Numlock News: February 2, 2026 • Supereruptions, Lost Treasure, 8K

Feb 02, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Box Office

It was a great weekend at the box office as Sam Raimi’s Send Help made $20 million domestically in addition to another $8 million overseas. It’s a great start for the Misery-meets-Castaway-meets-Horrible Bosses movie, and the Rachel McAdams movie is expected to maintain momentum. Also putting up impressive numbers was Iron Lung, which was an independent release written, directed and financed by Markiplier, who came to notoriety on YouTube. That made $17.8 million on a $3 million budget. There was one big breakout in the documentary space, though: The Moment, a mockumentary by Charli XCX from A24 put up blockbuster numbers, averaging a phenomenal $106,985 per screen in its four-screen first limited release.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Loot

Divers last summer found 1,051 silver and five gold coins from a wreck off the coast of Florida on the Treasure Coast. In 1715, 11 ships from the Spanish flotilla sank there, filled with what would today be $400 million in gold, silver and gems. Treasure hunters have been searching for the money ever since, and this cache — worth about $1 million — is the biggest find in decades. Naturally, this has all parties involved rather excited; Florida gets 20 percent of whatever’s found off its coasts, historians are worried that what treasure hunters typically count as loot would otherwise be considered artifacts and even the Spaniards may have a since at least two of the vessels were Spanish warships.

Constanza Ontiveros Valdés, The Art Newspaper

Streaming

The Nielsen data is in for the week of December 29 to January 4, and Stranger Things put up 8.65 billion minutes of viewing for the week of its finale — the single largest single-week total of any show on streaming since the inception of Nielsen’s coverage in 2020. It beats the 8.46 billion minutes held by Stranger Things in the first week of its final season’s release in November, and means that the program has locked up the four best weekly totals ever for a show.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter

8K

Television companies have quietly given up on pushing 8K televisions, in recognition that consumers generally seem to consider 4K televisions more than sufficient for their needs, and virtually no native 8K content is even made available. The first 8K television prototype to debut at CES was all the way back in 2012, and came from Sharp. It wasn’t until 2018 that Samsung released the first 8K televisions, going for $3,500 in the United States. Last week, it was reported that LG Display is cutting off production of 8K LCD or OLED panels, meaning that the first and only company with an 8K OLED TV display has pulled out of the business. As of September 2024, there were one billion 4K televisions sold; by comparison, only 1.6 million 8K televisions have sold since 2015, peaking in 2022.

Scharon Harding, Ars Technica

K-Pop

While K-Pop was in a bit of a period of turmoil over the past few years — top groups in flux, a rapid ascent on the world stage leading to inevitable slowed growth — it’s doing superbly well on the live scene. According to the year-end Boxscore charts for 2024, K-pop accounted for fully 7.7 percent of revenues for the top 100 tours, counting four acts among the top 40 highest-grossing tours. In the third quarter alone, K-pop concert revenue was up 231 percent year over year, hitting $176.8 million.

David L. Lee, Nikkei Asia

Vapes

Mexico had a market for vapes worth $1.5 billion, but in January, the sale of electronic cigarettes was banned in the country. The problem, though, is that when something is made illegal, it can often lead to the formation of a black market. Unfortunately, there is a rather sophisticated organized crime establishment in Mexico, one which is indeed incredibly well-suited to the distribution of illicit pharmaceuticals. There’s now a concern that the drug cartels will simply sweep in and roll up the business. This is not simple speculation: cartels have abducted employees of vape stores and suppliers in the past in order to take on the businesses.

María Verza, The Associated Press

Supereruptions

A new study published in Geology identified landlocked traces of two enormous volcanic eruptions — one that took place about 232 million years ago, another 210 million years ago — on the Tibetan Plateau, remnants of what was once the sea floor. The possibility of previously unidentified supereruptions, including a possible third major eruption in the ocean that preceded the Pacific about 249 million years ago, is especially interesting because there could be as many as 160 extinction events over the past 500 million years caused by these “ghost” undersea supereruptions.

James Dinneen, Science

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