| | Will Severance be worth the wait, and seven more culture storylines I’m watching in 2025 From the return of Apple’s hit thriller to the most open Oscar race I can remember, this year has so much in store for us culture vultures |
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| Gwilym Mumford |  |
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Happy New Year! 2025 is upon us and pop-culturally it has the potential to be a belter, with big releases and events aplenty. For a full rundown of everything to watch, listen to and play this year, check out the Guardian arts desk’s exhaustive year-ahead preview. Here on the Guide, meanwhile, we’re looking at some of the big questions across film, TV and music that we’re anticipating getting answers to this year. Just putting them together has whetted our appetites for the next 12 months. Hopefully they’ll do the same for you.
Will TV’s late returners offer delayed gratification? | | Covid, writers’ and actors’ strikes, and the vagaries of modern small-screen productions have warped TV schedules out of recognition in the 2020s, with shows returning sometimes as late as three years after they last aired. Which means that after a 2024 light on big returning series, 2025 is overflowing with them, notably Severance (17 Jan, Apple TV+), The White Lotus (16 Feb, Now), Stranger Things (date TBC, Netflix) and The Last of Us (date TBC, Now). All of those have been away for at least two years, though none can match the eight-year hibernation The Night Manager (BBC) will emerge from at some point in 2025. Can they live up to years’ worth of anticipation? If not there will be the reliably on-deadline Slow Horses (date TBC, Apple TV+) and The Bear (date TBC, Disney+), both back with new seasons a year after their last ones.
Who will win the most open Oscars race in years? | | Usually by this point in the awards calendar cycle consensus has started to settle around a clear Oscar best picture frontrunner – see Oppenheimer last year. But not so in 2025. The already released Anora, Conclave, Emilia Pérez and Wicked, and the soon-to-be-released The Brutalist (in UK cinemas from 24 Jan) are all roughly level-pegging on prediction sites like Gold Derby – with the likes of Sing Sing, Nickel Boys (out today), A Real Pain (8 Jan) and A Complete Unknown (17 Jan) not far behind. We fancy the widely admired Anora to claim the gong, but would be delighted to see the ambition of The Brutalist rewarded too.
Will it be a second Brat summer … or revenge of the lads? | | A new generation of female pop stars reigned over 2024 and have designs on 2025 too. Charli xcx, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan have already been lined up to headline Primavera, and it seems likely that one or more of them will descend on Glastonbury too. Oh, and you can throw in Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo at BST Hyde Park, Lana Del Rey’s two Wembley stadium dates and a Charli-curated and headlined festival at London’s Victoria Park as well. But not even that remarkable roster can compete for eyeballs with the Great Oasis Roadshow which, bar an untimely bust-up, will surely be summer’s main event. It’s a huge year for Sam Fender, packing out St James’ Park in his home town Newcastle for a three-night stadium residency, and for Fontaines DC, graduating to giant park shows in Manchester, Newcastle and Finsbury Park. And a word too for the great hardcore festival Outbreak, which 14 years after launching at a 100-capacity hall in Sheffield is putting on a giant Victoria Park date as well as its regular two-day Manchester event.
Will British TV maintain its hot streak? | | 2024 was a banner year for British TV. Bankrolled by American dosh, British series made up a significant chunk of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful shows around. That trend is unlikely to slow in 2025, with new series from seasoned showrunners Sally Wainwright (punk drama Riot Women, date TBC, BBC), Jack Thorne (eco thriller Toxic Town, date TBC, Netflix) and Steven Knight (SAS Rogue Heroes, now airing on BBC, and Victorian drama A Thousand Blows, 21 Feb, Disney). Can we count Too Much (TBC), Lena Dunham’s Netflix series about a single American woman in London, as British? We can and we will. And we’re also looking forward to The Death of Bunny Munro(date TBC, Sky and Now), an adaptation of Nick Cave’s 2009 comic novel starring Matt Smith. We’d probably be getting ahead of ourselves to include ambitious new upcoming series from Michaela Coel (First Day on Earth) and Richard Gadd (Lions), given they’ve both only recently started production – but if they want to cough them up this year too, they’d be very welcome.
Can the superhero movie come roaring back? | | In 2024 the superhero movie shrank from view faster than Ant-Man on a cold day. Marvel Studios released just one film – though, admittedly, that film was the hugely successful Deadpool v Wolverine – and DC Studios didn’t release any at all. The burden instead fell on Sony’s Spider-verse, whose trio of releases varied from underwhelming to “all of Hollywood is pointing and laughing at you” bad. After that annus horribilis, superheroes will try to again wrest control of blockbuster cinema in 2025. Sony, perhaps wisely, are sitting this year out but Marvel has three films coming, all of which the studio has high hopes for: Captain America: Brave New World (14 Feb); antihero team-up movie Thunderbolts* (2 May); and the long-awaited Fantastic Four: First Steps (25 July). DC, meanwhile, only has one film on the docket but it’s a biggie: James Gunn’s reboot of Superman (11 July). They’ll be battling for box office supremacy with A Minecraft Movie (4 Apr), Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (21 May), Disney’s live-action takes on Snow White (21 Mar) and Lilo and Stitch (23 May), Jurassic World Rebirth (2 Jul) and of course Wicked: For Good (21 Nov). Best those and reports of the superhero movie’s demise may have been premature.
Will we finally get that new My Bloody Valentine album? | | It’s become a tradition in the Guide’s year-ahead preview: we optimistically flag My Bloody Valentine’s long-promised fourth album as one of the most anticipated of the next 12 months, and then Kevin Shields and co don’t release the thing. Rinse, repeat. But this year, THIS YEAR, that all changes. Maybe. Possibly. OK, this is entirely based on the fact that the band have pencilled in their first show in seven years, in Dublin in November. But come on, surely that has to mean they’re prepping something, right? Right?! MBV aren’t alone in (hopefully) releasing new music in 2025 after a long gap. There are confirmed new albums, after seven years away, from Franz Ferdinand (10 Jan) and A$AP Rocky (early 2025), and releases reportedly on the way from LCD Soundsystem, The Shins and The xx (all after eight years away), D’Angelo (11 years), Sky Ferreira (12 years), Mclusky (21 years) and Pulp (a massive 24 years). Be warned: at least a handful of these will humiliate us by not releasing anything at all.
Dare we hope for a good Game of Thrones spin-off? | | After two seasons’ worth of evidence we can safely admit it: House of the Dragon is a dud – ploddingly plotted, lacking in memorable characters and with little reason to exist other than to milk the Westeros cash cow. That’s an accusation likely to be levelled at the next Game of Thrones prequel too, but there’s reason to be more optimistic about A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (date TBC, Now). For one, George RR Martin, who has been critical of HotD, is heavily involved in this adaptation of his Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas, which follow the adventures of a hedge knight and his squire. And in contrast to the CGI-fest of HotD, this spin-off is likely to largely revolve around its two leads adventuring across Westeros in the manner of the Hound and Arya Stark, which were often the best moments in Game of Thrones.
What will a $100m Paul Thomas Anderson movie look like? | | In this risk-averse age of movie/brand tie-ins and reheated sequels, prequels and repeat-quels, Untitled Paul Thomas Anderson Event Film (UK release date TBC, 8 Aug US), as IMDB calls it, seems scarcely believable: a movie by the most acclaimed auteur around that has a $100m-plus budget, stars Leonardo DiCaprio and is getting a giant Imax release. Details about its plot are hard to come by (rumours suggest everything from a Pynchon adaptation to a prison drama) but the Imax element suggests a film on the visual scale of There Will Be Blood. If this year’s film slate was just that and a load of Minion movies it would still probably suffice, but there’s a bounty of other auteurish films in 2025: Bong Joon-ho outer space sci-fi Mickey 17 (7 Mar), Terence Malick biblical epic The Way of the Wind (TBC), and new films expected from Chloé Zhao, Lynne Ramsay, Claire Denis and Yorgos Lanthimos too. Woof! |
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| Take Five | Each week we run down the five essential pieces of pop-culture we’re watching, reading and listening to | | 1 | TV – The Traitors
It’s the first week of January, so you have two TV choices: sharp projectiles thown across the oche, or verbal barbs hurled across a big round table. Both make for excellent viewing, particularly The Traitors, which pretty much immediately upped the stakes in Wednesday’s first episode. I won’t say how but it suggests that this third season will match the pyrotechnics of the last two runs. It continues tonight, and Wednesday, Thursday and Friday next week, with all episodes available on BBC iPlayer the second they end.
Want more? Colin Firth stars in Sky dramatisation Lockerbie: A Search for Truth, available in full on Now. Plus: here’s seven more shows to stream this week. | 2 | ALBUM – Aphex Twin: Music from the Merch Desk (2016-2023)
True Aphex heads will have already familiarised themselves with this compilation, dropped quietly just before Christmas, but it’s worth flagging for everyone else as it’s quite the bounty. Binding together the extremely limited-edition EPs and LPs Richard D James has sold from the merchandise desks of his shows over the past seven years, it showcases James’s restless, skew-whiff creativity: bracing drill’n’bass blasts sit next to dainty piano noodling and squelchy synth experiments. Ten years on from the release of the last Aphex album proper, Syro, this 38-track monster serves as quite the stopgap.
Want more? Saint Etienne’s 11th album The Night continues the band’s shift towards mature ambient-tinged pop. | 3 | BOOK – Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan
With its bold orange and white jacket featuring a closeup of a peach, Nicola Dinan’s debut novel Bellies was one of the coolest books to be seen with in 2023. And for good reason: the Hong Kong born, London-based author’s story of first love and coming out as transgender is stylish and moving. Disappoint Me, Dinan’s swift follow-up, is structured around meals, following a blossoming romance. It’s every bit as good – and as chic – as Bellies. Lucy Knight
Want more? Japanese fiction is having a moment in the UK, and Hiromi Kawakami is one of the country’s finest contemporary writers. Her brilliantly strange short story collection Under the Eye of the Big Bird, translated by Asa Yoneda, is well worth a read. | 4 | PODCAST – County Lines
The practice of ‘county lines’, where vulnerable children are recruited to run drugs across rural boundaries, has been depicted extensively in drama – most notably in the 2020 Harris Dickinson film County Lines. But hearing from the real people caught up in it is, understandably, often more difficult. This BBC Sounds series, hosted by radio journalist Phoebe McIndoe – whose brother found himself lured into the practice – seeks to change that. Across its three episodes we hear from dealers and buyers trapped in an excruciating cycle.
Want more? Another Sounds series, Diddy on Trial, looks at the case against rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs. | 5 | FILM – 2073
Before he became one of the major documentary-makers of his era, Asif Kapadia was a director of fiction with films like The Warrior and The Return. Now he’s managed to splice together the two forms for his ambitious new sci-fi drama. 2073 uses a mixture of performance and present-day footage to imagine a bleak future beset by authoritarianism and climate catastrophe. Samantha Morton stars. Out now.
Want more? Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield are a couple navigating romance and tragedy in We Live in Time, also out now in cinemas. And here’s seven films you can watch from home this week. |
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| Read On | | From Olly Alexander and Nilüfer Yanya to Noodles from the Offspring, music stars share what they really listened to last year (lots of their own songs, it turns out). | What’s it like to have your TV series prematurely canned? Not great, as Rachael Sigee’s piece speaking to scuttled showrunners reveals. | This article for n+1 magazine by media writer Will Tavlin is a must-read, laying out in excruciating detail how Netflix’s influence has made movies much worse. | Vulture’s podcast expert Nicholas Quah looks at the biggest (and for my money most unwelcome) development in podcasting in 2024: the pivot to video. |
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| Get involved | This week we’re after your favourite musical samples. They can be across any genre or era, be it Madonna lifting Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!, Public Enemy pilfering Slayer’s Angel of Death riff or MIA playing fast and loose with the Clash. Let me know yours by replying to this email or contacting me on gwilym.mumford@theguardian.com. |
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