‘The Naked Gun!’ Spider-Man swings! ‘The Office’ spins off!

Hello, Popculturology friends. Did you miss the Friday newsletter last week? We were at the beach, doing our best to not get sunburned, buying chocolate-covered gummy bears from Virginia Beach candy shops and waking up at 6:20 every morning. (When you have a toddler, why not wake up at 6:20 every morning of vacation?)

I’m doing my best to triage the news from the past two weeks while also doing my civic duty and seeing The Naked Gun after missing its opening weekend.

You know what’s a fantastic app? The PBS Kids app. It’s become our daughter’s go-to app when she’s on her iPad while traveling. Completely on her own — I swear I didn’t do this — she discovered City Island, a series of animated shorts that ran from 2022 to 2024 from Wonder Showzen creator Aaron Augenblick. It’s fun and packed with pop culture references that are now slowly taking root in our daughter’s brain.

Book nook

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

• Robogenesis (Daniel W. Wilson)

It turns out you don’t get a lot of reading done while at the beach for a week when you have a kid ...

CATCHING UP

As I mentioned, I saw The Naked Gun, checking it out last night after hearing Akiva Schaffer and the gang talk about it for weeks on The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast and see a ton of writers, comedians and pop culture folks who I respect praise the film.

We also got a reveal of Tom Holland’s return for Spider-Man: Brand New Day and the first trailer for The Paper, the upcoming spinoff of The Office ...

One hundred percent endorsement for The Naked Gun

The Naked Gun is funny. Wildly funny. All kinds of funny.

I wish there were more people in my theater on Thursday night, but those of who were there had a blast. Tons of laughing out loud. The real kind. Not the kind when you write LOL and just mean something is kind of amusing. Genuine laughter. (And, unfortunately, one random kid who thought it was funny to yell “What does that mean?” a bunch of times.)

This the fifth film directed by Schaffer, best known as one third of The Lonely Island. Hot Rod is a classic. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (co-directed with Jorma Taccone) is great. I enjoyed Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers. The Watch was a miss for me back when I saw it in theaters in 2012. Schaffer seems to be very selective about what he directs, but I gotta wonder if The Naked Gun will attract some bigger studio attention.

(This is gonna sound wild, but I’m throwing it out there: Schaffer could direct The Dark Knight. But could Christopher Nolan direct The Naked Gun?)

The Naked Gun is a real movie. It isn’t a spoof of a movie. It’s funny and — as Schaffer, Taccone, Andy Samberg and Seth Meyers have repeatedly pointed out on The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast — dumb in the perfect way. It also doesn’t hurt that The Naked Gun is a crisp 85 minutes long.

Go see this one in a theater. A movie like The Naked Gun doing well at the box office is how studios realize they should keep making comedies that aren’t sent directly to Netflix.

Spider-Man swings again

Not to sound like all those pretentious dorks who droned on and on in the lead up to Star Wars: The Force Awakens about “real sets” and “practical effects” (as if George Lucas’ prequels didn’t make use of a ton of them themselves), but it’s so cool to see Holland (and I assume a stunt double or two) in a full Spider-Man suit shooting Spider-Man: Brand New on actual streets. I’m sure they’ll overlay a bunch of special effects work on these shots, but there’s something special about seeing Spider-Man in the real world like this.

• Let’s go, Ruffalo: We’re absolutely never getting another standalone Hulk movie, but Mark Ruffalo will have a role in Brand New Day. We’ll also get the return of Michael Mando, who was teased as the Scorpion at the end of Spider-Man: Homecoming. (The Hollywood Reporter)
• Punk’d: A potential Spider-Verse spinoff is in the works, with Daniel Kaluuya (who voiced Spider-Punk in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse) and Ajon Singh working on a script. (Deadline)
• Telling us the odds: In an interview with Variety, Harrison Ford was asked if “Kevin Feige [has] convinced you to come back to Marvel again?” Ford’s response: “Nope.” (Variety)

The first trailer for The Paper

I’m a fan of The Office. I was on board from the very beginning, even during its first rocky season premiered. I even kept watching it after Steve Carell left and it started making some wacky choices. I watch it in reruns on TBS. But I’m not sure about The Paper, the upcoming sequel series.

We got our first trailer for The Paper this month, taking us into the world of a struggling midwestern newspaper — and it doesn’t look great. The vibes are wrong. The jokes seem stale. And, honestly, any attempt at making a sequel to The Office is just going to feel like a knockoff, especially since this series is going to Peacock first and not NBC.

• No chili? While we’re only getting one star from The Office back for this sequel series (Oscar Nunez’s Oscar Martinez somehow finds himself at the mercy of the same documentary camera crew), the show’s cast has been busy lately pretty much reprising the roles of those characters in various ad campaign. You can currently find Brian Baumgartner pitching beer for Sam Adams. (Sam Adams)

NEWS, NOTES & TRAILERS

New Paramount boss envisions expansion of Top Gun, Star Trek franchises

With Skydance Media’s acquisition of Paramount complete, Paramount Skydance Corporation CEO David Ellison and his team have turned his attention to capitalizing on the studio’s library, with Top Gun, Star Trek, Transformers and World War Z all being among franchises they see as ripe for expansion.

“Top Gun 3 is a massive priority for us,” Ellison deputy Dana Golberg told reporters this week after revealing that she and other execs had called Tom Cruise after the Paramount/Skydance deal was complete to “thank him for, frankly, the huge piece he’s been in Paramount’s history.”

Top Gun: Maverick was a massive hit and was probably responsible for keeping movie theaters afloat as people warily returned as the pandemic wound down, so it’s not a surprise Paramount feels a debt to Cruise and wants to keep making sequels to the film. (Los Angeles Times)