Excellent ... ‘The Simpsons Movie’ sequel is finally happening

Hello, Popculturology readers. Welcome to the Friday newsletter. Hopefully you’re having a better week than those chumps who tried to convince the world that we should accept an AI-generated “actress.” (And the poor woman who the AI actress somehow looks exactly like …)

”A few small beers”

I gotta be honest with you all, I did not see One Battle After Another becoming the sensation that it is. The trailers didn’t speak to me. (To be fair, those trailers were more about vibes than story.) But after seeing a bunch of pop culture writers I respect rave about One Battle After Another, having coworkers ask if I saw the latest film from director Paul Thomas Anderson and watching the movie score the No. 1 spot at the box office last weekend, I rectified this error on Thursday night.

All of these people were correct. One Battle After Another is fantastic.

I love that Leonardo DiCaprio has decided that he’s just going to play weirdos during this stage of his career. One Battle After Another is almost three hours long, but the movie rips thanks to DiCaprio’s constant skittering.

Sean Penn isn’t normally my thing, but watching him play a defective military officer desperate to join — and I’m not making this up — the secretive Christmas Adventures Club was absolutely worth the price of a ticket. Everyone in One Battle After Another kills it, especially Chase Infiniti, who has the coolest name you’ll ever see in a bunch of movie credits.

Now, in honor of Benicio del Toro, I’m going to have a few small beers and wrap up this edition of Popculturology.

• 📖 Who Cares If One Battle After Another Loses Some Money? (Jason Bailey, Bloomberg): “Only Zaslav knows how much that perception played into his decision to green-light the fairly pricy One Battle After Another, but it certainly wasn’t the only factor. There’s also the star power of DiCaprio. He is one of the few genuine movie stars left, and typically guarantees critical and commercial success.”

Programming note

Popculturology will be off Friday, Oct. 10. The newsletter will return the following week.

BOOK NOOK

Here’s what I’ve been reading this week …

• Dragon Teeth (Michael Crichton)
• Miracles and Wonder (Elaine Pagels)

NEWS, NOTES & TRAILERS

The Simpsons Movie: Part D’oh!

If you weren’t paying attention to this kind of thing back in 2007, The Simpsons Movie was a big deal. The long-running animated series (even back then, it had been around for a long time) making the jump to the big screen was something that Simpsons fans had been waiting for. The Simpsons Movie opened with a $74 million weekend in North America on the way to grossing more than $527 million worldwide.

And Spider-Pig became a pop culture icon.

And, as promised by one Simpsons chalkboard gag, a second Simpsons movie will now hit theaters less than twenty years after the first one. Barely.

20th Century Studios announced this week that The Simpsons Movie 2 will open on July 23, 2027 — two days shy of the twentieth anniversary of its predecessor’s July 21, 2007, release date.