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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trend 2: Social Media’s AI-Slop Crackdown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trend 3: Are CDs “So Back”?

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

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

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

Read more

Intro: The Tale of Two Super Mario Movies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts: Jangling Keys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Welcome back to the Monday Roundup!

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

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

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

In Today’s Roundup:

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

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

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

Trend 1: The End of The Simpsons?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trend 2: The Return of Myspace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

Intro: From One Option to Many Subscriptions

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

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

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

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

How Streaming Regressed Into Cable TV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts: What’s the Upside?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Like movies? Follow me on Letterboxd

Welcome back to the Monday Roundup!

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

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

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

In Today’s Roundup:

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

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

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

Trend 1: Spotify’s AI Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trend 2: The Franchise Flywheel (on Streaming)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

Intro: Adam Sandler, Small-Screen Star

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rise of the Streaming Movie Star

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts: The Evolution of the B-Movie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Welcome back to the Monday Roundup!

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

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

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

In Today’s Roundup:

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

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

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

Trend 1: Anime’s Global Domination

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trend 2: The Netflix Afterlife Phenomenon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trend 3: YouTube Loves Latin Music

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

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

Read more

Intro: The Peak of Peaks

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rise of TV’s Slop Era

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, to recap:

• New TV show volume increased.

• The price tag of this programming also increased.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts: Consider the Maximizer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• 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.

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Welcome back to the Monday Roundup!

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

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

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

In Today’s Roundup:

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

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

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

Trend 1: A Madonna Renaissance

Somehow, two things are true:

1. Madonna is back in the zeitgeist.

2. The year is 2026.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trend 2: Entertainment Industry Layoffs

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trend 3: Do the Emmys Matter?

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

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

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

Read more

Intro: From Hardware to Hard-Pressed

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

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

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

Apple TV+: Prestige Darling, Streaming Loser

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts: Don’t We Want This?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paying subscribers get:

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

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

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

Upgrade to Paid

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

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

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Like movies? Follow me on Letterboxd

Welcome back to the Monday Roundup!

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

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

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

In Today’s Roundup:

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

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

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

Trend 1: A James Bond Drought

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trend 2: Is Music Getting Softer?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more