Netflix's Decline, America's Royal Wedding, GTA 6, and More

TREND 1 / STREAMING / TV

Netflix’s No-Good Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

TREND 2 / MOVIES / BOX OFFICE

The Obsession Obsession

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

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

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

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

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

TREND 3 / MUSIC / CELEBRITY

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

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

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

Polymarket and Kalshi saw so much interest in the lead-up to the festivities that they created standalone Swift-wedding sections within their platforms, allowing users to bet on the bridesmaids, the ceremony location, the guest list, and other curiosities that are more exciting than putting money in your 401(k).

Because everything Swift does is so widely covered, her ubiquity inevitably prompted backlash—which brings us, naturally, to Metallica. Didn’t think you’d see Taylor Swift and Metallica in the same sentence today, did you?

Over the past few weeks, the only artist more discussed on Reddit than Taylor Swift has been Metallica.

Why? Because Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett does not care for Swift, a position he made known by wearing a shirt that read, “Taylor Swift is a CIA psyop.”

That shirt is now available on eBay, meaning you can purchase it with your Taylor Swift prediction-market winnings.

TREND 4 / INTERNET CULTURE / TIKTOK

TikTok Wants to Do It Live

I’ve been tracking TikTok’s top hashtags for about three months, and despite the rapid churn of the digital zeitgeist, one hashtag has remained prominent throughout: #GoLiveGrowFast.

I don’t use TikTok—not because I’m better than you, but because I tried it, recognized its dopamine-warping powers, and deleted it from my phone out of self-preservation. So, because I’m not actually on the platform, I had to investigate its most popular hashtags like a true narc.

My finding: TikTok really, really wants its users to “Go Live.”

#GoLiveGrowFast is the public-facing hashtag for this campaign, in which creators can encourage other TikTok users to, well, go live and (maybe) grow fast.

Right now, TikTok appears to be in the middle of a platform-wide promotional campaign in which major creators are being rewarded with digital diamonds—TikTok’s in-app creator currency—for evangelizing the wonders of livestreaming.

If I can be old and cranky for a minute: I do not understand how watching people directly address their phones in real time has become so addictive. Perhaps “production value” is an antiquated concept. Or perhaps I’ll never know, because I am too afraid to use the app in the first place.

TREND 5 / GAMING / VIDEO GAMES

Grand Theft Auto Is Making Billions Legally

Grand Theft Auto is currently responsible for a top-trending hashtag on TikTok and the most-watched trailer on YouTube (because video games also have trailers, FYI).

I’m no genius, but I think something may be going on with Grand Theft Auto. 🤔

Indeed, the long-delayed Grand Theft Auto 6 went on pre-sale in late June, selling an estimated 40 million units in less than an hour. Believe it or not, if sales were discontinued after that single hour of pre-sales, Grand Theft Auto would still qualify as the 19th best-selling video game of all time.

Estimates for overall sales vary widely, ranging from 70M to 450M units, so it’s entirely plausible that these projections were produced by a random number generator. Still, the low end of this range would make Grand Theft Auto 6 one of the 10 highest-selling video games of all time.

So if you have a teenage nephew and want to buy them a present that will thoroughly piss off their parents, look no further.

TREND 6 / INTERNET CULTURE / WIKIPEDIA

Anna’s Archive—Wikipedia’s Most Persistent Page

There is a Wikipedia page for something called Anna’s Archive that has trended amongst the site’s Top 100 entries for more days than Donald Trump, the United States, and YouTube. In fact, the only page outpacing Anna’s Archive is ChatGPT.

All this data raises a rather obvious question: What is Anna’s Archive?

After thoroughly researching this phenomenon, I now realize that I am providing free marketing for something that is overwhelmingly illegal. But, whatever, here you go: Anna’s Archive is commonly described as a “shadow library of all books in existence.” The site’s mission is to catalog humanity’s written works and make them freely accessible.

At first, this sounds noble, like a beloved public library. Except this public library does not require a library card or money and deliberately violates copyright law.

The project’s initial focus was on preservation, but that’s not how it’s being used. What has followed is a long-running game of whack-a-mole: the site is decommissioned, then springs up under a new domain, and is decommissioned once more, and so on.

If you go to the Anna’s Archive subreddit, it’s essentially a series of posts asking where to find the site, with the topmost answer always remaining the same: check Wikipedia.

Apparently, Wikipedia is continually updated with the most functional site domain for Anna’s Archive, which explains the page’s persistent web traffic.

Recommended Reads

📖 Curated Data Journalism

• A data-rich look at how America’s 1926 anxieties echo today’s. [Derek Thompson]
• The economics behind Love Island’s romantic chaos. [Monday Morning Economist]
• An interactive guide to how synthesizers turn simple math into music. [Per Thirty Six]
• A painstakingly visualized data deep dive into every episode of Seinfeld. [Visualising Data]
• An interactive map of every goal scored at the 2026 World Cup. [Ahmed Maher]
• A data-driven look at why Diane Warren keeps getting Oscar nominations—but never wins. [Numlock Awards]

🎭 Notable Culture Reads

• A cross-country dispatch from 58 movie theaters fighting to survive shrinking theatrical windows and post-COVID moviegoing habits. [The Ankler]
• Inside China’s fast-growing, algorithm-driven micro-drama industry. [The Dial]
• How Stephen Root became Hollywood’s greatest character actor. [Rolling Stone]
• Why Costco’s low-tech, limited-choice retail model may offer a better blueprint than Amazon’s everything-store. [Phenomenal World]
• A satirical guide to the dubious financial logic behind the AI boom. [McSweeney’s]
• How fake private-jet influencers make money online. [404 Media]

Datasets

🔢 Unique Datasets

• Billboard Hot 100 Tracks (1957-Present)
• Wikipedia Full Plot Summaries + IMDb Ratings
• A Scrape of Song Lyrics (1940-2022) Compiled by the Site Genius
• Long-running Record of YouTube Trending Videos (Updated Daily)
• Weekly Curated Dataset of Publicly Available Fake News Articles With Metadata
• Cross-Verified Global Biographical Database: 2.29 Million Notable People, 3500 BC–2018 AD
• World Values Survey: Global Survey Data Capturing Cultural Values, Beliefs, Attitudes, And Sociopolitical Preferences by Country
• Global Historical Population Estimates From One Million BC To 1990
• Stack Overflow Developer Survey: Annual Developer Insights Covering Technologies, Salaries, Demographics, Preferences, And Work Patterns
• Global Hourly Weather Forecasts And Historical Weather Time-Series From 1940 Onward (Updates Weekly)

Have Thoughts or Feedback?

Have thoughts on how to make the Monday Roundup better? Send ideas or feedback to daniel@statsignificant.com.