6 Culture Trends Worth Watching: Netflix's Decline, America's Royal Wedding, GTA 6, and More

A data-driven look at Obsession's astounding box office, a Metallica–Taylor Swift feud, TikTok's livestreaming ambitions, and more—plus recommended reads and datasets.

Welcome back to the Monday Roundup

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

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

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

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In Today’s Roundup:

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

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

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

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Trend 1: Netflix’s No-Good Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trend 2: The Obsession Obsession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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