If you were a ’90s kid, you might remember the craze around little egg-shaped toys with an 8-bit digital screen, displaying an ambiguous pet-thing that demanded food and attention.

Now, on the brand’s 30th anniversary, the Tamagotchi — the Japanese pocket-sized virtual pet that launched a thousand cute and needy tech companions, from Nintendogs to fluffy AI robots — is making a minor comeback.

Looking at Google Trends data, searches for “tamagotchi” spiked in December in the US, up around 80% from just six months prior, with the most search volume in almost two decades.

While the toys are popular Christmas gifts, with interest volumes often seen ticking up in December each year, the sudden interest might also have something to do with the birthday celebrations that creator and manufacturer Bandai Namco are putting on, including a Tokyo exhibition that opened on Wednesday.

Game, set, hatch

More broadly, modern consumers appear to have a growing obsession with collectibles (see: Labubu mania), as well as a taste for nostalgia (see: the iPod revival, among many other trends).

But, having finally hit 100 million sales in September last year, the brand itself is probably just glad to exist, giving a whole new generation the chance to experience the profound grief of an unexpected Tamagotchi death.

The global film industry officially has its second billion-dollar film of the year, as Disney’s “Zootopia 2” surged past the $1 billion box office mark in just 17 days. The other billion-dollar film this year, the live-action “Lilo & Stitch,” was also made by Disney.

“Zootopia” was the fastest to reach 10 figures of any animated film. The animated hit, which had the highest-grossing global debut of the year over Thanksgiving weekend, has benefited from massive numbers in China.

Disney also logged two billion-dollar films last year with “Inside Out 2” and “Moana 2.” (The latter also came out over the Thanksgiving holiday.) The only other film to cross the mark in 2024 was “Deadpool and Wolverine,” which featured Disney’s IP.

If you were asked to name the person who saw the biggest spike in Google searches across 2025, you might plump for a pope, perhaps, or a major political figure. Unless you were one particular Polymarket user, you maybe wouldn’t have put too much money on d4vd, a popular 20-year-old singer who reportedly remains an active suspect in the death of a teen girl.

However, when Google revealed its Year in Search 2025 today — a feature that, importantly, seems to reflect the figures and topics that have seen searches spike from last year, rather than overall search volume — d4vd, whose hits like “Romantic Homicide” and “Here With Me” have racked up billions of Spotify streams, sat atop the “People” section, beating Kendrick Lamar for the top spot.

As people in the business of making charts all day, you could say that we’re pretty au fait with Google Trends data. Even so, we can admit that Polymarket user 0xafEe may be a true savant when it comes to understanding what people are using the search engine for (though there are also allegations that the user is a Google insider or had other access to the information).

In any case, thanks to a series of what are now proving to be very prescient positions on Polymarket’s “#1 Searched Person on Google This Year” market, 0xafEe has made a medium fortune in the last 24 hours. There was a ~$10,600 “yes” position on d4vd himself — now worth more than $200,000 — as well as “no” positions across other candidates for the title, such as Donald Trump, Pope Leo, and Bianca Censori, all of which have profited substantially. All told, 0xafEe made just shy of $1.2 million on the market.

The final season of Netflix’s tentpole franchise “Stranger Things” debuts on the streamer at 8 p.m. ET on Wednesday, and its stock appears to be safely out of the upside down.

Netflix is trading up about 2% on Wednesday, on pace for one of its better days in the past three months. The stock has closed up more than 3% only a dozen times this year.

Potentially boosting investor optimism is a New York Post report from Tuesday evening that the streamer has ramped up its efforts to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. According to the Post, Netflix has made a case to the WBD board that antitrust concerns may not be warranted because Netflix competes not just with other streaming companies but with a larger pool of content providers, such as YouTube and TikTok. If Netflix’s legal team is right, the idea could pave the way for the world’s largest streamer by subscriber count to buy the fourth-largest.

At least one major Hollywood player is rooting against the company in the WBD bidding war. “Titanic” and “Avatar” director James Cameron this week said that Netflix acquiring WBD “would be a disaster.”

Morgan Stanley analysts have also argued that Netflix’s pursuit of these studio and streaming assets was creating headaches for its investors.