TR.BIZ: 2.3.2026
From Markiplier's box office smash to Spain's immigration, this is your early-mid-week check-in ✨
Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Report™. Today, we’re talking YouTubers taking over Hollywood, Nancy Mace’s internet poisoning, Spain’s immigration flexibility, sneaker mocassins, and more.
🤩 Hollyweird Insider: Markiplier’s big day in Hollywood
We talk a lot about how tech has gobbled up the last of Hollywood, but there really hasn’t been a successful example of the creator economy gobbling up the industry itself despite years and years and years of threats that such a thing would happen. But finally: it happened, coming from the likely-but-unlikely world of 2010s creators. Meet Markiplier’s Iron Lung, a sci-fi horror movie by the games and comedy YouTuber based off the video game of the same name — and it took number two at the box office this past weekend, between the new Sam Raimi movie and Oh, Melania!. The movie does not look good, but it is proof that — a decade later — we may be entering the era where creators of a certain size can and will nibble at industry, where the theater becomes a release mechanism for not-docs from creator types. This has been building for some time, given Battle for Dream Island’s selling out theaters in September and items like Shelby Oaks having a breakout via YouTube and the upcoming A24 backrooms movie. Markiplier’s win is an entertainment multi as it positions the creator-as-talent-as-producer-as-director as a key to success that the industry may not want to acknowledge as it means the traditional studio system is dead — and people like Markiplier and their almost 40M subscribers have the same sway as production studio apparatuses. Does that mean Mr. Beast should leave Amazon? Probably, but it also proves what Taylor has been doing for years now: theaters are a part of a release strategy that is now divorced from traditional movies, becoming a pay-to-play space that no longer bows to the studio system. Things are about to get very interesting.
👀 Trend Watchers, I: Events that do too much
This has been percolating for some time but there’s a trend of live events (from NYC) that are a grab-bag of ideas all pressed into one: from “wrestling speed dating” to “dodgeball open mic,” “interactive musical theater karaoke” to “sober morning sauna raves,” it appears that the “future” of events is stacking ideas atop of each other, balancing them in a way that should collapse but likely won’t. Or will it? Unsure, but we can look at the bathhouse as the scene of the crime: with “bathing experiments” and “show saunas” and “sauna raves” and “bathhouse readings,” the formula seems to be taking an idea of leisure and play (dodgeball, karaoke) and forcing it with an unlikely mate (rave, dating) to create a memorable experience that requires out-of-comfort-zone vibes from the jump. This seems like an over correction from the early 2020’s stay-in-alone culture, but also seems to be in response to people continuing to do nothing. What event mash up will we think of next?
👀 Trend Watchers, II: Internet poisoned public figures
I’ve been having a feeling that there are many people around us who are experiencing something I call “internet poisoning,” which isn’t AI psychosis but is a related type of behavior tied to positioning your life to the real-and-not cameras around you. This is not new, but stories of this poisoning seems to be surfacing: see the GOP’s Nancy Mace, the subject of repeated exposes of her mania — and I’d argue it’s internet poisoning. From a new Intelligencer story —
