TR.BIZ: 6.2.2026
From a drag trademark scandal to a drag AI scandal, 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 Pattie Gonia versus Patagonia, RuPaul’s terrible love of AI, how AI is killing the (white) girlboss, and why 67 is a delightful universal symbol.
🏛️ Politicultural: What do we make of Pattie Gonia versus Patagonia?
I’m not sure what there is to say about environmentalist drag queen Pattie Gonia versus activewear brand Patagonia that hasn’t been said, but I do think this is coming to represent a lot of our multiple manias. Here’s the backstory, for the unfamiliar: at the beginning of the year, Patagonia sent a legal order for Pattie Gonia to stop using their likeness as it violated their trademark, in a lawsuit that was for $1, which kept Pattie Gonia quiet until last week, when she shared a video explaining that the whole situation was meant to silence her and her activism and that the lawsuit would result in her paying for the brand’s millions in legal fees, which pushed Patagonia into a social silence due to high volumes of hate, which just broke yesterday for them to reiterate their position. This is what it is, but it is going sour for everyone as hoards are calling for a boycott of Patagonia in support of Pattie Gonia, all as a growing wave of people speak up to say Pattie Gonia is indeed in the trademark wrong. Mind you: we’re talking about an environmentalist literal corporation (Bleh.) and an environmentalist drag queen (Yay!), apples and oranges but both fruits of different sizes. In times like these, when the planet is literally melting down as we are in day two of Pride season, I’m not sure all this energy is worth much of anything: it’s all very, very stupid, the liberal environmentalist queer edition of the long-winded Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively saga that ended up burning both of them. Wrap it up.
🤩 Hollyweird Insider, I: Another win for the YouTube auteur
In case you missed it, Backrooms killed at the box office, becoming the best opening for an A24 film. But this didn’t happen in a vacuum as the film was closely followed by the success of the movie Obsession, another movie small budget horror movie that performed in an outsized way. The lesson here is multi-tiered, in that horror still rules but also that novelty — New talent! New ideas! — are needed now more than ever as both of these movies are by YouTubers turned filmmakers. This exact subject was discussed at length in the last Trend Report: Trend Report™, as it was a huge theme of Q1 that is certainly playing out in ways literally anticipated: YouTube talent is becoming the talent as Hollywood fades, not because they’re YouTubers (Which is the wrong lesson Hollywood will learn.) but that they represent experts with visions that have long gone unseen by the powers that be, who require no money to develop or build fanbases for because they did the work themselves. This conversation was couched around how a season of change is coming for industries like Hollywood, which I pinned to Markiplier’s box office breakthrough. Here’s what I wrote —
Markiplier’s major movie debut with Iron Lung illustrated how creators can work around and through Hollywood to succeed; the trailer for Backrooms posited that YouTube and TikTok is now the film school of the world; and Vanity Fair’s “new late night” story with social stars cast aside traditional media for a new system (despite the failures of Jake Shane). None of this is to mention the cancelling of an entire Bachelorette season, the tepid reaction to the new Harry Potter, and the Ellisons ostensibly winning Warner Brothers — all of which suggest something being very off with the sauce.
New talent, it seems, is exactly that: new — and people want new things in a time where everything feels stuffy, as old guards and old systems squeeze us. Will Hollywood move fast enough before such talent make their own universes on places like YouTube, or take bigger money from more stable entities? Likely, but know that the industry — like many — are already too far behind, as these creators have built their own robust universes within gaming and social media. Hollywood is going to be pleading, on hands and knees, now that it’s losing itself and select creators will take the bait to build their brand in the same way gaming brands (Minecraft, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Nintendo) have done because they understand a step toward legacy building, albeit a corroded and crumbling step up. As in the end of many a horror movie, do you offer the villain mercy as they die? Or do you let it fall, so that it doesn’t come back to haunt you? We’ll learn that answer very soon.
🤩 Hollyweird Insider, II: AI movies are homophobic, RuPaul
