Intro: How Many Times Can I Listen to the Same Song?

I am sick of my own music. Every day, I go to work, write my Python code, and (while coding) listen to My Chemical Romance’s “Welcome to the Black Parade” or Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” for the 1,000th time. Then I clock out, ready to do it all over again, playing these songs for the 1,001st time.

Every once in a while, I’ll get a rush of inspiration and try a new streaming service or playlist. A minute into this endeavor, I’ll feel like a golden god. “I’m so brave,” I’ll think to myself. “I should tell people about how brave I’m being.” Within ten minutes, I’ll typically lose all momentum and return to my well-worn playlists and channels.

A few years back, I explored the difficulties of song discovery as we age and found that our music tastes are largely shaped during adolescence, with so-called “open-earedness” declining after our mid-twenties.

Initially, I found this data comforting. It turns out I am just like everyone else—readily bingeing music played at my middle school dances.

But my acceptance of this phenomenon can only go so far. I still go to work every day, write my Python code, and listen to “Dancing in the Dark”—and I’ll probably keep doing this for a few more decades.

Am I unique in my relentless song repetition, or am I, once again, the norm? How does music consumption change as it becomes harder to discover new songs? And how do these phenomena intersect with music’s role in the workplace?

So today, we’ll explore our ever-evolving relationship with music amid declining “open-earedness” and examine how our streaming habits shift as our tastes narrow.

How Do Listening Habits Change Over Time?

AccuRadio is a free, human-curated internet radio service offering over 1,000 customizable music channels. I’ve consulted for the platform on several data projects, and they’ve generously provided anonymized user data for this analysis.

As a streaming listener (AccuRadio or otherwise), you generally have two responsibilities:

1. Choose a playlist, artist, or channel

2. Once presented with a song, you decide whether you’d like to listen or skip

If this sounds overwhelming, you can skip step #1 by throwing on Spotify’s AI DJ—ceding music selection to a large language model masquerading as a human disc jockey—which is modernity at its best. Once a channel is launched, the streaming experience becomes an all-you-can-eat buffet offering every song in human history—all you have to do is say “yay” or “nay.”

Streaming services like AccuRadio track song “skips” and “plays” as well as user age (when provided). Using this data, I analyzed listener “skip” percentages across various age groups.

My initial hypothesis was that song-skipping would increase over time. I envisioned a world of hardened Gen-Xers, Baby Boomers, and elder Millennials continuously rejecting new-fangled tracks foreign to their significantly less “open” ears. Turns out the opposite is true—younger listeners skip songs more often.

This finding sent me into a minor tailspin. Was my previous research completely wrong? Are younger music consumers closed-minded, while older listeners simply accept the songs served to them by algorithms and editorial teams? Not exactly.

Older listeners have lower skip rates because they put themselves in situations where they don’t need to skip songs. As someone with rapidly calcifying music tastes, I typically confine my streaming activities to a handful of trusted playlists and channels—because I like what I like. I just want to be soothed or distracted by creature comforts (is that so much to ask?!).

Alas, my lack of sonic exploration aligns with normative behavior, as the average listener samples fewer channels as they age.

Maturation begets a shrinking set of go-to channels and playlists. We don’t need to skip songs because we’ve heard them all before.

Our increasingly narrow tastes also take a peculiar shape in how we give feedback to our streaming platforms. AccuRadio lets users rate songs on a scale of 1 to 5. A “5” means you will hear that song more, and a “1” or “2” means the track is effectively banned from future listening sessions.

Counterintuitively, younger users—who are more likely to encounter novel tracks—assign higher song ratings on average.

How is this possible? How can this population skip more songs AND be more favorable in their feedback?

The difference lies in the permanence (or lack thereof) associated with skips and ratings.

• For Skips: Song-skipping has limited implications. Maybe you’re not in the mood for a given track, or you’ve grown tired of it recently. Perhaps you don’t love that song, but you’re unwilling to ban it permanently (i.e., you might learn to love Chappell Roan one day). I’ve skipped my favorite song several times because it didn’t feel right at that moment.

• For Ratings: Assigning a rating of “1” or “2” means you’re cleansing that track from your life (at least on that streaming service). Plus, I would only rate my favorite song once, giving it a 5, while readily assigning lower scores to several tracks I dislike. Ratings are a blunt instrument for music avoidance.

Younger streaming listeners tend to exhibit a “discovery mindset,” actively seeking novelty. In contrast, older listeners may approach streaming from a “maintenance mindset,” knowing what they want and using a given platform to reinforce established preferences.

But does a reduced appetite for sonic exploration also signal diminished interest in music (overall)? As our tastes narrow, do we listen to less music, or do we revel in the comfort of familiar channels and songs?

How Much Music Do We Listen to As We Age?

A quirk of this analysis is that it excludes a population not represented in our dataset. Since we’re analyzing data from a streaming platform, we’re missing the preferences of those who don’t regularly listen to music or use a streaming service. As such, these statistics are only representative of active streaming users. If someone has “quit” music—and I don’t even know what that means—they would not be represented here.

So, for those who’ve stayed dedicated to music (via streaming), how much do they listen?

Surprisingly, middle-aged streamers have higher weekly listening times and longer sessions.

These are my favorite types of analyses: the ones where I learn how little I know.

To recap our findings so far:

• Younger streaming listeners skip more songs and sample more channels while somehow consuming less music (relative to older streamer cohorts).

• Older streaming users sample fewer channels and are more likely to ban tracks that don't match their established tastes (via low star ratings), yet they listen to more music.

How is this possible? The answer centers on music’s role in our professional lives.

The working world introduces several situations where music is indispensable:

1. Commuting

2. Being bored at work

3. Drowning out loud coworkers

4. Long work bouts (coding, writing, strategizing, etc.)

5. Trying to inject joy into your day while doing activities 1, 2, 3, and 4, as well as all the time in between

To examine the interplay between streaming and working life, I analyzed hourly music consumption across various age cohorts.

Working-age groups (highlighted in blue) consume more music during work and commuting hours, while adolescents and retirees are more likely to stream at night.

This graph underscores the fluid nature of our lifelong listening habits. Music begins as a means of identity formation and cultural exploration, then becomes a practical tool for everyday life before ultimately returning to its purest purpose—entertainment.

I find this trajectory comforting. Consider my ever-evolving connection to Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” at each musical life stage:

• “Dancing in the Dark” Listen #1: I was an adolescent—around ten years old—raiding my dad’s music for classic rock gems. I sampled Bruce’s “Born in the U.S.A.” and was immediately transfixed by “Dancing in the Dark.” For the next few days, I consumed this song ad nauseam—like way too much—and experienced the joy of shaping my musical tastes.

• “Dancing in the Dark” Listen #1,000: I’m probably in the middle of an analysis—perhaps for this article—when “Dancing in the Dark” plays via a playlist in shuffle mode. I acknowledge the song and recognize it’s better than silence, then keep working while listening passively.

• “Dancing in the Dark” Listen #5,000: I am in my twilight years, retired and stinking rich (hopefully). I sip a flavorful mocktail whilst sitting beside a crackling fire and listening to the music of my youth. “Dancing in the Dark” plays, and I think, “What a nice song.” I take a moment to appreciate Springsteen’s impact on my life and my consistent affection for this song. Then I die.

Perhaps decades from now, I’ll no longer be sick of my music—listening for pure pleasure rather than contextual utility. That would be nice.

Final Thoughts: The Agony and Ecstasy of Noise-Canceling Headphones

As someone prone to overanalyzing things, I often retrace the evolution of my listening habits to better understand my relationship with music. In the end, I always come back to two moments that forever reshaped my relationship with music.

1. Getting My First iPod: I won an iPod Mini at a school raffle—back when these gadgets were all the rage and Steve Jobs could force-install U2 albums on every device. I was captivated by my iPod Mini and spent countless hours on iTunes scouring for new tracks. At one point, I tried listening to my iPod while taking a bath, which led to the device getting wet, then breaking, and me throwing a tantrum. An endless world of music was available for sampling, and I spent every available hour in service of this quest.

2. Getting My First Job: My first job out of college was at a 30-person startup in an open-floor-plan office. Whenever someone spoke, the entire company heard the conversation. I was shocked: “How could adults be so disrespectful?” After a few days, the office manager pulled me aside and suggested I buy noise-canceling headphones. She explained that I couldn't do my work without music. How else could I concentrate? Thus began 8-hour workdays defined by Spotify, Pandora, and AccuRadio listening sessions.

Of course, this inflection point was unavoidable—people have to work, and novelty doesn’t last forever. Still, I’m troubled by my lack of agency. Can I infuse my music listening with a sense of freshness, or should I simply accept the realities of aging?

Should I go out of my way to sample new channels (and be brave!) while rating novel songs more favorably? Or should I deepen my appreciation for well-worn favorites, savoring every replay of “Welcome to the Black Parade” and “Californication”? And most importantly, if I choose one of these options, can I commit to it for more than two minutes?

No matter what, I eagerly await the day when, as an 80- or 90-year-old retiree, I rediscover my youthful passion for Bruce Springsteen, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and My Chemical Romance. At least I have that to look forward to.

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Welcome to the Monday Roundup!

A weekly bonus edition featuring data-driven culture stories, curated datasets, and recommended reads. Note: Your regular Wednesday essay remains free for all readers.

This week: six original data stories exploring the ever-earlier arrival of Christmas music, a pumpkin spice recession, Letterboxd’s potential buyers, Barbie’s decline, the cities most celebrated in popular music, and a record-breaking CEO payday—plus notable reads and 10 public datasets. Free readers get the first two stories; paid subscribers get everything.

Trend 1: Is “The Holiday Season” Starting Earlier?

In theory, “the holidays”—as in Thanksgiving and Christmas—should amount to a handful of bank closures and vacation days. Yet these individual celebrations have slowly become a sprawling holiday season that keeps expanding across the calendar.

Each year, the holiday season begins a little earlier, as measured by our appetite for Christmas music. According to the data, the festivities now kick off immediately after Halloween. Since 2020, Christmas songs have begun appearing on the Billboard Hot 100 as early as November 1st.

This gives us a sense of when people begin dipping their proverbial toe into the holiday season. But equally fascinating is the scale of this shift. Looking at the number of Christmas songs entering Spotify’s Top 100 each year, we see an ever-growing collection of holiday classics dominating the charts earlier and earlier.

I have always viewed the holiday season’s gradual expansion across the calendar as an optimization problem. The holidays derive their magic from scarcity; after all, the entire year can’t be one giant celebration. At the same time, people seem perfectly content to exist in a perpetual state of festivity and consumption. Somewhere between these competing impulses lies an optimal balance of scarcity and celebration, and for the moment, we seem to have settled on November 1st as the starting point.

Trend 2: A Pumpkin Spice Recession

Sometimes, you turn to the media to make sense of our chaotic world—to better understand others’ suffering and what you might do to make even the smallest difference. And sometimes, you come to a newsletter, and you read about pumpkin spice lattes. This story falls squarely into the latter category.

October is upon us, which means gourds of all varieties will invade our lives, led by the ever-popular pumpkin spice. As with any seasonal consumption trend (like Christmas music), what was once quaint has now been co-opted by corporations that want to sell you more stuff.

In the case of pumpkin spice, that means this seasonal flavor is appearing on the menus of coffee chains like Starbucks earlier and earlier, now arriving in late August rather than early September.

When corporations capitalize on a popular trend, the question becomes: will this organic cultural phenomenon lose its appeal when it’s no longer scarce?

At first glance, the answer appears to be yes. Google search interest in this reliably viral drink has declined since the mid-to-late 2010s. Once a popular search term in August, ahead of its seasonal launch, pumpkin spice no longer ranks as the most-searched latte that month.

Pumpkin spice is no longer a novelty, which means it’s no longer special. Gone is the little rush of excitement that comes with buying your first pumpkin-infused beverage in September. Instead, we see the flavor appear on shelves in mid-August and think, “Oh, I guess fall’s around the corner.”

Trend 3: Who Will Acquire Letterboxd?

An investor consortium led by film financier G.G. Pritzker recently expressed interest in acquiring Letterboxd for more than $300 million, becoming the latest group of wealthy Hollywood insiders hoping to get their hands on the platform’s vast repository of reviews and its 35 million users.

At this point, reports of prospective Letterboxd buyers have started to resemble a game of Mad Libs. One week, it’s Netflix. The next, it’s The New York Times. Then A24, or some wealthy Hollywood financier you’ve never heard of. The list of potential suitors is almost endless.

So, for posterity’s sake, who are the key players in this bidding war, and, better yet, who is the odds-on favorite to acquire the cinephile social network?

Read more

Intro: The Most Popular Song in Human History

Let’s imagine the year is 3026 and the human race is long gone, having perished in [insert some horrible tragedy that Al Gore predicted]. A group of extraterrestrial beings arrives on our planet, curious to study our culture and use archival information to piece together how we lived.

In an effort to understand our art, they stumble upon extensive record-keeping from the Billboard Hot 100. These aliens crunch the numbers and subsequently deduce that the greatest tune in human history was none other than Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas,” which, as of this writing, has topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 24 weeks, an all-time record, surpassing Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”

Now I ask you, the reader: Would this encapsulation of our culture feel accurate? Is “Choosin’ Texas” really the greatest song humankind has to offer? Perhaps more absurdly: Have you ever heard this song?

Such is the curious case of an above-average tune that has experienced unprecedented commercial success. According to the music industry’s foremost record keeper, “Choosin’ Texas” is the most popular track of the last 70 years—a distinction that makes you question how Billboard (and its charts) came to such a conclusion.

So today, we’ll examine the remarkable commercial longevity of “Choosin’ Texas,” deconstruct how Billboard compiles its marquee Hot 100 list, and explore why this song is uniquely predisposed to that longevity (as measured by Billboard).

The Most Popular Song You’ve Never Heard

Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 in November 2025, appearing at #39 for the week of November 1st. What happened next makes the song an all-time outlier. In its first wave of listenership, “Choosin’ Texas” peaked at #5 before falling as low as #48. At this point, one could reasonably assume the song would keep falling down the charts until it left the Hot 100 and faded into cultural obscurity.

But the song caught an epic second wind, climbed to the top of the charts, and has stayed there for nearly six months. Compared with other tracks that debuted on the Hot 100 that same November, its slow rise and lasting success are remarkable.

And here’s where things get really strange: Despite its record-breaking run atop the Billboard Hot 100, “Choosin’ Texas” is one of the least-streamed #1 hits of the last five years. When we compare all-time Spotify streams with weeks spent at #1, the song stands alone, combining an unusually long reign with relatively modest streaming numbers.

The track also has a much smaller streaming footprint outside the U.S., never reaching No. 1 on Spotify’s global chart and spending just four days in the global top 10.

This isn’t unusual for a country song, given the genre’s predominantly American audience. Still, the divide between domestic and international listenership is striking for a song this popular.

The track’s remarkable staying power has perplexed critics, prompting country music detractors to look for explanations, starting with the stagnation of music culture.

The central argument is that music culture now evolves more slowly, with fewer songs dominating the zeitgeist and popular hits spending longer stretches atop the Billboard charts—a phenomenon the data supports. As of 2026, more than half of the songs in the Billboard Hot 100’s top 10 have already spent at least 20 weeks on the chart.

This has likely contributed, at least in part, to the longevity of “Choosin’ Texas.” Yet the same phenomenon could just as easily apply to any other song that reached the Billboard top 10 over the past year. So the question remains: why this particular tune?

To answer that, we need to examine how Billboard’s 70-year-old ranking system actually works.

Billboard’s job was much simpler in the 1960s, when chart rankings largely depended on record sales and radio airplay. Today, the publication must find a way to measure and compare several forms of music consumption, including:

• Paid music streaming

• Free, ad-supported streaming

• Radio airplay

• YouTube views

• Physical and digital music sales

Billboard reconciles these different forms of listenership by converting them into a common metric: song sales. Under this system, a certain number of streams equals a single song sale—for example, 100 paid subscription streams count as one song sale.

Most of these measures cover some variation of streaming, a medium in which “Choosin’ Texas” currently lags behind other chart-topping songs. Which brings us to radio play.

If you want to see this song’s highly specific cultural reputation in a single chart, look no further. The track’s weekly streaming activity has remained flat for months, while its radio play continues to climb.

Country music fans have been among the slowest to embrace streaming because of a mix of cultural and technological factors, from subpar internet quality in many rural areas to long-standing listening habits. As a result, country is the second-largest radio format in the United States.

Said differently, country radio’s sizable audience is probably hearing “Choosin’ Texas” with remarkable frequency. Indeed, the track has become a country music staple, accumulating an estimated 291 times as many streams as the average charting country track this year—a level of dominance unmatched in any other genre.

It’s a strange mix of factors that raises questions about whether the song deserves its extraordinary chart dominance and whether Billboard rankings have ever really mattered. On one hand, Ella Langley’s surprise hit has dominated the charts despite smaller streaming numbers. On the other hand, people are listening to this song, just not through the channels music critics typically use.

Final Thoughts: A Legitimate Expression of Popular Taste

Let’s return to our hypothetical alien explorers in the year 3026. These curious extraterrestrials are once again investigating our cultural heritage. They stumble upon a database maintained by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and decide to use its album-sales data to identify the most popular music artists in American history.

Now, who do you think tops this hypothetical list? The Beatles? Elvis Presley? Taylor Swift? Michael Jackson? Nope, none of these pop stars.

By this measure, the most popular musician in American history is country star Garth Brooks.

Garth Brooks was the most popular artist of the 1990s by orders of magnitude, selling out massive stadiums and spurring a country music revival across the United States.

An apparent parallel exists between Garth Brooks’ underappreciated commercial dominance in the 1990s and the chart-topping longevity of “Choosin’ Texas” today. Cultural tastemakers have long overlooked country music, favoring album-oriented rock as the pinnacle of music artistry. As a result, people often treat a country musician’s commercial achievements as aberrations rather than legitimate expressions of popular taste.

And so, in order for these listeners and their preferences to be taken seriously, people really, really have to like something. That brings us to “Choosin’ Texas,” a song that some combination of country listeners and country radio DJs really, really like, so much that it has taken on a life of its own, as if it were trolling music journalists.

It’s a testament to the insularity of various cultural silos. For many streaming users, this song’s preeminence is considered an arithmetic error. For country radio devotees, the track’s tenure atop the Billboard charts is exceedingly obvious. For aliens attempting to recreate our culture 1,000 years later, the entire ordeal will be extremely confusing.

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Like movies? Follow me on Letterboxd

Welcome to the Monday Roundup!

A weekly bonus edition featuring data-driven culture stories, curated datasets, and recommended reads. Note: Your regular Wednesday essay remains free for all readers.

This week: six original data stories, including Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” streaming surge, the rise of “maxxing,” Digger’s polarizing reception, Warner Bros.’ disastrous year, AI celebrity re-creations, and Paramount’s mountain of debt—plus notable reads and 10 public datasets. Free readers get the first two stories; paid subscribers get everything.

Trend 1: September 21st & the Single-Day Song Spike

Once a year, September 21st rolls around, and subsequently Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” reappears on the Billboard Hot 100.

People are always looking for an excuse to play “September” outside the confines of a wedding reception, so every September 21st, the world collectively fires up this disco classic to celebrate an otherwise unremarkable date.

Since 2017, Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” has repeatedly recharted among Spotify’s 100 most popular songs globally, anchored around its titular calendar date.

This ever-danceable earworm is one of several tracks to experience a massive surge in listenership tied to a specific day, headlining a curious category of annual song spikes that includes Dropkick Murphys’ “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” on St. Patrick’s Day, “Monster Mash” on Halloween, and “I Gotta Feeling” on New Year’s Day.

While this newsletter frequently chronicles the negative consequences of digital music distribution, this particular ritual is undeniably charming. Streaming has made it easier than ever for millions of people to revisit the same song on the same day.

Trend 2: The Rise of “Maxxing”

Here’s a sentence that’s impossible to take seriously: “Whimsymaxxing” was among TikTok’s top trends this past week. To state the obvious, the term is oxymoronic—optimization and lightheartedness don’t exactly go hand in hand—though I haven’t consumed enough #whimsymaxxing content to confirm this paradox.

Anyway, whimsy is merely the latest trait to be “maxxed,” joining an expanding canon of desirable qualities that Instagram influencers can help you optimize, alongside “looks,” “sleep,” “sardines,” and “fiber.”

The maxxing-sphere stresses an optimal approach to one’s personal care, whether it’s bowel movements, a chiseled jawline, or a rockin’ beach tan. The maxxing concept isn’t new; these trends have existed on social media for half a decade. What is new is mainstream awareness of this suffix, as reported on by news outlets, and its subsequent adoption by normies (for lame concepts like AI “tokenmaxxing”).

The beginning of 2026 saw an abrupt uptick in maxxing-related news coverage, spurred by the very public crash-out of looksmaxing influencer Clavicular, who committed several crimes and then continued live-streaming about jawline sculpting (by chewing gum, of course!).

Underlying this social media trend is the belief that an ideal standard of beauty, health, or professional success exists—and that some influencer has cracked the code, offering a simple, repeatable formula for achieving it.

The future of this social media suffix is exceedingly predictable: it will gain mainstream adoption until it is eventually rendered uncool, and then these hashtags will fall out of fashion. What will endure, however, is the timeless nature of human insecurity—and a legion of hucksters eager to exploit those anxieties under a new brand name (and a new hashtag).

Trend 3: Is Digger the Most Polarizing Movie of the Decade?

Most films generate an inexact consensus among critics and audiences. Within each group, a general agreement emerges about whether a movie is “good” or “bad.” But every so often, a film becomes something of a Rorschach test, provoking reactions so wildly different that you wonder whether everyone watched the same film.

Such is the case with Digger, which opened to a paltry $20 million worldwide against a $180 million budget (and an additional $100 million for marketing). Whatever its artistic merits, the film is an undeniable commercial catastrophe—so spectacular that Warner Bros.’ top film executives lost their jobs in the immediate aftermath.

That, however, is just the movie’s commercial reception. Its critical reception tells a far more complicated story—or perhaps several competing stories.

Read more

Intro: Spooky Season Begins

For some, October marks the official start of fall. For others, it’s the beginning of “spooky season,” an excuse to watch all 13 movies in the Halloween franchise (especially the bad ones). For me, October is a reminder that, two decades ago, I watched The Ring, did not sleep for a week, and then made my mom sit with me exactly seven days later because I was convinced I might be murdered by the little demon girl from the movie’s cursed videotape. (For the record, her name is Samara.)

Until I die, the month of October will be a reminder that a two-hour movie ruined an entire week of my life.

To this day, if I see The Ring sitting among the digital tiles on a streaming service, I speed right past it. I simply do not enjoy thinking about Samara, or any of the rampant evil in this work of fiction.

Such is the power of an indelible movie villain: something about their construction worms its way into your head—and then they live there rent-free (for the rest of your life).

As spooky season returns once more, I set out to identify these unforgettable antagonists: an all-star team of day-ruining movie characters ingrained in popular imagination.

So today, we’ll quantify cinema’s best horror villains through a mix of movie quality, commercial longevity, and perceived scariness, then chart an emerging canon of up-and-coming antagonists that will be fixtures of spooky seasons to come.

Film Quality: The Best Villains Based on Moviegoer Acclaim

Few things in entertainment are more lucrative than a horror film franchise. All you need is a memorable villain, and then you can coast for decades. You don’t need to pay movie stars, spend money on elaborate sets, or invest in any of the traditional hallmarks of quality. In the case of the Halloween franchise and Friday the 13th, all you need is an iconic mask worn by an anonymous stuntman.

As such, the quality bar for horror movie franchises often slips with each sequel, as the seventh, eighth, or ninth installment is a far cry from what made the first film so memorable.

Yet, that isn’t true of all horror movie villains. In some cases, a franchise’s central antagonist offers filmmakers a blank canvas to explore a wide range of themes and story concepts, allowing the series to evolve over time and, in turn, remain relevant.

So to begin our villain rankings, we’ll start with moviemaking quality, as measured by online film ratings. We’ll compare the average rating for an entire series with the highest-rated entry in that respective franchise, ultimately stack-ranking our results by the former. By this measure, our canon of beloved baddies is topped by Jack Torrance from The Shining, The Thing, Pennywise the Clown, Hannibal Lecter, and the Xenomorph from Alien.

A Few Observations:

• Some long-running horror series have maintained a high quality bar: Hannibal Lecter and the Xenomorph from Alien have proven far more resistant to franchise-wide declines in story quality. In my view, this speaks to the narrative malleability of these characters. Alien’s Xenomorph is perhaps the clearest example, a murderous extraterrestrial capable of fitting into a wide range of storytelling modes. The Xenomorph can serve as the focal point of a haunted-house movie, the centerpiece of a sci-fi parable, a symbol of corporate overreach by the film’s fictional space billionaires, or a straightforward terror in a gross-out creature feature—all packaged in the same monster.

• Many franchises fail their source material: Psycho and The Exorcist are two prominent examples of series that struggle to recapture the magic of the franchise’s first entry. The commonality among these movies is that the original was directed by an auteur filmmaker like Alfred Hitchcock and William Friedkin, respectively, neither of whom was involved in any sequel.

Scariness: The Most Terrifying Horror Villains

Next, we have villain scariness, a somewhat intangible quality we’ll measure by aggregating numerous online rankings of cinema’s “scariest movie villains.” Said differently, these are the characters audiences simply can’t shake, as voted on by the wisdom of digital crowds.

Our resulting list is led by 1980s slashers like Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers, two unkillable villains who have collectively appeared in 21 films in which they murder promiscuous teenagers with varying degrees of creativity.

Using our findings, we can now examine a central tension within every horror franchise: the trade-off between “scariness” and filmmaking quality. Most horror sequels settle into a familiar formula: a succession of kills involving largely anonymous actors, followed by a third-act showdown in which the “final girl” confronts the franchise’s mythic antagonist.

That predictability caters to series diehards who simply want more of the same. For critics and the broader moviegoing public, however, the appeal is far more limited. And because horror films are relatively cheap to produce, studios can keep churning out poorly reviewed sequels, allowing quality to deteriorate until the franchise becomes unwatchable.

So which series have avoided this decline, and which have failed to win over mainstream audiences?

To identify the villains that best balance cinematic prestige and dread, we can plot the two factors against one another and divide the results into four quadrants.

In the upper-right quadrant (very scary and high quality), we find the Xenomorph, Hannibal Lecter, and Pennywise the Clown from IT—characters who have sustained decades of cinematic relevance while sufficiently scaring audiences.

In the highly scary but critically derided bucket, we find beloved slashers like Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, and Jason Voorhees, along with Pazuzu from The Exorcist—a franchise that has spent decades trying, and largely failing, to recapture the power of its 1973 original.

Longevity: The Horror Villains That Endure Within Popular Imagination

I’ve been interested in movies for as long as I can remember. When I first started getting into film, one of my favorite rituals was asking my parents about their most memorable moviegoing experiences. My dad would tell me about seeing Field of Dreams for the first time; my mom would talk about The Graduate. Once, I asked my mom about her least favorite moviegoing experience. Without missing a beat, she said, “The Exorcist.”

The Exorcist is arguably Hollywood’s first modern horror film, blending storytelling realism with supernatural terror—a stark departure from the campy Universal monster movies of the 1940s and 1950s. To this day, I refuse to watch any movie from the Exorcist franchise because I am simply too scared. Perhaps I will pass the same animus to my children when it comes to The Ring.

Alas, Pazuzu—the demon who haunted my mother in the original Exorcist—still haunts audiences today, ranking among the most enduring antagonists of all time, according to our composite longevity score. This metric combines franchise lifespan, number of films, and sustained online attention to measure each villain’s cinematic staying power.

Once again, quality serves as an important counterweight to longevity—some of these long-running franchises appear to be sleepwalking with every lega-sequel and reboot. The most recent Pazuzu release was a shell of its Oscar-winning originator.

Our Final Ranking: Combining Our Results

When we combine our three criteria into a single aggregate rating, the Xenomorph from Alien tops our final list, which, in my opinion, is a pretty solid choice for the greatest horror movie villain of all time.

The Alien franchise has endured for nearly five decades and attracted some of the most acclaimed directors in film history, including Ridley Scott, James Cameron, and David Fincher. Like its rapidly transforming monster, the franchise continuously evolves. The original Alien is a haunted-house movie in space, while Aliens drops this intergalactic lizard into a full-blown action film.

Also near the top of our list are Hannibal Lecter and Michael Myers. One commonality among these characters—and several other upper-echelon entries—is the groundbreaking nature of the films that introduced them. Movies like Halloween and The Exorcist helped establish entire horror subgenres; as such, their villains remain unkillable onscreen and in the minds of IP-hungry studio executives.

The Best Horror Villains Post-2010: The New Horror Canon

Our aforementioned list heavily rewards longevity, which means newer characters had no chance of cracking the final list.

To account for this, I created a second ranking that replaces longevity with popularity (as measured by a combination of box office and online rating volume) and asked a different question: which iconic horror villains from the last 15 years will make a list like this three decades from now?

Atop this cohort are the antagonists from two of the biggest horror hits of the last five years: Freaky Nikki from Obsession and Aunt Gladys from Weapons.

These characters will serve as fodder for Halloween costumes this year and will scare movie watchers for decades to come.

Final Thoughts: A Fatal Flaw

One day, when I was 12, I was wandering around our local Blockbuster and came across the DVD case for Hellraiser. Usually, I have film poster blindness. I don’t put much stock in movie marketing; it takes more than a single image to sell me on a film. But Hellraiser was different.

The cover featured the franchise’s iconic Pinhead character, which I immediately deemed “the scariest thing I’d ever seen.” I subsequently vowed never to watch this movie.

Flash forward to spooky season 2026. I’m aimlessly scrolling through streaming libraries, looking for a horror movie to kick off the festivities, when I stumble upon Hellraiser (and Pinhead). It was at this moment that I—a 33-year-old man with a job and a child—decided I would no longer be scared of an image displayed on a digital streaming tile. Or at the very least, an attempt would be made.

And guess what? This movie was super boring.

After about 30 minutes, I started fast-forwarding just to get to the scenes featuring Pinhead. And those scenes were indeed quite captivating, briefly interrupting standard-issue horror plotting populated by anonymous actors I did not care about.

My Hellraiser experience captures the agony and ecstasy of the iconic horror villain and the franchises built around these figures. The antagonist is always the main draw, appearing every 20 minutes to kill someone, while everything in between is mostly pointless. You’re asked to care about a bunch of random characters, 80% of whom will die by the end credits.

As I researched this article, it became clear that quality and longevity are fundamentally at odds in horror moviemaking. The genre benefits from absence: the prospect of normality being disrupted by the macabre, which means the film’s central figure can be present for only 50% of the story (at most). The downside is that the movie’s main attraction occupies a small fraction of its runtime. This structural flaw is what makes a franchise’s ninth installment so much worse than its debut—it’s the paradox of the popular horror villain.

What these franchises do accomplish is keeping their antagonists alive in popular imagination, ensuring that Pazuzu, Pinhead, Aunt Gladys, and Samara are passed down across generations. These characters burrow into our brains, ruining a week—or more—of our lives, even if attempts to recreate that effect mostly fall flat.

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Welcome to the Monday Roundup!

A weekly bonus edition featuring data-driven culture stories, curated datasets, and recommended reads. Note: Your regular Wednesday essay remains free for all readers.

This week: six original data stories, including A24’s commercial ascendancy, South Park’s staying power, Robert Pattinson’s huge 2026, Avengers Never-Endgame, the return of girl groups, and Netflix’s global expansion—plus notable reads and 10 public datasets. Free readers get the first two stories; paid subscribers get everything.

Trend 1: A24 Gets Greedy

When is an indie studio no longer “indie”? Probably around the time said upstart begins making demands. Such is the case for A24, which now exists in a liminal space between indie sweetheart and profiteering entertainment corporation. Coming off the blockbuster success of Backrooms, the micro-major studio is renegotiating its revenue-sharing deals with movie theaters worldwide, trying to move from the low-40% range to the mid-50s.

Historically, indie films have paid a substantial tax for theatrical distribution, forfeiting a greater portion of earnings to exhibitors. A24, however, is making the (rather credible) argument that its films no longer qualify as independent as their budgets and box office continue to increase.

A24’s commercial ascendance is yet another major loss for theater chains, which are forced to live a Faustian existence as glorified middlemen, their entire business built around a product over which they have no control. Worse still, the average share of ticket sales going to studios hit an all-time high in 2025, driven by a contraction in the indie market and the outsized importance of blockbusters (which offer more favorable rates to producers).

A24 has raised $375M in capital over the last five years, meaning the studio’s ambitions now go beyond selling T-shirts to hipster baristas. Negotiating better distribution terms was probably central to their investor pitch, and I’m sure those Wall Street hobgoblins ate it up.

Trend 2: South Park’s Eternal Relevance

South Park’s Season 29 premiere saw a 33% increase in viewership, following the show’s temporary name change to South America—a backhanded nod to Donald Trump’s recent shenanigans. At a time when new season renewal rates have plummeted, long-running TV shows like The Simpsons and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia have become something of a novelty.

Many of these geriatric programs are shadows of their former selves, with The Simpsons being the clearest example of a once-great show stuck in a prolonged decline. South Park, however, has largely avoided that fate.

The show has maintained an above-average online rating across its 30-year run and will likely rebound from last season’s dip, which came amid criticism of the show’s insistence on skewering Trump pretty much every episode.

The show’s enduring appeal has made South Park one of streaming’s most valuable entertainment properties. In 2025, Paramount paid creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone more than $1.5 billion for exclusive streaming rights to the series—an extraordinary sum for a 30-year-old program.

While the characters of South Park never age, the show has evolved with the times, producing episodes days before release to stay culturally relevant. The show’s name may have changed, but it remains as good as ever.

Trend 3: Is Robert Pattinson’s 2026 Acting Run the “Greatest of All Time”?

The 1998 Major League Baseball season was defined by a fierce competition between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire, as the two sluggers raced to break baseball’s single-season home run record. The Sosa-McGwire duel energized the sport, creating a season-long meta-narrative that captivated even the most passive baseball fan.

Minus the steroid-cheating scandal that later tainted the Sosa-McGwire duel, something similar is occurring in movies right now. Robert Pattinson and Anne Hathaway are locked in a (conceptual) slugfest for the title of “greatest movie year ever”—a made-up distinction that exists in the minds of film nerds.

So how unprecedented are these actors’ 2026 filmographies, and who is winning this nonexistent contest?

Read more

Intro: Moana, But Less Good

Disney’s live-action Moana hit streaming two weeks ago, ending its theatrical run and cementing its status as a box office bomb, with an estimated $100 million loss during its theatrical engagement. To this, I say: good. These live-action remakes are artistically bankrupt, falling squarely into a category of “who asked for this?” entertainment. You can only release so many versions of Moana before you cannibalize its source material. Complicit in this lifeless adaptation is Dwayne Johnson, who is once again the face of a Hollywood flop.

Post-pandemic, The Rock has cooked up an undisputed turkey-fest of cinema, including Black Adam, Red One, Red Notice, Jungle Cruise, Moana 2, and now live-action Moana. At this point, coverage of Dwayne Johnson’s once-unimpeachable movie stardom has become less about the films themselves than the larger spectacle of his fading commercial clout. How did one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars become a punching bag for box office pundits, and is there precedent for the former wrestler’s fall from grace?

So today, we’ll trace The Rock’s rise and decline—from commercial preeminence to perceived box-office poison—and examine how his career came to embody a fading model of movie stardom.

Dwayne Johnson’s Rock Bottom

We’ll start with the metric that matters most in Hollywood: is this actor making money for the people who pay them millions? In the case of Dwayne Johnson, the answer is now “no.” The average ROI of a Rock-led production has drifted into the red, a precipitous drop from his pre-pandemic highs.

Worse still, the actor is losing his grip on popular imagination—a somewhat intangible dynamic that matters for a performer who must translate his or her celebrity into box-office dollars.

From 2016 to 2019, The Rock’s Wikipedia page drew the most sustained traffic of any Hollywood actor, ranking among the site’s Top 100 pages roughly one out of every four days. Since the pandemic, that figure has fallen to around 2%, even as he continues to release two movies a year.

I don’t want to rejoice in The Rock’s downfall, but this box office dry spell may have been long overdue. A Dwayne Johnson project has never been synonymous with the following markers of prestige cinema: the Criterion Collection, auteur filmmaking, glowing Letterboxd ratings, glowing critic reviews, a film that has no CGI, or a Metacritic score displayed in a green-shaded box.

This is all to say that The Rock typically headlines films of below-average quality, according to online ratings.

An actor can only make so many less-than-stellar films (Red One, Red Notice, Black Adam, etc.) before this perceived disregard for quality catches up to them—with the lowest of low points being an unnecessary live-action adaptation of his most critically acclaimed movie (Moana).

And while it’s tempting to cast The Rock as some sort of cinematic villain in the midst of a cosmic comeuppance, his particular brand of celebrity may have always come with an expiration date.

To quote Hamilton: “Oceans rise; empires fall.” Hollywood trends—including movie stardom—are cyclical. Consider Johnny Depp, Will Smith, Bruce Willis, Kevin Costner, John Travolta, and the patron saint of this newsletter, Nic Cage. Each enjoyed a stretch when their commercial bankability seemed almost permanent. Then, a few lackluster movies and/or PR debacles later, their stardom was simply gone.

In their place, we get new stars like Margot Robbie and Timothée Chalamet, or proven commodities experiencing a late-career resurgence, like Tom Cruise and Keanu Reeves.

In fact, Hollywood’s star system has more turnover than you might expect. In a typical year, roughly 43% of the actors leading the highest-grossing films are reaching that level of commercial success for the first time.

The Rock’s recent decline in celebrity may also reflect changing Hollywood norms and a shrinking box office. There are simply fewer movie stars in the American film industry, as measured by the number of performers who have appeared in at least three top-grossing films within a five-year span (excluding the pandemic). This decline in sustained commercial stardom predates 2020, tracing back to the early 2010s, when prestige television was ascendant, the Marvel machine was hitting full stride, and Hollywood was finding it increasingly difficult to break new talent and launch original stories.

Viewed through this lens, Dwayne Johnson’s 20-year box office run is actually quite remarkable, given that he first emerged as a leading man in the early 2000s. For twenty years, he gave us subpar cinema, and yet he endured as Hollywood’s brightest star. Perhaps he’ll stage a career revival after this latest debacle, but even if his run ends here, its longevity remains exceptional.

Final Thoughts: A Schematic Approach to Stardom

There used to be a certain kind of movie stardom that functioned much like Mad Libs. A film pitch—or its entire marketing campaign—could often be reduced to a single sentence: take a famous actor, drop them into an absurd situation, and let their star power and charisma do the rest. It was a formulaic approach to moviemaking so pervasive that South Park once built an entire episode around satirizing the phenomenon.

In a 2004 episode, Cartman disguises himself as a robot named AWESOM-O and, through a series of misadventures, becomes a Hollywood development executive. Forced to generate movie ideas on command, he spits out hundreds of terrible pitches that feature Adam Sandler:

• Puppy Love: Adam Sandler falls in love with a girl, but she turns out to be a golden retriever.

• Punch-Drunk Billionaire: Adam Sandler inherits a billion dollars, but first he has to become a professional boxer.

• Coconut Love: Adam Sandler gets trapped on a deserted island and falls in love with a coconut.

The brilliance of the bit is that every concept is both ludicrous and plausible, harkening back to an era when movie development was schematic: What if [famous actor] had to deal with [insert hilarious hijinks or dramatic obstacle]?

That formula maps neatly onto Dwayne Johnson’s once-untouchable movie stardom:

• What if The Rock was the tooth fairy? (Tooth Fairy)

• What if The Rock had to survive a major earthquake? (San Andreas)

• What if The Rock looked enormous while standing next to Kevin Hart, who is very small? (Central Intelligence, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, Jumanji: The Next Level)

Take a simple premise, attach a bankable movie star, and a blockbuster is born. Post-pandemic, however, audiences demand something more: event-ization, strong reviews, IMAX-worthy spectacle, auteur filmmaking, visceral scares, Letterboxd hype, or some other reason to leave the house. The formula has changed—if any such formula still exists.

AWESOM-O’s pitches wouldn’t work in today’s moviegoing environment, making The Rock’s particular brand of movie stardom a relic of a bygone commercial archetype.

Much like his stage name, Dwayne Johnson’s on-screen persona remains static—a rock stuck in place even as Hollywood changes around him. And while it is tempting to assign him some agency in this decline—to blame bad project choices—the reality is that it simply may have been his time to exit the limelight.

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Welcome 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: Ed Sheeran’s brutal month, U.S. film onshoring, Apple TV’s post-Emmys momentum, a U.S. and UK musical decline, Paramount+’s critical disconnect, and Hollywood’s rising glass ceiling.

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

• Unique Datasets: Ten publicly available datasets, covering everything from YouTube comments to musical instrument names.

Trend 1: Ed Sheeran’s Very Bad Month

Judd Apatow has a stand-up bit about the so-called “cancellation” of many of his former collaborators, including Russell Brand, James Franco, and Jonah Hill. According to Apatow, he himself cannot be canceled because he doesn’t leave his house often or do anything interesting. There’s an inherent paradox to this bit, since stand-up comedy is an extremely public activity. Still, the premise holds for most non-comedians, and I’m sure Ed Sheeran in particular wishes he had never left his house over the past month. Against all odds, Sheeran has managed to anger pundits across the political spectrum by dropping Macklemore from his tour following the rapper’s pro-Palestine comments at a recent performance.

In fact, media coverage surrounding Sheeran, which typically qualifies as “standard industry stuff” or “boring,” has skewed radically negative over the last few weeks, as measured by article tonality.

And this negative coverage continues to escalate as Sheeran and his supporters (like New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft) keep saying and doing the exact wrong thing. The sheer volume of hypercritical think pieces at the singer’s expense is almost impressive.

Media outlets of all ideological persuasions have joined together in this collective pile-on. In fact, the only publications to cover the singer positively are Goss.ie and the Edmonton Sun, two outlets that technically exist but play little role in international, national, regional, local, or neighborhood discourse.

Most celebrities would respond to this media onslaught by following Apatow’s advice: lay low for a few months and stay out of the public eye. Sheeran, however, has no such option, as he has nine more concert dates to close out his ongoing tour. The singer’s existence is bordering on Kafkaesque, as he is contractually obligated to leave his house and appear in public, even while serving as the focal point of an all-time media drubbing.

Trend 2: Onshoring U.S. Movies

A film production incentive bill is slated to be introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives within the next few weeks, aimed at keeping American movie shoots in America. The bill has surprising bipartisan support, even from Donald Trump, who has never been much of an ally to the film industry, despite his starring role in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.

As of this writing, 121 active film and TV incentive programs exist worldwide, up from 86 in 2017. The U.S. is responsible for around 33% of these initiatives, all of them state- and county-level efforts.

The proposed federal filmmaking tax credit would layer national subsidies on top of existing state-level benefits, meaning an established production hub like Georgia would be the primary beneficiary of this program, offering one of the most competitive cost-saving packages worldwide (based on current projections).

So if you were frustrated by films where Prague or Vancouver served as unconvincing stand-ins for New York, you can rest easy knowing Atlanta will soon become the de facto substitute for the Big Apple.

Trend 3: Apple TV = The New HBO?

A few weeks ago, I wrote a 2,000-word essay about Apple TV+, complete with nine graphics, that could just as easily have been a single sentence: the Silicon Valley streamer is producing great television, yet that hasn’t translated into meaningful TV market share. Since I published that piece, Apple has premiered a new season of Ted Lasso and dominated the 2026 Emmys, winning 28 primetime awards.

And so the question remains: have Apple’s admirable efforts translated into viewership?

Read more

Intro: Rejecting The Wisdom of Crowds

Sometimes a stock price accurately reflects future business prospects, a product of the wisdom of crowds and what those crowds expect for an entire sector of the economy. When that’s the case, I tend to put a lot of faith in the market. And yet, just as easily, I’ll dismiss a stock price the moment it contradicts one of my irrational beliefs.

Such is the case with AMC Theatres, America’s largest theatrical exhibitor, whose share price fell to an all-time low this year as it nears penny-stock territory.

At a high level, this price point makes sense. Theatrical moviegoing was weakened by the pandemic and still hasn’t returned to pre-2020 levels. Meanwhile, national chains like AMC and Regal took on substantial debt to survive the downturn.

And yet, for some reason, I remain bullish on the future of movie theaters. Not because I expect some triumphant resurgence in traditional moviegoing, but because the purpose of these brick-and-mortar fun houses is beginning to evolve.

The past five years have seen significant experimentation in the type of content that belongs on the big screen: a members-only screening of Netflix’s Stranger Things finale, the release of Taylor Swift music videos, or the premiere of an anime TV episode. Increasingly, movie theaters are becoming venues for more than traditional moviegoing.

So today, we’ll explore the evolution of the movie theater as it shifts from a conventional cineplex into a physical hub for cultural experience.

The Future of Movie Theaters

The past few months saw the highest summer box office on record, a data point amplified across all entertainment trade publications as proof of a moviegoing renaissance. And while movies are “so back,” this revival is grossly overstated thanks to inflation—a phenomenon that is conveniently overlooked when it serves a reporter’s best interest.

When we look at tickets sold (a metric agnostic to ticket pricing), theater foot traffic is down and to the right, following a middling post-pandemic recovery.

Right now, these record box office figures are driven by rising costs and the popularity of high-priced IMAX tickets—so it’s not all bad (but it’s also not an unambiguous triumph).

There are indeed bright spots: the growth in premium formats (IMAX, Dolby, and 4DX), the success of YouTube creators, horror’s continued dominance, and, most pertinent to this essay, the rise of “event cinema.”

Post-pandemic, these event releases account for 7% of North American box office, up from 0.5% of grosses in 2016.

You’re probably looking at this graph and thinking:

1. So cool—people are going to the movies for events!

2. What qualifies as an event?

To simplify matters, we’ll consider something “event” programming if it was produced and distributed outside the traditional studio or independent film model, or if it originally debuted years ago and is now returning to theaters.

So what exactly falls into this category? Event programming includes faith-based films, theatrical extensions of anime TV franchises, repertory re-releases, streaming service one-offs, concert films, and one-night live events, with each format expanding its theatrical footprint over the past half-decade.

To get a more granular sense of these categories, we’ll examine the highest-grossing movie-theater events of the past decade, a roster led by the improbable faith-based blockbuster Sound of Freedom, which made millions through an elaborate game of movie-ticket tag, and Taylor Swift projects that bypassed traditional distributors altogether.

We’ll start with faith-based films, a rapidly expanding cohort of movies and independent studios that I was initially hesitant to include in this event programming category. In terms of format, these are simply movies; what sets them apart is their content and marketing.

These are stories and themes that traditional studios avoid, and the promotion of these films is often unique, whether it’s Sound of Freedom and its “buy a ticket for someone else” gimmick or the grassroots church promotion many of these films rely on. Since The Passion of the Christ debuted in 2004, this category has continued to expand. For anyone who follows the box office, you’ll typically see one or two of these films among the highest-grossing releases for a given week.

Next, there are repertory screenings, essentially a fancy term for bringing older movies back to theaters.

For a long time, Disney was virtually the only studio using this tactic, selectively re-releasing its classics for new generations of moviegoers.

But the average repertory release is changing, with adult-oriented movies like Interstellar returning to theaters in a gambit seemingly aimed at movie nerds rather than children.

I’ve gone to a few of these repertory screenings, and I’m always struck by how young the audiences are. There is something uniquely disorienting about sitting in a theater full of 21-year-olds watching a 30-year-old Taiwanese film.

And at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from decades-old Taiwanese films is Netflix pop trash.

Netflix, a streamer whose entire business model is built around driving movie theaters into the ground, is now experimenting with one-off theatrical releases. The twist is that Netflix is capitalizing on existing fandom, event-izing the Stranger Things finale or a KPop Demon Hunters sing-along to squeeze a few more dollars from its most committed subscribers.

Put differently, these screenings are less about expanding Netflix’s user base than finding new ways to extract revenue from the customers it already has. That could become an increasingly important strategy as subscriber growth across streaming continues to slow.

Perhaps the unifying theme across all event programming is the monetization of fandom. Industry executives are using the big screen to pull more dollars from audiences with an existing affinity for a piece of content, including:

• Someone with dedicated faith

• Taylor Swift’s rabid fan base

• A cinephile completionist making their way through Letterboxd’s list of top movies

• A Netflix subscriber who loves Stranger Things but is also unwilling to pay $10 more per month for the service

After years of making content cheaper and more accessible through streaming platforms, entertainment executives have rediscovered the movie theater as a way to juice earnings. The future of entertainment is a reinvention of its past.

All told, the entertainment industry’s rediscovery of event programs and fandom activations could grow to be somewhere between 12% and 20% of the box office by 2040, or that number could just as easily be zero. I truly have no idea, but this is the best I can do using the practice of statistics.

Whether that 20% grows overall box office or merely claims a larger share of a shrinking market remains to be seen. So, too, does the future of AMC Theatres, a prospective penny stock that could reach zero well before 2040.

Final Thoughts: The Physical Culture Fun House

Businesses typically consolidate as demand shrinks, forcing companies to merge and, sometimes, blurring the boundaries between once-distinct industries. Take, for example, Sears-Kmart, which was born of the department store’s decline. Or iHeartMedia, which accumulated a massive radio station portfolio as streaming grew and advertising dollars migrated elsewhere.

A similar dynamic is now playing out across physical culture. The death of the video store, record store, local movie theater, mom-and-pop bookstore, corporate bookstore, stationery store, video-game retailer, and novelty store has spurred consolidation across myriad cultural domains into a new brick-and-mortar hybrid: The Physical Culture Fun House. Perhaps the foremost example of this phenomenon is the American bookseller Barnes & Noble (and its UK equivalent, Waterstones).

Against all odds, Barnes & Noble is growing, relaunching multiple storefronts within driving distance of my house. I assure you that last sentence is no hallucination: a physical bookstore is growing. “How?” you might wonder. Well, the answer is by selling things that aren’t books.

Step into a Barnes & Noble and you will find that 40% of the store has been reallocated to other physical goods: vinyl records, DVDs, greeting cards, journals, pens, board games, CDs, and so on. What was once a bookstore is now a purveyor of material culture. Thirty years ago, you could find these products scattered across numerous retailers; today, physical media is housed in a handful of surviving chains or local heroes.

If you’d like to consume culture digitally, you can stay home and frequent a streaming service of your choosing. But if you’d like a tangible cultural experience, you can go to a Physical Culture Fun House like Barnes & Noble or an AMC movie theater. Similarly, the cineplex is becoming a catch-all for shared audiovisual experience. You can watch music videos together, consume content that honors your faith in a shared setting, watch a climactic episode of your favorite television show alongside like-minded fans, and participate in countless other experiences yet to be conceived.

The draw of these events won’t be the media itself. You could watch this content at the gym or on a plane if you so choose. Instead, the appeal will be the setting: a premium, physical environment where you consume that content surrounded by other people, with the “premium” coming from tangibility and a rejection of digital isolation.

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

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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

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Welcome 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: Sydney Sweeney’s unique celebrity, film festival standing ovations, the horror industry’s exploitation of Bambi and Winnie-the-Pooh, Dump-tember, a tax on football fandom, and Roblox’s staggering scale.

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

• Unique Datasets: Ten publicly available datasets, covering everything from chess games to candy bar rankings.

Trend 1: Sydney Sweeney

Another year, another Sydney Sweeney ad that sends the internet into a tizzy. This past week, a betting app called Novig launched a new marketing campaign featuring the Euphoria star in “near-total undress.” Reactions to the ad have varied widely (to say the least), but the most notable backlash has come from female athletes, who argue that the advertisement hypersexualizes women’s sports.

Much like Sweeney’s 2025 American Eagle “jeans” ad, the new campaign has the actress trending across the interwebs. In fact, since 2022, Sydney Sweeney’s Wikipedia page has seen the second-most traffic of any actor, with her Euphoria co-star Zendaya topping the list.

Upon further inspection, the actress generated more search interest from her Saturday Night Live appearance and controversial ad campaigns than from any movie or television show she has headlined.

Sydney Sweeney’s celebrity could best be described as recursive: she is increasingly famous for being famous, with the attention surrounding her advertisements and public appearances overshadowing her art.

Trend 2: Film Festival Standing Ovations

There will likely be no shortage of discussion and debate surrounding the documentary NAZA over the coming months. If you’re wondering why I’m walking on eggshells when it comes to this film, it’s for a simple reason: it’s about the actions of the Israeli army over the last few years, and it will be extremely polarizing throughout its inevitable awards run. You will see no fewer than five think pieces about this movie before the end of the year, so I’ll focus on an extremely trivial matter instead: film festival standing ovations.

Two weeks ago, NAZA received a 24.5-minute standing ovation following its premiere, the longest such ovation ever recorded at a film festival.

Regardless of movie quality or subject matter, these standing ovations have gone too far (or perhaps, more literally, too long). Since the pandemic, the annual tally of films earning an ovation of four minutes or longer at the Cannes Film Festival has increased considerably, with 20 movies achieving this feat in 2025.

I can’t remember the last time I stood still for ten minutes without being at an airport. While many of the films garnering lengthy standing ovations are worthy of praise, my hot take is that these ovations, and the media circus surrounding them, trivialize the art they’re meant to reward. We’re likely in the midst of a standing-ovation bubble, a strange outgrowth of post-pandemic film culture, and years from now psychologists will study this highly specific phenomenon.

Trend 3: Public Domain Exploitation

Sometimes I’m hard-pressed for pop culture topics to cover, and I think, “Maybe today is the day I run out of ideas.” Then I’ll read about an absurd entertainment trend that reminds me this newsletter could exist for 100 more years (at minimum), because people do the darndest things.

For proof of this phenomenon, look no further than the following three films, all released in the last few months:

1. Pinocchio Unstrung

2. Wuthering Heights: House of the Damned

3. Betty’s Revenge (as in Betty Boop).

All three are horror films built around beloved intellectual property that recently entered the public domain, joining a rapidly growing canon of movies that make up one of the strangest pop culture trends I’ve ever covered.

Read more

Intro: The Internet is “Dead”

There is a burgeoning belief in certain corners of the internet that the internet itself is “dying.” Like any extremely-online theory, this framework began on a message board with a stupid name—in this case, Wizardchan—written by an anonymous internetgoer with an even sillier web handle: Illuminati Pirate.

Mr. Pirate’s post, titled “Dead Internet Theory: Most of the Internet is Fake,” is an anti-government conspiracy theory that conceives of a “Dead Internet” where all major websites are overwhelmed by propagandistic bots in an effort to control the population and reduce human interaction. This was first posed in 2022, months before the launch of ChatGPT.

The following year, generative AI went mainstream, and the Dead Internet concept evolved from a screed against state-sponsored panopticons into an existential anxiety about the rapid growth of AI-generated content. In 2026, the “Dead Internet” is a synthetic projection of humanity, with most of its content generated by LLMs and bots.

Typically, I’m pretty skeptical of any online theory that began on a message board called Wizardchan, so I wanted to investigate claims of the internet’s demise all on my own. How artificial have our digital lives become, and what happens when humanity’s knowledge base is no longer curated by humans?

What Happens When AI Starts Citing Itself?

Long before the Internet (as in 2,450 years ago), there was Plato’s cave. In his book The Republic, Plato hypothesizes a world where humans are held prisoner in a cave and can understand the outside world only through shadows cast on cave walls. One day, a prisoner escapes only to realize that these shadow-like projections offered a distorted representation of authentic human life.

Plato’s cave is almost too tidy an allegory for our digital lives; simply replace the word “cave” with “TikTok” or “Twitter” and the word “shadows” with “fake news” or “AI slop.” Humans are inundated with far too much information, with approximately 4.4 million online articles published each day—basically 4.4 million cave shadows.

As of April 2026, researchers estimate half of this newly published digital content is the product of generative AI, up from 5% in 2022.

Had you shown this to me three years ago, I probably would have said, “Well, that’s bad, but ChatGPT is mostly scraping Wikipedia, so it’s just regurgitating a source I trust.” That was then. After three years of prolific AI slop production, the situation looks very different.

According to a June 2026 study from Graphite, 43% of sources cited by ChatGPT are now LLM-generated—the AI equivalent of a person who loves the sound of their own voice.

Knowledge can now exist in AI-generated silos, synthesized or hallucinated by a chatbot that later regurgitates that hallucination as fact. This raises a rather unsavory brain teaser: If 50% of the internet is now AI-generated, what happens when large language models are trained on their own output? The downstream effect can best be summarized as “garbage in, garbage out,” though the tech industry has dressed the phenomenon up with more technical language: response collapse.

Response collapse stems from two distinct problems, each reinforcing the other.

The first issue is convergence, as models begin generating a narrow range of answers, recycling the same ideas and conclusions in response to similar prompts.

The second problem is degraded model performance for chatbots like Claude and Perplexity, which favor their own output over better human-written answers.

This synthetic drift away from human-curated truth is occurring just as people place more trust in AI-generated summaries and recommendations.

According to a recent study of Google search behavior, 68% of searches now end without a click, as AI-generated blurbs answer a user’s questions before they scroll to the article recommendations below. When an AI summary does appear, that search session is more likely to end there, with the synthesized blurb accepted at face value.

Our shared understanding of capital-T “Truth” was once cultivated by humans; now, that collective knowledge base is being outsourced to AI systems just as people are beginning to trust their outputs almost absent-mindedly.

For now, that may be fine. These chatbots can still trace an answer back to a primary source like Wikipedia. However, several generations from now, ChatGPT may cite an article it produced three years earlier, which cites another AI-generated article from five years earlier, until the chain eventually leads back to something a human once wrote.

The Dead Internet, then, is one where much of what we read, whether a social post or an educational article, is increasingly devoid of humanity: a synthetic projection of something a person wrote years ago, back in the “before times.”

Final Thoughts: LinkedIn, the “Dead-est” Place on the Internet

If you read a high-minded publication like The Atlantic or The New York Times, you’ll find several articles a week about “the end of [insert some liberal principle or societal structure].” Personally, I have read so many of these essays that I’ve developed my own ritual to accompany their consumption:

1. I read the essay, learning of some imminent disaster that is the first step toward some far-off future hellscape.

2. I finish the article.

3. I think to myself, “Well, that’s not going to happen anytime soon. Looks like my children will simply inherit a worse version of planet Earth.”

4. My dissociation complete, I move on with my day.

While finalizing the research for this piece, my instinct was to retreat into the comfort of this mental model. What fun it is to prophesy future disaster, especially when you’re not held accountable for your predictions. But what if response collapse and synthetic knowledge creep are already here? What if this isn’t some far-off future state? What if the Dead Internet is very much alive on LinkedIn? Yes, that’s right—LinkedIn, as in the worst place on the internet that isn’t 4chan.

According to a recent report from the AI detector Pangram, nearly 45% of LinkedIn posts are the product of a large language model.

I found this statistic rather surprising; I assumed the number was actually higher. A platform that unironically cultivates a social experience surrounding work will no doubt be the first social network overtaken by robots. LinkedIn is perhaps the foremost example of AI-knowledge drift:

• From 2003 to 2023: People who were “good” at LinkedIn honed their approach through trial and error, discerning the type of content other users wanted to see and backsolving the platform’s algorithm.

• From 2023 to 2025: Those using ChatGPT and Claude benefited from early adoption. The world rewarded and shared their grindset-mindset content, unaware that these posts were synthetic.

• From 2025 onward: Training data for what constitutes a successful post became overwhelmed by AI-generated content. ChatGPT’s outputs began mimicking LinkedIn’s most successful posts—most of which were generated by LLMs.

• The year 2036: No human has authored a viral LinkedIn post for some time. The content spread across this social network is a photocopy of a photocopy of a time when humans shared their own thoughts on their favorite productivity hacks and workday rituals. LinkedIn will either be unusable because it lacks humanity, or extremely addictive because ChatGPT and Gemini have converged on the optimal formula for LinkedIn posting.

Sure, LinkedIn may avoid this exact future state, but it’s hard to imagine a world where the site isn’t inundated by generative AI. The real question is whether this fate will be unique to LinkedIn and the sterility of the working world: is this platform an exception—because it’s always been the worst—or is LinkedIn simply further along in humanity’s shift away from organic expression?

A site like LinkedIn may well be on its way to “death,” but death doesn’t mean extinction. More likely, the internet will simply be more banal, composed of synthetic projections of personhood that are, paradoxically, extremely pleasing to humans. Platforms like Wizardchan may very well thrive in the Dead Internet age; what will “die” is the humanity that once produced these posts.

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Like movies? Follow me on Letterboxd

Welcome 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: Elizabeth Holmes’ cultural endurance, the Oscar race, the decline of theatrical documentaries, the BBC’s fading reach, Latin music’s post-Super Bowl slump, and The Cat in the Hat’s bizarre AI-fueled resurgence.

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

• Unique Datasets: Ten publicly available datasets, covering everything from Bob Ross paintings to Reddit activity.

Trend 1: Elizabeth Holmes

The following sentence is an alphabet soup of topics bound to stoke intense fascination in pretty much any human being: Nathan Fielder secretly co-directed a three-hour documentary about Elizabeth Holmes’ last 34 days before she was sent to prison. Wowza! Consider my ticket purchased.

Fielder’s documentary, titled You Can See Everything, dropped an extremely unnerving trailer this past week and immediately saw Holmes’ Wikipedia page trend among the site’s Top 100 entries, a feat the disgraced CEO has accomplished in 8 of the last 11 years.

I legitimately thought that popular culture had moved past Holmes’ story. After all the books, podcasts, and shows, I assumed this topic had lost its grip on the zeitgeist.

And then Nathan Fielder came along, tackling a story he was seemingly born to tell.

You Can See Everything is slated for October 16th of this year and would make Holmes one of the most heavily chronicled cultural figures in television and film over the past decade, trailing the likes of Charles Manson, Jeffrey Epstein, and O.J. Simpson—which could be considered “elite company” amongst delinquents.

The world now has high hopes for a theatrically released documentary, which may be the first (and last) time I write this sentence.

Trend 2: The Best Picture Race Heats Up

It’s fall film festival season, a time when studios debut their presumptive Best Picture nominees and when the degenerates who gamble on the Oscars refine their betting strategy.

One of my scorching hot takes is that betting markets will benefit the film industry as the world rediscovers the Academy Awards by way of gambling. If you think this is a “bad take,” I hardly blame you. But the monetary investment in movies’ biggest night is growing exponentially, with prediction markets projected to see $400M in bets for the 2027 ceremony, up from just $4M in 2024.

And who is this year’s favorite (thus far)? The most vanilla pick possible: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which became the frontrunner following its release.

Personally, I think the Oscar race would benefit from ambiguity to better capture the hearts and wallets of its newest viewers—gamblers and finance bros.

Trend 3: The (Alleged) Decline of Documentary Film

Multiple friends have asked me to use my industry connections to gain access to an advance screening of the Nathan Fielder–Elizabeth Holmes documentary. Unfortunately, my ability to fulfill this request is greatly complicated by the fact that I am not a well-connected person. Believe it or not, chartmakers do not sit atop Hollywood’s pecking order.

The sheer magnitude of interest in a theatrically released documentary got me thinking about the state of nonfiction storytelling:

1. When was the last time a documentary was this hotly anticipated?

2. At a macro level, what is the state of documentary film in 2026?

Read more

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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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.

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

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

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*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 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.

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