Can Krypto the Superdog save the movie business from superhero fatigue?
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Will Superman donning his famous red trunks for the first time in more than a decade bring the Man of Steel back into fashion?
Hollywood is hoping Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn's hotly anticipated Superman reboot will come to its rescue as one of the box office blockbusters of 2025.
Krypto's heroic cameo in the movie's latest trailer, plus the reappearance of those famous red trunks, has sent fans into a tizz, with Gunn admitting he was on "team no-trunks" until star David Corenswet convinced him that dressing "like a professional wrestler" helps keep the iconic character's fun comic book origins in focus.
From Superman's hot pants to the first Oasis concerts in Australia since 2005, Lady Gaga's eighth studio album and the fifth and final season of Stranger Things on Netflix, we've assembled your hit list of the 25 coolest things coming in pop culture in 2025.
This is the stuff we're most excited for - the albums, the hottest concert tickets, the new books, the TV shows and movies. And, yes, that includes live-action versions of Lilo & Stitch and How To Train Your Dragon plus more Wednesday and White Lotus to binge.
Hottest albums
Amy Martin's pick of the new music coming in 2025 including - wait for it - Pink Floyd-inspired Miley Cyrus.
Next year is shaping up to be another stellar one for women in pop. And what better place to start than Lady Gaga? After a major time starring on the big screen, the pop queen is back in the studio working on her eighth studio album, set to be released in February.
While the title is yet to be revealed, we do have a taste of what it will sound like. Disease was released in October, and it shows the singer is heading back to pop roots, just in time for her to headline Coachella.
In other Lady Gaga news, the singer is cementing her place as a triple threat, set to appear in the upcoming Netflix series of Wednesday.
While 2024 was the year Miley Cyrus became a Grammy winner, 2025 is the year she will release a new visual album. The singer confirmed in an interview with Harper's Bazaar that she had been spending long hours in the studio in the lead-up.
We don't know too much about what to expect, but we do know a song called Something Beautiful is slated as the title track, co-written by her boyfriend, Maxx Morando.
Director Panos Cosmatos, who is helping with the visuals, says it's Cyrus' most experimental release, while the singer herself has said it was inspired by Pink Floyd's The Wall.
While it may have been slightly delayed, Lana Del Rey's ninth studio album comes out in 2025, and this time she's going country.
The Summertime Sadness singer has worked with long-time collaborator Jack Antonoff on this latest release, The Right Person Will Stay, and while it's not out until May, people are tipping the singer will release a couple of tracks when she performs at country music festival Stagecoach in April.
It seems like The Weeknd is starting his 2025 New Year's resolutions early. On December 18, the rapper posted on social media, "New album, new tour, new movie, new everything".
It may be giving "new year, new me" vibes, but he's also not wrong. The Weeknd's upcoming album Hurry Up Tomorrow is set for release on January 24, with a movie based on the album, starring Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan, also in the works for 2025. And while no tour plans have been officially announced, the singer has promised one is on the way.
A$AP Rocky
Don't be dumb. It's pretty good advice to live by, but it's also the title of A$AP Rocky's upcoming album.
It's been six years since we've had an album from the US rapper, and it's already been delayed a few times, so fans won't be holding their breath.
Still, lead single Highjack - which features Jessica Pratt - indicates the album will be worth the wait. Busta Rhymes, Flavor Flav, Slick Rick, Fatman Scoop, and Morrissey are also attached to the project.
Hottest television
James Joyce has four streaming favourites and one new Aussie comedy to add to your watch list.
Stranger Things: Season 5
The plot for the final season of the blockbuster Netflix series is shrouded in mystery. But we hear that Terminator star Linda Hamilton has a role.
The hit 1980s-set sci-fi fantasy saga by brothers Matt and Ross Duffer launched the career of Millie Bobby Brown and introduced a new generation to Winona Ryder of Heathers and Beetlejuice fame.
Filming of the season wrapped in December, with Netflix teasing that the eighth and final episode will be titled "The Rightside Up", suggesting the Hawkins gang might actually get to the bottom of the Upside Down after all these years. By the time it drops later in 2025, it will have been almost four years between Stranger Things seasons.
Wednesday: Season 2
Here We Woe Again. That's apparently the title of the much-anticipated first episode of the second season of Wednesday. And that's about as much as we know about what's in store for the marvellously macabre Addams family, except that Jenna Ortega returns as the delightfully spooky and kooky upstart with some new co-stars, including Joanna Lumley as Grandmama Addams, plus Christopher Lloyd, Haley Joel Osment and reportedly even Joker: Folie à Deux star Lady Gaga.
Wednesday became Netflix's most popular show ever when it debuted in November 2022 and Ortega has since extended her angsty adolescent schtick to another gothic Tim Burton world, the movie Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
The White Lotus: Season 3
From Hawaii to Sicily and now Thailand, the new season of the glossy, luxury-resort-set murder mystery ensemble series is set to drop in February. Creator Mike White has previously teased fans to expect "a satirical and funny look at death and Eastern religion and spirituality".
The new, sadly Jennifer Coolidge-less cast includes Parker Posey, Walton Goggins, Jason Isaacs, Michelle Monaghan, Scott Glenn and Patrick Schwarzenegger.
Natasha Rothwell reprises her Season 1 role as wellness spa manager Belinda Lindsey, and she told Vanity Fair of the first scripts she read: "I gasped out loud a minimum of five times, and this was just me reading them. Everyone needs to buckle up, because it's going to get real!"
Andor: Season 2
Ben Mendelsohn is set to reprise his role as white-caped Death Star building site manager Orson Krennic from the 2016 Star Wars film Rogue One.
Andor, starring Mexican actor Diego Luna as a thief-turned-spy working for the heroic Rebel Alliance taking on the might of the evil Galactic Empire, is the gritty prequel to Rogue One, which is itself the prequel to the very first Star Wars film, 1977's A New Hope.
If none of this makes sense to you, Andor is not the series you are looking for. Few of Disney's other Star Wars spin-offs - and there have been a few - have earned the fan acclaim of Andor, which is now Disney's most expensive Star Wars production (reportedly costing a staggering $US645 million for its two seasons). Lands on Disney+ in April.
Optics
This six-part Aussie comedy series premiering on the ABC in January follows two young women thrust into running a crisis management firm that specialises in public relations spin for celebrities, sports stars and corporate titans.
There's a hint of Utopia and The Hollowmen about Optics, which the ABC says is "a fast-paced, laugh-out-loud workplace comedy that lifts the veil on everyday office politics and on the corporate spin that infects all the news we consume".
The Chaser's Charles Firth co-stars with series co-creators Vic Zerbst and Jenna Owen (now showing in Stan's new Aussie gem Nugget is Dead: A Christmas Story).
When the trio began doing their homework on the dark arts of corporate spin, they worried "there weren't enough PR crises in Australia to sustain 30 minutes of television each week". As it turns out, they reckon there's enough material for "about 30 years of television every week".
Hottest tickets
Amy Martin has your concert wish-list sorted for the year ahead - maybe even a shot of Espresso singer Sabrina Carpenter.
Billie Eilish
Just months after being named Apple Music's artist of the year, Billie Eilish will take to Australian stages with her Hit Me Hard and Soft tour. The Bad Guy singer has 12 sold-out shows across Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.
The tour will have a sustainability focus as part of Eilish's continued partnership with environmental non-profit REVERB, which has raised more than $1 million for projects addressing climate change.
Oasis
In what will be their first live show together since 2009 - and the first in Australia since 2005 - Oasis brings their world tour to Australia in 2025. The Britpop sensation will play five shows across Melbourne and Sydney in late 2025.
In a statement announcing the Aussie shows, the band quoted Men at Work's hit Down Under and wrote: "People of the land down under. You better run - you better take cover ... We are coming. You are most welcome."
Drake
Canadian music icon Drake, the man behind hits like Hotline Bling and God's Plan, is heading our way this February with The Anita Max Win Tour.
It's been a while between trips for the Canadian hip-hop star, having released four solo albums and a collab with 21 Savage in the eight years since he visited. But with 10 shows across Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane, there are plenty of chances for fans to catch up with the musician.
Dua Lipa
British-Albanian pop star Dua Lipa is not only bringing her 2025 Radical Optimism tour to Australia, she's also kicking off the entire run right here.
In support of the album Radical Optimism, which went to number one in 11 countries, those who managed to score tickets to the Sydney and Melbourne shows will be in for a treat.
Sabrina Carpenter
While nothing has been officially announced, the fact that Ticketek already has a waitlist for the Australian leg of Sabrina Carpenter's Short N' Sweet Tour (and that the pop princess teased that she'd return to Australia while she was supporting Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour), means it's as good as a done deal. And if she does, fans of the Espresso singer will have an extra sweet 2025.
Hottest books
As we turn the page on 2024, Sally Pryor picks the best reading for the year ahead.
Blue Poles: Jackson Pollock, Gough Whitlam and the painting that changed the nation, by Thomas McIlroy
For any self-respecting, culture-loving Aussie who loves a good bit of discourse, Blue Poles should be on the hot, hot, hot list. Former Canberra Times journalist Thomas McIlroy tells the life story of one of Australia's most recognisable and controversial paintings.
Created in Jackson Pollock's Long Island studio, it hung on the apartment wall of a New York art dealer until the National Gallery of Australia bought it in 1973 for the then-unfathomable price of $1.3 million. The sale sparked a media sensation and forever changed the way Australians viewed art. It's now one of the country's most prized paintings, and the full story will surprise you.
Source Code, by Bill Gates
We hear a lot these days about Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who basically run the world we live in whether we like it or not. But it was Bill Gates who really got the ball rolling when he founded Microsoft in 1975, way before the Internet was even a thing.
Now he's telling his story, and this is the first in what is reported to be a trilogy. Source Code (great title) sets out his early years, from his childhood in Seattle, struggles to fit in, restless adolescence and decision to drop out of Harvard and focus on Microsoft. A sob story to be sure. But possibly quite illuminating?
Matriarch, by Tina Knowles
To counterbalance the quite reasonable perception that too many memoirs these days come from old white men, look no further than Tina Knowles, whose memoir Matriarch will quite likely involve more frantic page-turning than that of Gatesy up there. I mean, look at who she's produced - Beyonce and Solange? Turns out her real name is Celestine and she's from Texas, but it's her persona as the ultimate stage mum that really intrigues.
The publishers describe it as "a page-turning chronicle of family love and heartbreak, of loss and perseverance, and of the kind of creativity, audacity, and will it takes for a girl from Galveston to change the world". It's also billed as a memoir that "carries within it the story of America", as if all Americans were producing insanely talented megalomaniac musicians who, like, beat each other's husbands up in lifts and give their kids weird names. Whatever, I'm all in.
We Do Not Part, by Han Kang
Look, we know you went and powered through the back catalogue of 2024's Nobel Prize for Literature (if you hadn't before!), but fear not, she's got a new one out already! Han Kang's latest "haunting and visionary" novel, translated from Korean follows Kyungha as she travels from Seoul to the forests of Jeju Island and the home of her hold friend Inseon. He's in hospital after an accident, and needs her to feed his beloved pet bird.
This sounds exactly like the kind of meditative and paradigm-shifting narrative we all need to read, if we could just tear ourselves away from the travails of tech titans and rock star mothers. And we can, I know we can, thanks to authors like Han Kang. There's a reason she won the Nobel.
John and Paul - A love story in songs, by Ian Leslie
A lot of non-fiction in 2025's most anticipated, but this one involves an age-old story so fixed that it's become legend. I bet you think you know all there is to know about the Beatles (you don't), or if not, that you don't actually need to care (you do).
This latest book holds one of the world's most storied bands up to the light and finds a new angle - the great love story between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The Bromance, if you will, but these two were way more than just bros.
Their creative partnership - brilliant and perfect and tortured and fractured - nonetheless dictated the course of pop music and still does today. And like all of us, Paul really misses John - he said so!
Hottest movies
James Joyce's popcorn picks: live-action remakes of cartoon faves, a bold superhero reboot and the Michael Jackson biopic.
Snow White (March)
Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to the Disney production line for live-action remakes we go. Rachel Zegler (from Steven Spielberg's West Side Story re-do) plays Snow White and former Wonder Woman Gal Gadot is the evil queen as director Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer, The Amazing Spider-Man) reimagines Walt Disney's 1937 animated classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with a modern sensibility courtesy of co-writer Greta Gerwig (co-writer and director of Barbie). Will this be the fairest cartoon remake of them all?
Lilo & Stitch (May)
Will this be the rascalliest cartoon reboot of them all? Disney is reprising in CGI and live action the antic-filled escapades of ill-mannered, hot-tempered, indestructible blue alien Stitch and Lilo, the lonely little Hawaiian girl who adopts and - somehow - tames him.
The original 2002 animation was a heartwarming romp, with five Elvis Presley hits on the soundtrack as Lilo dressed her mischievous dog-like alien pet in a Presley-inspired ensemble. Here's hoping director Dean Fleischer Camp (Marcel the Shell with Shoes On) doesn't make the same mistake as Tim Burton did with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which sagged without the original film's joyful Harry Belafonte calypso songs.
How To Train Your Dragon (June)
Welcome to the Dreamworks version of How To Remake Your Cartoons. The original 2010 animation was a blow-your-horned-helmet-off blast of emotion and exhilaration as scrawny Viking teen Hiccup went against the wishes of his warrior father to befriend a fearsome black-winged dragon and help save their village.
This remake, blending live action and CGI, is directed by Dean DeBlois, who piloted the original trilogy, and the recent teaser trailer has sent hopes soaring that he will recapture the high-flying thrills and emotional depths of the first movie.
Superman (July)
Another day, another superhero reboot. James Gunn, writer-director of Marvel's rollicking Guardians of the Galaxy movies, will try to bring the Man of Steel back into fashion after Zack Snyder's gloomy, dour movies starring Henry Cavill.
There may even be a bit of fun as Superman's original red trunks return and Krypto the Superdog joins David Corenswet's mild-mannered newspaper reporter Clark Kent and Daily Planet colleague Lois Lane (The Marvelous Mrs Maisel's Rachel Brosnahan) to save the world from Nicholas Hoult's dastardly Lex Luthor.
A host of lesser-known DC Universe characters are also assembled, including Mister Terrific, Metamorpho, Guy Gardener of the Green Lantern Corps and Hawkgirl.
Michael (October)
Michael Jackson's nephew Jaafar Jackson plays the King of Pop in this biopic by Antoine Fuqua (director of Training Day and Denzel Washington's The Equaliser movies).
Producer Graham King (who steered Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody) says the movie's intention is to "humanise but not sanitise" the controversies that surrounded Jackson and his death in 2009 at the age of 50.
That said, the film has been made with the cooperation of the Jackson estate, with dozens of his songs expected to feature in the film. Jaafar is the son of Jermaine Jackson, who performed alongside his younger brother as one of the Jackson 5.
Sally Pryor
Amy Martin
James Joyce
James Joyce is executive editor of ACM, the publisher of this masthead. Based in Canberra, he is a former editor of ACM's The Canberra Times and began his journalism career as a cadet reporter for his hometown paper, ACM's Newcastle Herald, where he spent two decades moonlighting as the masthead’s movie and TV critic while working his way up to the position of deputy editor.
