Charli xcx’s 2026 at the Movies Discussion: Greatest Pop Stars Podcast

It’s been about 20 months since Charli xcx first kicked off the Brat era, which brought her to new heights artistically, culturally and commercially as a pop star, and which lasted for all of 2024 and into the beginning of 2025. But rather than attempt to kick off a brand new album era in 2026, Charli is spending this year going to the movies — co-starring in some, doing music work for others, and even working her own career story into one or two of them — with a pair of them already out now, in the not-quite-autobiographical A24 mockumentary The Moment, and the box office-topping, Emerald Fennell-directed Wuthering Heights adaptation.

On this Pop Star Performance Review episode of the Greatest Pop Stars podcast, host Andrew Unterberger is joined by Billboard‘s Kyle Denis to discuss the start to the year in Charli Cinema. We discuss our immediate reactions to The Moment and Wuthering Heights — how successful we think the two movies were on the whole, and how the pop star’s specific contributions worked within them — and look forward to what is looking to be a near-endless chain of Charli features still upcoming in 2026.

Along the way, we ask all the most pressing questions about Popcorn Charli: Was The Moment definitely a comedy? How did Charli fare at playing herself — and is she always kinda playing herself as a pop star to begin with? Do we agree with the critical reputations of Wuthering Heights the album (good) and Wuthering Heights the movie (not so good)? Are we leading to a near future where none of the Wuthering soundtrack songs end up charting on the Hot 100, but an older “Wuthering Heights” does instead? And perhaps most importantly: Which of the (seemingly) dozens of upcoming Charli xcx film projects are we most looking forward to?