Sometimes you gotta call it quits

Hey there, Popculturology readers. Welcome to the Friday edition of the newsletter.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around Disney’s live-action Lilo & Stitch remake pulling in a whopping $182.6 million over the four-day Memorial Day weekend. People seem to hate the new ending, but you can’t argue with the film’s financial success. A weekend this big is going to encourage Disney to keep going with the live-action remakes — even if the real story here was that people just wanted a new Lilo & Stitch movie.

• 📖 Lilo & Stitch and the Power of Zillennial Nostalgia at the Movie Theater (Mia Galuppo, The Hollywood Reporter): “Released in 2002, Lilo came after the second golden age of Disney animation (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast) when the animated movies out of the house of Mouse were on a downward swing. Traditional animated features like Lilo and its peers, Atlantis: The Lost Empire and The Emperor’s New Groove, were supplanted by offerings from the more ascendant Pixar. Lilo, itself, was sandwiched between hits Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo.”
• 📖 Why Disney’s Live-Action Lilo & Stitch Succeeded Where Snow White Failed (Chris Lee, Vulture): “That hybrid classification extends to recent hits such as Minecraft and Sonic the Hedgehog, which combine live actors with CGI beasties. On the other hand, ‘animated fairy tales are not translating to live action well because retelling those stories diminishes the fantasy,’ Gross continues. ‘It makes the stories smaller. The emotional range is narrower and less expressive. They’re struggling right now.’”

Quitters prosper

Despite what you may have been told as a kid, it’s OK to be a quitter.

At least when it comes to buzzy, must-watch TV shows.

We were out of town when the second episode of The Last of Us’ latest season aired, staying at my parents’ house in Rochester for Easter. They definitely don’t watch that show, so we figured that we’d catch up with the episode after we got back to Virginia that Monday.

Then we learned what happened during Season 2’s second episode. You know. The Big Thing™️. (Glances nervously at Pedro Pascal.) And it wasn’t just that the Big Thing™️ happened. It was how the Big Thing™️ happened. (This is the second time a Big Thing™️ happened on an HBO show while we were out of town. I especially appreciated everyone online being real cool about Logan Roy dying on Succession.)

By the time we got back home that Monday, exhausted from the New York-to-Virginia drive and after getting a very patient toddler to bed, we made the decision to wait until later in the week to watch the Last of Us episode that we had missed.

Watching that Big Thing™️ happen isn’t really how we want to end our long weekend, right? we asked ourselves.