25 JULY 2025
Welcome to this week’s edition of Culture Wire, a newsletter brought to you by Singapore-based pop culture and lifestyle marketing agency Culture Group.
In this week’s edition:
- Headline of the Week: Superman soars past $400M but that doesn’t mean franchise fatigue is dead
- Fax, No Printer: Which brand accidentally became TikTok’s go-to soundtrack for disappointment?
- Before You Leave: The commodification of self expression – showing off your DNA, hunting for the perfect dupe, letting AI ease your loneliness and more!
Headline of the Week
🦸 LAST CAPE STANDING
Regular readers know superhero fatigue has been a running joke for the last few years, so when Superman surpassed US$ 400 M globally this week, you’d be forgiven for assuming capes are cool again. Strong reviews and audience praise for the movie’s hopecore message (one moviegoer said: “I haven’t felt depressed even once” since watching it) helped drive up ticket sales, alongside a relatively unknown but ultimately likeable lead actor and a viral press tour. But before we declare that superhero fatigue is over, there’s a more complex story here…
OUR TAKE
On paper, Superman wasn’t an easy sell. Yet another superhero film in a saturated and stagnant genre, combined with the challenge of marketing a quintessentially American character in an anti-American moment. Ahead of the launch, director James Gunn talked up Superman’s universal appeal: “I’m telling a story about a guy who is uniquely good, and that feels needed now because there is a meanness that has emerged due to cultural figures being mean online”.
You can draw a direct line between that comment and the audience’s embrace of Superman’s hopecore message. The film deliberately leans into positive masculinity – and that resonated with the core young male audience who’ve been served nothing but brooding antiheroes for years. The love is spilling into real life too: Krypto the superdog helped drive up searches for dog adoption, with Google searches for “adopt a dog near me” jumping up 513% after the opening weekend (the more specific “rescue dog adoption near me” rose by 163%) 🐶.
But rather than signaling a franchise renaissance, Superman’s triumph tells us something about the current state of culture. With studios remaining committed to ‘cultural backsliding‘ (did you see the identikit Harry Potter stills?), the broader entertainment landscape feels stagnant.
That’s reinforced by our collective inability to agree on a ‘song of the summer’ and an onslaught of AI-generated content (the AI band Velvet Sundown racked up 1 M Spotify plays). Signs of pushback are emerging: YouTube’s recent pledge to crackdown on AI-generated video content highlights that platforms recognize audiences can tell the difference between genuine creativity and manufactured culture.
Against that backdrop, Superman’s success shouldn’t be read as a permission slip to keep recycling IP 😴. Instead, it shows what franchise films now need to do to break through cultural noise. Gunn didn’t just make another superhero film; he had to reinvent what the character could mean against 2025’s political and cultural climate.
The lesson for marketers? Leveraging familiar or nostalgic brand equity now requires genuine reinvention. Whether you’re reviving a product line or tapping brand recognition, audiences expect you to answer ‘why now?’. Rather than falling back on familiarity, justify why a story matters today.
Fax, No Printer*
For those of you born before 1997, ‘fax, no printer‘ is Gen Z speak for ‘undeniable facts I agree with’
Which brand accidentally became TikTok’s favourite way to express letdown?
Scroll to the end of the newsletter for the correct answer!
Before You Leave
Pinterest Highlights the Latest Rising Trends
(2 min read)
How dupes turned online shopping upside down
(15 min read)
(7 min read)
How displaying your DNA became a status symbol
(7 min read)
A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That’s a Problem
(20 min read)
This Week's Trivia Answer
C. Jet2
Maybe there is a song of the summer – it’s just from 2015 and is followed by a voiceover ad for a low-cost British airline. Over the last few weeks, TikTok FYPs have been flooded with a clip from Jess Glynne’s decade old hit Hold My Hand which precedes a cheery reminder that ‘Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday’ (the tagline comes from a January 2024 ad campaign from the airline that now has 2.6 M views). Initially used to poke fun at the gap between expected vacation experiences and reality, use cases have broadened as the trend spread across the globe. Some TikToks using the clip showed flash flooding in New York, for example.
The twist? The UK-focused airline just gained massive global awareness through content they have no control over. As Skift observed, while both Glynne and voiceover artist Zoe Lister have acknowledged the trend, Jet2 seems to be flying under the radar. Sometimes the best move is knowing when not to interrupt a good thing, but it does raise a question: if your archive went global, would you decide to lean in?
🚀 Over and Out!
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Your Culture Mavens,
Angela, Catherine, Teri, Twila, & Vicki
