Numlock News: February 17, 2026 • Pikachu, Bonbon, Beast Games

Feb 17, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Heights

“Wuthering Heights” pulled in a solid $38 million domestically and an impressive $45 million overseas over the Valentine’s Day and Presidents’ Day weekend. The Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi adaptation of the Emily Brontë novel did especially well among women, who made up 75 percent of the viewers on opening weekend. Outperforming expectations, though, was GOAT, an animated kids movie which made $35 million, good for the best opening for an original animated film since Elemental.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Pikachu

Internet personality Logan Paul of the estimable Paul family sold his PSA 10 Pokémon Pikachu Illustrator trading card at auction for a record $16.49 million. It immediately provoked discussions about the provenance of the card and its relationship to a since-imploded platform called Liquid Marketplace. The card, with a PSA identification number #23000982, was previously listed by Liquid Marketplace in July 2022 for fractional ownership, which led to a complicated ownership saga that culminated in the exchange eventually shutting down. It was revived by Logan Paul so users could withdraw funds, only to now be the subject of an ongoing legal dispute involving the Ontario Securities Commission, alleging “multi-layered fraud in the crypto asset sector.”

Cory Plante, Polygon

Bonbon

Bonbon Drop is a line of stickers that has caused a frenzy in Japan, leading some retailers to halt sales as they deal with the chaos surrounding the drop, as well as counterfeits and a booming secondary market. First released in 2024 by Bandai Namco subsidiary, Sun-Star Stationery, over 15 million sheets of the stickers have been sold so far, going for 550 yen (US$3.60) per sheet of 40 or so stickers. The economies of collectables being what they are, it has become a sensation since some stickers are considered vastly more valuable than others. Already, resellers are listing stickers —in one case, 27 sheets for 330,000 yen (more than US$2,100).

Nikkei Asia

Beast Games

The second season of the game show from YouTuber MrBeast appears to be seriously underperforming compared to season one, as well as many other shows on Amazon. The first week of season two saw 7.0 million hours viewed, which was a hair over the 6.8 million logged by season one. The issue, though, is that Beast Games managed to hang on the Nielsen chart for four weeks in its first season, building slightly on that initial turnout even. By week two of its second season, though, Beast Games fell off the chart. Worse still, Beast Games is pulling the kind of numbers shared by other shows on Prime Video that were canned after their second season, such as Good Omens and Outer Range.

Entertainment Strategy Guy

Bodice Rippers

Harlequin, the mass-market romance novel publisher, announced that it’s folding its historical romance line, Harlequin Historical, in 2027. Launched in 1988, Harlequin Historical is one of the longest-running series for the publisher. Given the success of shows like Bridgerton and the overall health of the genre, one would assume that this line would be a leader compared to Harlequin’s other 13 lines. But indeed, it turns out that the core consumers of historical romance are now getting their romance not from grocery store paperbacks but rather from ebooks and fan sites. While programming in the historical romance genre has been a hit, that has not necessarily led to a commensurate increase in book sales. Plus, with romantasy topping the charts, if you want to read about someone who gets seduced by a guy with a sword, there’s no need to confine one’s desires to the actual historical setting of actual England in actual fifteen-plaguey-six AD, forced to wonder what precise kinds of cargoes Lord Himbeaux earned his fortune from.

Sam Spratford, Publishers Weekly

The First Of Them

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are threadlike fungi that grow inside the plant roots of about 75 percent of plant species around the world. It’s a symbiotic relationship, with the fungi providing up to 50 percent of the nutrient and water supply in exchange for carbon, which it uses to reproduce. A new study conducted in the Rocky Mountains grasslands looked at plots that have been warmed by two degrees using suspended heaters for three decades. Researchers were seeking to simulate conditions that may soon occur in much of the planet as a result of climate change. In the study, arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi declined, accounting for 0.7 percent of the control plot and just 0.4 percent in the warmed plots. However, the decomposer fungi, which don’t help plants grow, rose from 35 percent to 39 percent. This was accompanied by declines in grasses and flowering plants, and an increase in shrubs.

Stephanie Kivlin, Aimee Classen and Lara A. Souza, The Conversation

Tanker

In the kind of boring but important news bulletin that you’d typically hear at the beginning of, say, a James Bond movie, a mysterious group of wealthy shipping tycoons is buying up the oil supertankers. A Seoul-based firm has bought about 120 very large crude carriers over the past month or two, a position so large that it’s unprecedented. The final buyer is believed to be an entity linked to an Italian shipping magnate, and the relationship between the two is unclear. What is clear, though, is that they bought a whole lot of oil tankers. It’s effectively 15 percent of the total non-sanctioned tanker fleet, and of the big boats, the tycoons effectively control one-third of the VLCC global fleet. The market has been spooked, and the cost of freight has jumped: VLCCs can haul two million barrels of oil and now cost $120,000 per day, up fourfold since before the buying spree.

Alex Longley, Weilun Soon and Alaric Nightingale, Bloomberg

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