THE JOURNAL
Harris Dickinson and Nicole Kidman in Babygirl (2024)
Get ready to fill your 2025 diary with hugely anticipated TV shows, blockbuster films, brilliant novels and catchy releases. Take note of MR PORTER’S culture picks for the year ahead, below.
01. The TV shows
Patravadi Mejudhon, Lisa and Christian Friedel in The White Lotus. Pedro Pascal in The Last Of Us
The next year is set to relieve many of us of our misery, with the long-long-awaited returns of many mass-hysteria-inducing titans of television. Severance is back in January (it’ll have been three years since the last season), The White Lotus in February (almost two years since that sensational finale), The Last Of Us returns in the spring (another two years) and Wednesday is looking like summer (three years).
Buckle up for creative spins on well-trodden but much-beloved worlds, with another HBO Game Of Thrones prequel – A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms, set a century earlier – and a Pride And Prejudice spin-off care of the BBC, The Other Bennett Sister, based on a cult book that focuses on forgettable middle child, Mary. And having won a Bafta for the brilliant Mood, Nicôle Lecky brings another drama to the BBC, Wild Cherry.
Netflix mini-series Zero Day brings movie stars Robert De Niro and Angela Bassett to the small screen. Similarly, Steven Spielberg will recreate the story of Napoleon as an HBO series, based on Stanley Kubrick’s unrealised vision.
02. The films
Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17 (2025)
Who says spooky season is over? The New Year brings an unholy corpse of ghoulish cinema that (in the UK) starts when the clock strikes midnight. The Robert Eggers adaptation of Nosferatu rings in 2025, starring Lily Rose-Depp, Nicholas Hoult and Bill Skarsgård as the vamp. That will be closely followed by Wolf Man, a Ryan Gosling-produced Blumhouse body horror led by Julia Garner and Christopher Abbott.
Later in the year, Frankenstein will be brought back to life. The director Guillermo del Toro claims his big-screen take is a lifetime goal, with Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi cast as the man and his monster, respectively. Plus, images have released of a skeletal Cillian Murphy in Danny Boyle’s summer sequel, 28 Years Later. Vampires, werewolves and zombies, oh my!
Cinema’s current obsession with May-December relationships continues with Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson playing power games in Halina Reijn’s erotic thriller Babygirl. Renée Zellweger is also back as Bridget Jones, this time Mad About A Boy – the charming Leo Woodall is the boy in question.
Bridget is not the only beloved diva due a return: Elphaba and Glinda return to the screen for the second half of Wicked. And we are yet to see the back of M3gan, who powers up for a 2.0.
Know who else is back? Almost every male Oscar-darling director you could imagine: Bong Joon-ho with the incredible Mickey 17, Paul Thomas Anderson with The Battle Of Baktan Cross, Edgar Wright with The Running Man and Ryan Coogler with Sinners. Invest in some popcorn.
03. The books
After her knockout novella Assembly, Natasha Brown returns with Universality, the tale of an ambitious journalist that investigates a brutal assault via solid gold bar – a story inspired by a strange real case. Award-winning poet Ocean Vuong will share another stirring novel, The Emperor Of Gladness. And, following the bestselling Yellowface, RF Kuang returns to fantasy with Katabasis, a love story of rival Cambridge academics that must travel to the underworld to save their advisor’s soul.
Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the borders of mythmaking and reportage in The Message by visiting three conflict sites: Dakar, South Carolina and the West Bank. Elsewhere, love is on the brain as Shon Faye makes sense of romance and lovelessness in Love In Exile, while Edmund White reflects on The Loves Of My Life in a new memoir.
Sao Ichikawa is due an English translation of her Japanese bestseller Hunchback, about a woman in a wheelchair who escapes into online worlds until she makes a sudden life-altering decision. And Sayaka Murata, the author of Convenience Store Woman, returns with another imaginative, quirky tale, Vanishing World.
04. The music
Noel and Liam Gallagher of Oasis in Tokyo, September 1994. Photograph by Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images
There are tours galore coming in 2025, with the hottest ticket being the decades-awaited Oasis reunion. On the pop front Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo have announced tours, plus, the return of Blackpink in your area. (But the solo projects are still a-go, with a Lisa album to come.)
Lana Del Rey is allegedly the latest artist to go country, with what sounds like a record full of love songs, The Right Person Will Stay. And Doechii is set to follow-up her critically acclaimed Grammy-nominated rap EP with her debut LP.
LCD Soundsystem are expected to release their first album since 2017. Plus, we’re getting new masterworks from Ethel Cain and The Weeknd. And the British are coming with Central Cee, FKA twigs, Mogwai and Shygirl all due to drop.
And… might 2025 really be the year Sky Ferreira’s Masochism is finally out into the world? Feels like it has been announced almost every year in the decade it’s been delayed, but here’s hoping “Leash”, the track she recently released for the aforementioned Babygirl, bodes well that time has come. And, if you know what’s good for you, get ready to tap into new Ichiko Aoba, Oklou and the return of Banks. What a time to be alive.