Why did chess just get a sudden increase in popularity

probably alot of reasons besides the movie and covid. alot of people out of the labor force and underemployed or/and stuck in a mind numbing job beneath their education level. doubt it is because of a dream of being a grandmaster. from my research besides the top 20 or so grandmasters, the average income of a  gm is only 3000-4000 usd a month and that is mostly from giving lessons.

Side effects of corona virus, people who get infected seem to develop a liking for chess and other time wasting activities

I agree with what @acorn1954 and others have said. There are thousands of smart people that have downshifted out of hard stressful jobs due to the pandemic. Then chess got some publicity from television and a recent scandal. After which, I think some of these people decided to play chess.

The site has been experiencing higher than normal traffic for the past month and increases in registrations. Something certainly is driving an increase now as well.

A possible contributing factor: a streamed chess boxing event was held in L.A. circa five weeks ago and has today racked up circa 3.7 million views on YouTube.

Probably just that dumb queen gambit show

Gotham Chess and mittens

Also Andrew Tate…

Nelson Lopez (Chess Vibes)

btw, GothamChess' real name is Levy Rozman.

Many people are saying queen's gambit has gotten it popular. Over the years with covid and lockdown chess was probably one of the only things you could've done. Who knows the real reason though.

I think the sudden change in popularity in chess is the combination of football (soccer) players like ronaldo in the louis viton photo shoot with the chess board camanpane and the new update of chess.com with the new bot mittons and all the other cat bots

That is right, there is a whole bunch of videos on youtube called "tate destroys piers morgan at chess" and most of them have over 1 million views.