Sherwood News

Adult fiction titles are booming, thanks to BookTok

It Ends With Us is the latest big screen adaptation to make millions at the box office

8/12/24 10:46AM

This weekend was a big win for one Hollywood power couple, as Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool & Wolverine surpassed $1 billion at the global box office, and Blake Lively’s big screen adaptation of romance-drama novel It Ends With Us achieved a $50 million debut. Perhaps the only person with more to celebrate than the Reynolds-Lively household, though, is the author of the book that inspired the latter movie: Colleen Hoover.

While the 44-year-old Texan first self-published back in 2012, her books have exploded in popularity since 2020. According to Circana BookScan via Vox, Hoover’s titles have now sold almost 30 million in-print copies; in 2022, she held 6 of the top 10 spots in the NYT paperback fiction list, outselling the Bible that year; and It Ends With Us has been a NYT bestseller for over 132 weeks, currently standing at No.1 for combined print & e-book fiction despite being published 8 years ago.

Page-turning

Indeed, Hoover’s meteoric rise has coincided with the ‘BookTok’ boom. During the pandemic, a global community of readers and authors converged on video sharing app TikTok to discuss their favorite titles, offer recommendations, and post reactions to viral novels, giving rise to major author success stories like Hoover, Sarah J Maas, and Taylor Jenkins Reid, among others.

Cut to present, and the #BookTok hashtag has garnered over 35.6 million posts, and counted more than 200 billion total views on the app at the end of last year. Zoom out, and you can even see a broader jump in the popularity of young adult fiction (+50%) and adult fiction (+42%) titles — BookTok’s bread and butter — relative to pre-pandemic 2018, per Circana research on the US book industry; meanwhile, nonfiction titles have seen a slight slump over the same period.

Millie Giles1/9/26

Tamagotchis are making a comeback, 3 decades after first becoming a global toy craze

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.

Tamagotchi Google Search Trends — Sherwood News

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.

Millie Giles

PANDORA’S BOX OFFICE

1/5/26

“Avatar: Fire and Ash” surpasses $1 billion globally after 18 days

James Cameron is now the first director in history to have four consecutive movies gross over a billion dollars.

$5.6B

Max Knoblauch12/23/25

Disney could be well on its way to its third billion-dollar film of the year following a $345 million opening weekend for “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” The film’s opening gross puts the “Avatar” franchise’s total box office earnings at $5.6 billion — and counting.

The latest film, the second “Avatar” entry under Disney’s tent, earned about 75% of its total box office gross internationally — in line with previous movies in the (as of now) trilogy. Domestically, this one earned $88 million, falling short of expectations.

“Fire and Ash” was the widest Imax release ever, debuting on 1,703 screens globally and earning $43.6 million through the format. The $345 million “Fire and Ash” opening weekend was the second-highest of 2025, behind Disney’s “Zootopia 2,” which recently passed the $1 billion mark, globally.

Year to date, Disney has earned $5.8 billion globally at the box office.