THE MONDAY ROUNDUP SAMPLE EDITION
6 Culture Trends: Sydney Sweeney, Bambi, the NFL, Roblox, and More
A data-driven look at Sydney Sweeney backlash, film festival standing ovations, NFL fandom exploitation, and Roblox’s massive success—plus recommended reads and datasets.
TREND 1 CELEBRITY / ATTENTION
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 MOVIES / FESTIVALS
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 MOVIES / HORROR
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:
- Pinocchio Unstrung
- Wuthering Heights: House of the Damned
- 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.
Despite Disney’s best efforts, several beloved animated characters have slipped into the public domain over the past five years, including Mickey Mouse, Popeye, and Winnie-the-Pooh.
Filmmakers have met these expiring IP protections with Disney’s worst nightmare, taking these iconic children’s characters and casting them in low-budget horror films, usually as murderous villains. This emerging subgenre includes Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, Bambi: The Reckoning, and The Death of Snow White.
Often, these films are released within hours of a character entering the public domain, as indie directors race to debut competing films about Bambi’s burgeoning bloodlust.
TREND 4 MOVIES & MUSIC / SEASONALITY
Dump-tember
Truth be told, I’ve had a difficult time finding topics to write about this week, so much so that I decided to investigate cultural stagnation by time of year, which leads me to Dump-tember.
In a perfect world where cinema is free of commercial expectation, art would simply exist, released at any time of year. However, that is not the world we live in.
Put simply, marquee movie releases are funneled into two distinct periods:
- The Summer: Family-oriented blockbusters tend to rise between May and July, when kids are out of school.
- The Holidays: The end of the year sees another uptick in blockbuster releases for holiday moviegoers, paired with an onslaught of smaller prestige films looking to snag Oscar nominations.
September sits between those two periods and serves as a dumping ground for low-grossing releases.
Similarly, music streaming activity dips during this same period.
Why do people temper their culture consumption during this one month? Are movies and music simply worse, or are people less willing to enjoy the arts?
The short answer is a bit of both. The strongest predictors of when people listen to music or buy movie tickets are decidedly mundane: work and vacation.
August and September see an uptick in travel; then the kids go back to school, and so we adults must catch up on our work, leaving little room for joy. After all, GDP must go up. And thus, Dump-tember is born.
TREND 5 SPORTS / STREAMING
A Football Fandom Tax
American football is back! For the next six months, the collective productivity of an entire nation will tank as we give our Sundays to the NFL and our make-believe fantasy teams. To an outsider, I’m sure this sounds stupid (and that person would be correct!), but that doesn’t mean it’s not awesome.
Over the past week, my trend-tracking dashboards have been inundated with NFL content. Close to 50% of trending Google searches are football-related, while #NFL is the most popular TikTok hashtag by orders of magnitude.
Football is the most beloved entertainment property in the United States by a wide margin, and that has led to widespread financial exploitation of the sport’s rabid fanbase (myself included). Most major streamers pay handsomely for exclusive NFL broadcasting rights, meaning hardcore fans can only access certain games by signing up for smaller streaming services like Fox One, NFL+, or Peacock.
In fact, watching every single game this season would cost an estimated $714, the equivalent of 55 Chipotle burritos (with guac).
Ask most football fans whether forsaking dozens of Chipotle burritos to watch a vicious gladiator sport is worth it, and they will respond with a resounding “yes.” Years from now, economists will study the mass exploitation of football fandom, particularly how we forked over our hard-earned cash to a streaming service called “Fox One” to watch a last-place showdown between the Cleveland Browns and Miami Dolphins.
TREND 6 GAMING / INTERNET CULTURE
Pop Culture’s Single Biggest Property Is…Roblox?
The biggest thing in popular culture is Roblox. This is not an exaggeration, I assure you. For those unfamiliar, Roblox is an online platform where users can create and play millions of community-crafted games, ranging from obstacle courses and role-playing games to shooters and social hangouts. Imagine if The Sims, LEGO, and Second Life had a baby, and you pretty much get Roblox.
There are endless ways to quantify the popularity of this gaming juggernaut, but I’ll start by putting the platform’s scale into perspective. In 2025, Roblox users spent 123 billion hours on the platform, nearly 66% of the time Netflix’s entire global subscriber base spent watching hundreds of different programs.
Yet Roblox’s cultural impact goes far beyond gameplay. Videos of people using the app are just as popular as the platform itself, with Roblox being the most frequently covered topic among YouTube trending videos.
And Roblox’s growth shows no sign of slowing, with user engagement nearly doubling from 2024 to 2025.
After perusing this data, you can be the judge: is there any pop culture phenomenon that surpasses Roblox?
Recommended Reads
📖 Curated Data Journalism
- How American Idol and The Voice lost their ability to create pop stars. [Can’t Get Much Higher]
- Tool for comparing what your life might look like if you were born in another country. [If It Were My Home]
- It’s surprisingly hard to know how dangerous e-bikes and e-scooters actually are. [USAFacts]
- Immersive, real-time recreation of 9/11 events using synced TV, radio, flight data, and the early web. [9/11 Realtime]
- Who owns, funds, and controls the world’s biggest film festivals. [Stephen Follows]
🎭 Notable Culture Reads
- AI agents are making the internet more annoying, from spam to scams. [404 Media]
- How food delivery made eating more convenient and increasingly solitary. [Longreads]
- How Backrooms tapped into our ancient fear of the unknowable. [The Point]
- Why a standard day doesn’t actually last 24 hours. [Big Think]
- How group chats keep far-flung friendships alive. [The New Yorker]
Datasets
🔢 Unique Datasets
- Global Internet Speed Dataset by Country
- OpenSubtitles Massive Dataset of Film and TV Subtitles
- Open Database Of Millions Of Online Chess Games
- A Comprehensive Database of Bigfoot Sightings
- FiveThirtyEight’s Candy Power Rankings Dataset
- Global Database of Political Apologies By State Leaders Worldwide (1947-2022)
- U.S. Baby Names Database: Annual National Baby Name Records
- GroceryDB: Comprehensive Database Of 50,000+ US Grocery Items
- The World’s Largest Open Database of Cell Towers
- Dataset Detailing External Fact Citations for Wikipedia Articles
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