How Does The Weeknd’s Hurry Up Tomorrow Film Compare to Other Pop Culture Swings?

To witness a pop star at their absolute peak remains the white whale of live music. The feeling of experiencing art at such a maximal scale, combined with the acknowledged rarity of what you’re consuming, is indescribable. Luckily, for Americans and Dallasites alike, we’ve had the chance to see a couple of peaks in recent years.

In 2023, Taylor Swift’s three-night stand at AT&T Stadium became the highest-grossing event in the stadium’s history, in the midst of the Eras Tour, which is now the highest-grossing concert tour in history.

Last month, the stadium also saw Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s Grand National Tour hit Arlington. This came about in the haze of Lamar’s abrupt cultural dominance, which featured perhaps the highest-profile rap feud of all time against Drake, a spectacular Super Bowl LIX halftime show, and a flurry of singles from his latest album GNX that were entered into the hip-hop canon immediately upon release.

The way Swift and Lamar’s apexes came about couldn’t have been more different. Swift’s broad retrospective thesis, fueled by positivity, is that she is one of the most influential pop stars, or American celebrities, to ever live. There’s no looking backward on this Lamar tour, leveraging such blistering in-your-face momentum, fueled by the victory lap of beating Drake, culminating in a contemporary spectacle that’s ultra-aware of its exact moment in time.

But the two had one thing indisputably in common. Those peaks were organic, at least as much as one could be. Swift’s first album was in 2006, and her stardom has only risen each year since. For anyone else, a greatest hits tour in your early 30s is premature. For Swift, it was a necessity.

Alternatively, over the last 16 months, Lamar has served as the thunder to a perfect storm, only to catch his own lightning in a bottle and take it on the road.

All that to say, even the biggest stars in the world still have room to swing for the pop culture fences, and the very best can knock it out of the park.

This brings us to The Weeknd, who has spent the last six months building his case and his plan to claim the mantle.

In September 2024, he announced Hurry Up Tomorrow, his tenth studio album that was also rumored to be the last under the Weeknd moniker, moving forward as his real name, Abel Tesfaye. The dance-pop record was officially released on Jan. 31, 2025, followed by the announcement of a nationwide tour as well. It's a great pop album by any metric, though perhaps a slight step down from the previous two installments in the After Hours trilogy, 2020's seminal After Hours and 2022's pseudo-concept album, Dawn FM, which is arguably his best output to date.

"Cry for Me" and the album's opener, "Wake Me Up," have become instant Weeknd classics. "Timeless," a collaboration with Playboi Carti, has garnered 859 million Spotify streams to date.
Just a few days after the album's release, the trailer for Hurry Up Tomorrow, a feature film of the same name, was released. Directed by Trey Edward Shults, it stars Barry Keoghan and Jenna Ortega (also known as Sabrina Carpenter’s sloppy seconds in the "Taste" video) alongside Tesfaye himself, who would be playing a fictional version of himself.

The film was set for nationwide release on May 16, exactly one week after the tour would kick off in Glendale, Arizona.

With a brand new album, a heliocentric film adaptation, a nationwide tour, and the looming drama of this being an unofficial retirement consider Tesfaye’s chips to be entirely pushed in. There is no turning back now.

We’ll be seeing him when he hits AT&T Stadium in Arlington for a two-night run on Aug. 27 and 28, and we have no doubts that the stadium will be packed and enthusiastic. And as for the purported retirement of the Weeknd name, Tesfaye hasn’t said that he’ll stop making music, so we wouldn’t count anything dramatic coming from that, aside from an excuse to charge a bit more for tickets.

The Hurry Up Tomorrow film is fascinating here, and it’s the key ingredient in this year’s master plan.

But upon its announcement, all signs pointed to a bust for the film. The first trailer showed no hint of a plot, and all but promised a style-over-substance approach with Waves director Trey Edward Shults. Even worse, the finished version of the film reportedly remained on the shelf for nearly a year while producers shopped for a distributor. And of course, Tesfaye’s previous metafictional project, The Idol, stands as one of the worst-reviewed shows in HBO history.

Hurry Up Tomorrow hit theaters last weekend, finishing sixth place in the domestic box office with a measly $3.3 million. It sits at 14% on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing, with critics and fans alike criticizing the exact plotless and over-stylized issues that we worried about with the trailer.

Upon checking it out for ourselves, it’s decidedly not good, but some critics are being unnecessarily harsh. It’s only fair to meet a movie where it’s at and judge it based on how well it’s doing what it’s trying to do, even if you disagree with the approach. Hurry Up Tomorrow makes no attempt to develop its characters or give the viewer anything more than a vague idea of their motivation.

Purple Rain continues to fool us. A musician playing themselves in a dramatized version of their own music rarely makes money, and it’s even more rare for it to be good. The string of Beatles movies were hits in their time, but their success reflects the limitations of ‘60s media more than the films’ merit. A couple of decades later, Paul McCartney’s 1984 film, Give My Regards to Broad Street, which featured reimagined Beatles songs and a plethora of cuts from his solo career, was a devastating bomb. It grossed about 11% of its budget and was panned by critics and audiences alike.

In 1988, Michael Jackson starred in Moonwalker, a highlight reel disguised as a feature film, which compiles music videos, concert footage and surreal short concepts. It was a box office hit at the moment, but it remains relatively obscure in the musical canon.

Even Prince wasn’t invincible. In 1990, he wrote and directed Graffiti Bridge, a direct sequel to Purple Rain featuring Morris Day and the Time reprising their roles. The film lost money on its initial budget and received terrible critical reviews, but has garnered a small cult following over time.

Keoghan plays The Weeknd’s manager, Lee, a hedonistic caricature of the worst of show business. Ortega’s character, Anima, is on an arsonist’s streak and receives worried calls from her mother. She loves The Weeknd. That’s all we know. Similarly, Tesfaye is in the immediate fallout from a devastating breakup, obsessively replaying voice messages and staring at old photos with the girl. That’s all we know, and it’s clearly all they want us to know.

The movie resides in limbo, settling for slick, highly saturated shots of our three characters over anything else. It really could’ve been a photoshoot or a short, extended music visualizer for the album. It's within that same limbo where Tesfaye has boxed himself in, stuck between being marketable or being mysterious. Between vulnerability and vague. It's in the eternal question of whether or not to mythologize himself. By the looks of Hurry Up Tomorrow, both sonically and visually, it seems like it'll be a question he'll be asking for years to come, no matter what his name is.