new tunes in stores, theaters, and restaurants, and by staging “booming” campaigns, in which musicians were planted in public crowds to play a song again and again so it might seem like a preexisting craze.

I came across the exploits of Tin Pan Alley while researching a recent article and was surprised to learn that the music industry has been engineering catchiness long before drum machines, auto-tune, Taylor Swift, or TikTok algorithms. In many ways, these early promoters were the first practitioners of a hybrid science: part sonic optimization, part behavioral manipulation, and ever more refined with each passing generation.

So today, we’ll dig into the scientific underpinnings of song catchiness, examining the compositional tricks that make tracks memorable and the environmental conditions that make a tune inescapable.

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What Makes a Song Catchy: The Musical Hallmarks

There is no single formula for catchiness, so much as a collection of musical tendencies that, when combined with the right artist and cultural moment, can make something indelible.

Two recent studies have tried to quantify these sonic hallmarks, mining auditory data from thousands of hit and non-hit songs to identify the musical features most closely associated with memorability.

The first study, conducted by researchers at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, identified five sonic traits meaningfully associated with memorability: higher energy, faster tempo, a prominent lead melody, greater emphasis on D notes, and a more positive mood. If you’re completely devoid of musical talent (like me!), then here are some example songs that satisfy nearly all of these requirements: “Call Me Maybe,” “Love Story,” “Uptown Funk,” “I Gotta Feeling,” “Dancing Queen,” and “Shake It Off.”

A similar study from researchers at Goldsmiths, University of London, also found tempo to be a key factor, alongside a track’s melodic shape and the unexpectedness of its pitch leaps. Earworms typically rely on a traditional rise-and-fall structure, giving them a recognizable melodic arc, while unusually large jumps between notes add just enough surprise to make the song feel both familiar and distinctive all at once.

The textbook example of this rise-and-fall-plus-surprise pattern is Adele’s “Hello,” a melodramatic dirge that lulls you into complacency before vaulting to level 11 in a moment of sonic exaltation. For a few seconds, the song gives you something startling, then quickly settles back into the familiar, returning the listener to their musical comfort zone.

This never-ending tug-of-war between familiarity and novelty is a common thread in nearly all research on song memorability. One study from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences asked participants to rate musical excerpts across three dimensions—certainty, surprise, and pleasure—and found that tracks resonated most when listeners had a sense of where songs were headed (high certainty), only to be rewarded with a brief moment of novelty (high surprise). In other words, people want the same thing—but a little different.

And few devices capture this mix of familiarity and surprise better than the compound vocal hook, which stacks recognizable musical ingredients to make something unexpectedly fresh. I had not encountered the term before writing this essay, so for the similarly uninitiated, a compound hook is exactly what it sounds like: a hook made of hooks. The textbook example is Pharrell’s “Happy,” where the title phrase, call-and-response structure, backing vocals, rhythmic vocal delivery, chorus lift, and handclaps all converge into a near-perfect moment of musical memorability.

One study from the University of Wollongong in Australia tested the memorability of different hook strategies, comparing vocal hooks, instrumental hooks, compound hooks, and songs with no hook. The results were not particularly surprising: compound vocal hooks earned the highest scores, suggesting that the stickiest songs do not rely on a single ear-catching trick, but layer several of them at once. And because these hooks are vocal, we can sing them, hum them, and quietly rehearse them to ourselves, keeping them lodged in memory and allowing them to spread from person to person with viral efficiency.

So let’s say you are Pharrell, and you’ve created a track as unforgettable as “Happy.” Do you simply set it free and see what happens? Of course not.

Song composition alone does not make a track inescapable. That requires promotion, repetition, and distribution: the machinery that turns an infectious track into a cultural plague. A “song of the summer” does not arrive fully formed. It is engineered at every stage, from the songwriting itself to the shameless promotional strategies perfected by record labels.

What Makes a Song Catchy: The Environmental Factors

Within the broader architecture of music-making, there are several small optimizations that can increase a track’s chances of becoming inescapable. Many of these tactics are tailor-made for short-form video and playlist culture, yet their underlying logic dates back to the 1920s and Tin Pan Alley. The song promotion of that era was often brazen and ethically dubious, but it understood something fundamental about hit-making: sometimes the best way to lodge a song in popular imagination is brute-force exposure.

An experiment from researchers at Umeå University in Sweden found that song enjoyment increased with repeated exposure, regardless of a track’s complexity. A song could be as densely layered as Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” or as basic as Nickelback’s “Photograph”; either way, most listeners like it more on the twentieth listen than on the first.

Much of this stems from our primordial attraction to the familiar. The same Umeå University study asked participants to rate songs for likability, then grouped the results by how familiar each listener was with the track’s style. The pattern was depressingly straightforward: the more recognizable a song was, because listeners either knew the band or had heard similar artists, the more they tended to enjoy it. And with each listen, that preference only grew stronger.

You can think of musical taste as an ever-expanding lineage. People rarely make radical leaps between genres or styles. Instead, their preferences tend to evolve incrementally, moving from classic rock to a neighboring genre like pop punk through a chain of similar artists that make for a logical transition.

So if you loved a '90s band like Creed, with its particular brand of alternative-rock melodrama and mid-tempo earnestness, then Nickelback’s arrival in the early 2000s probably felt like a logical next step. The former helped lay the groundwork for the latter, smoothing the path from one generation of radio rock to the next.

That is, until you, an impressionable teen, learned that Nickelback was not a band to be embraced, but apparently “the worst band of all time.” As someone who has spent far too much of his professional life thinking about Nickelback, both the band and the meme, I often wonder how many potential fans were snuffed out by the group’s subpar reputation. Which brings us to the final ingredient of song pervasiveness: social influence.

Our taste in music is heavily shaped by the people around us. If a close friend loves a song, we may seek it out; if they hate it, that judgment can poison the well before we ever press play.

Researchers at Princeton tested this dynamic by giving participants a set of unfamiliar songs and varying the social context in which they appeared. Some participants received only the songs themselves, with no indication of what anyone else thought. Others were placed in environments where they could see which tracks their peers had liked and downloaded. The results were all too predictable: when listeners were exposed to social signals, download patterns became far more volatile. Songs were more likely to become runaway hits or total nonentities, suggesting that popularity can be shaped, and sometimes manufactured, by the visible preferences of others.

We are surrounded by these sorting mechanisms in everyday life: Billboard charts, TikTok view counts, Spotify rankings. These systems make success self-compounding, allowing a Taylor Swift album to saturate popular playlists, attract even more attention, and remain ubiquitous long after its initial release.

Final Thoughts: The Pop Star Illusion

In the early 2000s, Jessica Simpson was an inescapable cultural force. Today, I imagine few members of Gen Z know much about the singer-turned-reality-TV-star or the zeitgeist’s fixation on her inability to decode a tuna can label (if you don’t get the reference, a one-second Google search will suffice).

Simpson’s cultural ubiquity was so complete that when her younger sister Ashlee launched a music career of her own, it felt like a natural extension of the Simpson Industrial Complex.

By 2004, Ashlee Simpson was riding high on the success of “Pieces of Me,” a fizzy pop-rock hit that peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100, earning her an invitation to perform on Saturday Night Live—a show that would ultimately undo her short-lived career.

During her second performance of the night, the wrong pre-recorded vocal track started playing. Faced with the impossible task of lip-syncing the words of an entirely different song, Simpson froze, performed a strange little jig, and walked off the stage.

Ashlee Simpson’s catastrophic non-performance dominated the national conversation for what felt like four years, prompting a series of uneasy questions that no one had bothered to ask in the first place. Why had we simply accepted that Jessica Simpson’s sister was also a pop star? Was this person a music industry plant incapable of singing? If Ashlee Simpson played a limited role in the creation of her music and could not perform that music live, then what was the point of her art?

Had you asked those questions before the Saturday Night Live debacle, I’m not sure the answers would have been any different. What changed was that the illusion of Ashlee Simpson’s pop stardom had been broken. In one painfully awkward ten-second stretch, the machinery became visible: “Pieces of Me” was not the pure expression of a singular artist, but a song engineered for catchiness by co-writers and producers, then attached to a performer who could plausibly sell it as her own.

With every passing year, the music industry becomes more mechanized. From Tin Pan Alley to the Brill Building to Motown to modern hitmakers like Max Martin and Jack Antonoff, record labels have perfected the art of producing optimally catchy songs and then blasting them into ubiquity through brute-force exposure. The role of the pop star, then, is to complete the illusion: to make the track feel like an extension of their persona, even if they had little role in its creation.

Music production is an alchemical science: a many-variable equation calibrated around tempo, pitch, texture, familiarity, and repetition. When it works, you get a song like “Pieces of Me” or “Yes! We Have No Bananas”—a track so efficiently constructed, so faithful to pop’s oldest formulas, and so relentlessly pervasive that it burrows into your brain. When it doesn’t, you get every other Ashlee Simpson song, along with all the tracks you’ve never had to erase from memory because they never made it there in the first place.

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