August 26 is not a day that is particularly known for feeling especially crisp or autumnal in most parts of North America. And yet it’s the day this year — the earliest release date ever — that Starbucks, contending with a slowdown in sales, will unleash its annual run of pumpkin spice lattes upon its customers.

You’d be forgiven for mistaking this tone for one of disdain. Since its inception in 2003, the pumpkin spice latte has become something of a straw man for discussions about capitalism, seasonal creep, and the meaning of “basic,” resulting in widespread hatred for an otherwise innocuous beverage.

For example, back in 2014, at the height of pumpkin spice mania, this very website described the PSL as “an unctuous, pungent, saccharine brown liquid, equal parts dairy and diabetes, served in paper cups and guzzled down by the liter” — even though clearly the pumpkin spice latte is a highly delicious treat that pairs well with wearing vests and making dorky comments about how crisp the air feels today. Yes, it contains 380 calories; yes, it will make your coffee a rather unappetizing orange color; no, you should not “guzzle it down by the liter.”

But contempt for the PSL and other items of the seasonal pumpkin spice variety is often not really about the flavor itself. After all, there are plenty of other flavors we should all be way more furious about. (There is a shop in Scotland that serves mayonnaise ice cream, people!) Too frequently, it’s about sexism, class anxiety, and our collective skepticism of savvy marketing. After all, the PSL is doing something right: It’s Starbucks’ most popular seasonal beverage, with about 424 million sold worldwide. In 2019, the chain leaned in further with the introduction of the Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew, finally admitting to the world that late August is still iced coffee weather.

The history of the PSL

The pumpkin spice latte almost didn’t exist. As former Starbucks veteran Tim Kern told Quartz, “A number of us thought it was a beverage so dominated by a flavor other than coffee that it didn’t put Starbucks’ coffee in the best light.”

Fortunately for Starbucks, the Tim Kerns of the company were ultimately overruled, because within a decade of its launch in 2003, the PSL became its top-selling drink, with more than 200 million of them sold. In 2015, Forbes estimated the PSL brought in around $100 million in revenue over a single season.

2015 was also the year that Starbucks changed its decade-old formula to include actual pumpkin for the first time, rather than simply caramel coloring and pumpkin pie spices (like cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice, and cloves). By all accounts, it tasted pretty much the same, just, according to its inventor, “cleaner.”

At that point, the PSL wasn’t just a cash cow — it was a cultural phenomenon. In part, that’s thanks to its marketing: There is nothing inherently seasonal about the spices that go in pumpkin pie, but Starbucks is able to convince us that the drink should only be consumed during the fall months, thereby increasing demand.

But there’s another reason the PSL exploded so much over the past decade. Culinary food trend analyst Suzy Badaracco told Vox in 2014, “Pumpkin became recognized as part of the comfort food trend during the recession in 2008,” due to its association with Thanksgiving and the holidays. In tough times, we’re more likely to crave foods that bring back happy memories.

Surely, though, the reason we all began talking about PSLs to begin with was their prevalence on social media. It’s not that they’re inherently photogenic — a Starbucks cup is a Starbucks cup regardless of what’s inside it, and the PSL doesn’t get its own specially designed cup the way the holiday drinks do.

It’s because when you add a PSL to a photo of, say, your new fall boots standing atop crunchy-looking leaves or a selfie featuring a festive dark lip color, it adds to the autumnal aesthetic. It’s not a coincidence that Instagram — the epicenter of cutesy fall tableaus — happened to blow up in the early 2010s, which is the same time it became cool to claim you despised pumpkin spice.

But maybe that’s not the whole story.

The backlash is about our anxieties around capitalism

The fact that the pumpkin spice latte — which, to many, conjures the scents and imagery of Thanksgiving — is released in increasingly hot weather year after year is often touted as an ominous harbinger of the evil forces of seasonal creep. “It’s agricultural revisionism!” argue some, citing the fact that pumpkins aren’t actually in season until autumn proper.

A viral John Oliver clip from 2014 declares as much, noting that “that bottle of pumpkin-flavored science goo sits behind the counter of Starbucks, never aging, like Ryan Seacrest”:

Perhaps in response to such criticism, in 2019 Starbucks released its second pumpkin spice beverage since the PSL’s introduction, but this time, it’s cold. The Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew is a vanilla cold brew with pumpkin cold foam and topped with pumpkin spice, which CNBC describes as “less sweet and has a stronger coffee taste than a pumpkin spice latte.”

The success of the PSL is also largely responsible for the barrage of pumpkin spice-flavored everything else, including cream cheese, dog treats, Kahlua, and an especially wacky seasonal crossover, Peeps. There have also been air fresheners, deodorant, even Four Loko (okay, that one ended up being a joke), resulting in the expected amount of hand-wringing about a food trend “gone too far.” (Indeed, back in 2010, the spice brand McCormick forecast that pumpkin spice would be a popular flavor for the holiday season, which in turn likely exacerbated the rush.)

When a food trend is as in-your-face as pumpkin spice is — ever been to a Trader Joe’s in October? — it forces us to think about how the free market is essentially designed to create this kind of phenomenon. If a product like the pumpkin spice latte sells, it’s natural under capitalism for other companies to attempt to replicate that success. But it’s uncomfortable when we see it happening on such an exaggerated scale.

Actually, the backlash is about our contempt for women

Well, maybe, but maybe what pumpkin spice backlash is really about is our dismissal of trends that are coded as feminine. As Jaya Saxena wrote in Taste in 2017, in a piece titled “Women Aren’t Ruining Food,” “When men enjoy something, they elevate it. But when women enjoy something, they ruin it.”

She continues, on the topic of “girly” food crazes like açai bowls, rosé, and pumpkin spice versus “manly” ones like barbecue, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, and IPAs:

When those foods blow up, we judge women for falling for the marketing or trying to jump on the bandwagon, and we assume that because they like something other women like, they don’t have minds of their own. And on top of that, women are asked to reckon with, consciously or unconsciously, the perceived psycho-sexual symbolism attached to seemingly innocuous foods.

Plus, “masculine” foods are almost never chastised for being “basic,” the ever-nebulous term used to describe someone with average, predictable taste that’s usually reserved for women.

In the most stereotypical (and by now probably outdated) terms, a “basic bitch” wears North Face, leggings, and Uggs, and absolutely adores hashtag-PSLs, marking her as a woman with “a girlish interest in seasonal changes and an unsophisticated penchant for sweet,” as The Cut noted back in 2014.

There are often classist implications, too. In a 2014 BuzzFeed piece about “basic” and class anxiety, Anne Helen Peterson wrote:

Unique taste — and the capacity to avoid the basic — is a privilege. A privilege of location (usually urban), of education (exposure to other cultures and locales), and of parentage (who would introduce and exalt other tastes). To summarize the groundbreaking work of theorist Pierre Bourdieu: We don’t choose our tastes so much as the micro-specifics of our class determine them. To consume and perform online in a basic way is thus to reflect a highly American, capitalist upbringing. Basic girls love the things they do because nearly every part of American commercial media has told them that they should.

Essentially, hating pumpkin spice lattes is our way of othering those who drink them, and in the process, marking ourselves as decidedly un-basic.

Of course, this notion of what “basic” means is not the same way black people have been using it for decades, which, as Kara Brown explained in 2014 in Jezebel, pretty much just translates to “I think that the stuff you like is lame and I don’t really like you.”

“Rihanna could become the official spokesperson for Starbucks pumpkin spice lattes and nobody would think of her as basic,” she wrote. “You know why? Because Rihanna does what she wants and what she thinks is cool and doesn’t give a damn about anybody else.”

Or maybe nobody cares anymore

Even if Rihanna suddenly became the official spokesperson of PSLs, however, there is also the possibility that, quite frankly, nobody really cares that much anymore. We seemed to have hit peak “pumpkin spice hot take” in the year 2014, with searches for “pumpkin spice latte” peaking in 2015.

Maybe that’s because we’ve all been stricken with a case of seasonal beverage fatigue in general. Starbucks is constantly coming out with random gimmicky drinks, from the Unicorn Frappuccino to the so-called secret menu.

We also aren’t seeing the same kind of anger directed at what is arguably replacing pumpkin spice as autumn’s de facto flavor. In 2017, both Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts released maple pecan lattes. And according to restaurant menu data from that year, “mentions of maple as a flavor in nonalcoholic beverages on menus are up 86 percent this year over last. … Pumpkin mentions, on the other hand, are down 20 percent.” Yet nobody’s complaining about how stupid maple syrup is.

And these days, tweets about PSLs are way more in the vein of “Screw you and let me enjoy my shitty drink in peace, because everything is terrible.”

People have also expressed exhaustion about the “actually-ing” over what pumpkin spice even is, as if anyone really wants to talk about it.

There are even ironic tweets poking fun at the automation of feminist responses to the anti-pumpkin spice brigade:

Anyway, this is all to say that maybe by now pumpkin spice has finally returned to signifying the autumnal blend of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves, and nothing more: not basic, not everything wrong with capitalism, and not gross. Because it’s not! It’s delicious.

Update, August 26, 2025, 10 am ET: This story was originally published in 2018 and has been updated multiple times, most recently with the 2025 PSL return date.

Many Instagram users this week had their scrolling interrupted by the bearded visage of our newly elected Vice President JD Vance. Suddenly it seemed that on the week of their inauguration, everybody on the app was following or being suggested to follow the official accounts of President Donald Trump and Vance (@POTUS and @VP, respectively). 

Chaos ensued. In group chats, on Instagram Stories, on X, and Bluesky, people frantically wondered what was up. Some, like pop stars Gracie Abrams and Demi Lovato, said that when they tried to unfollow the VP and POTUS accounts, the app wouldn’t let them until they attempted multiple times. Other hashtags appeared to be banned or hidden, like #jan6 or #democrat. 

Meta, meanwhile, has been busy assuring users that nothing new or weird is going on here. The accounts for the POTUS and VP, including their followers, were automatically handed over to the new administration as is customary during a presidential transition, while the accounts for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris previously under those usernames would be duplicated in an archive account. They’ve said it “may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to go through” but did not provide details when asked by the New York Times why that might be. Hashtags like #democrat were hidden, Meta said, due to “an error” that affected many hashtags, not just left-leaning ones (those hashtags are now visible). 

The episode came just weeks after Meta, Instagram, and Facebook’s parent company, announced sweeping changes to the platforms: CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he would be firing Meta’s fact-checkers and relaxing standards for moderating posts in an effort to prevent “bias” and “censorship” — a move that was widely read as an attempt to curry favor with the Trump administration. Since 2018, Instagram and Facebook have deprioritized political and news content; now, it plans to bring these topics back to the forefront of users’ feeds.

Meta’s assurances that they are not boosting certain accounts or censoring others, and that these issues are no more than glitches may very well be true. But due to the secretive, black box nature of algorithms like Meta’s, it’s very hard to fact-check such claims. 

Jillian York, author of Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism, says that Meta has a long history of censorship. “We should not take Meta at their word for anything,” she says. “There’s a history of Meta saying, ‘This is a glitch,’ and what they really mean is internal bias, human error, or AI error. It’s unclear at this point which we’re talking about.”

For years, Republicans have believed that social media companies were inherently biased against conservative speech, despite evidence to the contrary. (More news influencers lean conservative, and most are male.) Now with a new Trump administration in power, it’s liberals who are expressing concern — and their fears, watchdogs say, are more reasonable than they might initially seem. 

People worried about how Silicon Valley tycoons are kowtowing to Trump need not look far for an example of what conservative control of a platform might look like. “We saw this happen with X after Musk took over. My feed was completely different, and I think that’s possible with Meta too,” says York. Twitter was famous for its searchability, its transparency (you could see exactly who follows who, who liked what, what time a tweet was posted, and what was trending), and its allowance for free speech relative to other platforms. 

But under Musk, who describes himself as a free speech absolutist, censorship on X has gotten worse, not better. He banned links to competitor websites like Instagram and Substack, and admitted that X throttles posts that include any links at all, preventing users from accessing the kind of substantial, quality information found in news articles. He downranked tweets about Ukraine and appeared to limit views of posts that included words like “transgender,” “gay,” and “bisexual,” while allowing slurs for gay people to go unchecked. He dissolved the company’s Trust and Safety Council and boosted his own tweets so that they became inescapable for any user, regardless of whether they followed him. 

Just like Musk pulled certain levers to make X a friendlier place for hate speech, spam, and AI slop, so too can any other platform. They can deprioritize links to certain websites (or any websites at all) so that posts that include them will receive fewer views. They can amplify hatred against minority groups while banning speech critical of the established order (for instance, under Meta’s new rules, writing “white people have mental illness” is prohibited on Facebook, while “gay people have mental illness” is allowed). They can, in theory, throttle users they deem problematic so that their posts don’t spread while boosting those who are sympathetic to their own interests. 

Platforms can also limit transparency, as was the case when Meta got rid of CrowdTangle, the tool that allowed researchers and journalists to track what’s trending, how information spreads, and which accounts are driving it. TikTok, too, quietly killed its feature that allowed people to see how many views videos containing certain hashtags received. The move came after accusations that TikTok was boosting pro-Palestinian content due to the popularity of pro-Palestine hashtags, even though no evidence ever emerged that that was true. 

All of the major platforms already filter “sensitive” topics (why else would so many people be using algospeak, like “seggs” or “unalive”?). There’s nothing stopping them from continuing to bury whatever they deem fit; several rights watch organizations have warned that Facebook and Instagram routinely censored pro-Palestine content. 

On TikTok, many users complained that their algorithms seemed to lean more conservative after the app was offline in the US for several hours, then reinstated, perhaps a reflection of a shift in the user base that has been underway for months. The app welcomed users back with an announcement that explicitly thanked Trump, a rare move for a tech company. During the weekend’s inaugural events, TikTok sponsored a party celebrating the top 30 conservative influencers who helped secure Trump the election. In the days afterward, TikTok users claimed they couldn’t search for terms like “fascism” or comment “free Palestine.” 

Though TikTok has denied that it is censoring this content, the problem is the same as it is with Meta: No one can be absolutely sure the company isn’t lying, and it’s no wonder people are suspicious. 

Internet users fear more than just the erosion of trust in their social platforms: AI has made Google Search barely useable, filled Amazon, Etsy, and other storefronts with junk, populated social media with bots, and regurgitated misinformation to the millions of people who use tools like ChatGPT or Google Gemini. Humans have never spent more time online, but the spaces we’re in often make us mistrust everyone we interact with and everything we’re told.  

Despite the backlash against the rightward swing of the major platforms, it’s curious that there isn’t a larger mass movement away from them. As Politico’s Derek Robertson wrote in Liberties Journal, so many of us feel like we’re hurtling toward a dystopian technocracy where human life and connection are continually degraded and devalued, and yet, “Why has a popular movement for technological self-governance failed to coalesce — something akin to the political movement inspired by the urbanist Jane Jacobs? Why, to return to our original question, don’t people care?”

It’s clear that people do care, but perhaps they feel as though their concerns won’t be heard unless they’re on the same platforms as everybody else, or that the platforms they’re on will morph into something unrecognizable. Perhaps we’re all just burnt out by the thought of building a presence on yet another new app — one that could, like all the others before it, only disappoint us in the end.

The point of Beast Games is laid out with chilling starkness in the first 60 seconds of its premiere. A thousand people are competing for a $5 million grand prize that, we’re told, is the “largest in entertainment history.” But its host, 26-year-old Jimmy Donaldson, better known as the massively successful YouTuber styled “MrBeast,” refers to this pile of money in another way: “generational wealth.” This might sound like an oddly academic way of describing a jackpot, but only if you were unfamiliar with Mr. Beast’s defining quality: his desire to test exactly what people are willing to do for cash.

The next thing viewers hear on Beast Games is the contestants describing their motivations for competing on the show. The first is a Black woman who says that she grew up homeless and that she would use the money to help other homeless kids. The second is a young white guy who says, “If I win $5 million, I could use that to make passive income for the rest of my life.”

Beast Games, whose first four episodes are now streaming on Amazon Prime, knows what it is doing when it shows you one contestant presumably worthy of the prize and another presented as far more sinister by comparison. It knows what it is doing when it shows you a millennial with pink hair crying hysterically because they knocked over a tower of blocks, or any other instance of grown adults acting like toddlers. It knows that it has taken Squid Game, a show about how, actually, our glee at watching poor people debase themselves for money might be a bad thing, and drawn the exact opposite conclusion. 

Beast Games exists to make you hate it and other people, and for you to keep watching regardless. In this, it’s an extraordinary success. 

The gist is that 1,000 people wearing tracksuits compete in challenges to win the prize over the course of 10 episodes. They start the contest in a giant warehouse before moving to “Beast City,” which looks like a life-size Brio train set, then onto “Beast Island,” a private $1.8 million Panamanian island. Future episodes move those remaining to the Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. Despite reportedly costing more than $100 million to make, it’s marked by nonsensical writing, ugly graphic design, and frequent ads for MoneyLion, a payday loan company that markets itself as a cool fintech brand. Every moment of the show is designed to capture and keep your attention, and it does, even as you hate yourself more with every passing second. 

The logic of the show is so poisonous that the moments designed to strengthen viewers’ faith in humanity — like when all four team captains choose to forgo an offer of $1 million rather than betray their teammates — made me want to scream at them from my couch. “Don’t you know that literally the only reason you’re here is to win a bunch of money?” I wanted to say, before reminding myself that I am an adult woman watching Beast Games. 

But this cynicism is justified when one of said team captains then becomes a cultlike figure among a faction of his fellow contestants, spewing bizarre Christian sermons in order to further his identity as a martyr. The large-bearded Jeremy claims that it is in fact God who is guiding him through Beast Games, and God who told him to take mostly his fellow male teammates along with him to the next round, even after he promised to help the women. This leads to a hilarious moment where a female contestant says, “I speak to God every day and I know for a fact he didn’t tell him that.”

Those who are Beast-fluent know that Donaldson typically shies away from more complicated narratives about gender and race, preferring instead to keep the tone to toddler-level simplicity: “Mr. Beast give poor guy money, Mr. Beast God!” There is an almost shocking lack of conflict in many of his YouTube videos; any tension is only surface-level. 

This is where the Amazon show innovates, pitting the men and women and the white and non-white players against each other, forming the central narrative of the show. It’s horrific and infuriating to witness two brothers gleefully convince a sobbing woman to sacrifice herself for them, or when a white guy takes back his promise to the two Black people he’s sharing a prison cell with. (God, this shit is bleak.) By the third episode, I was ready to wield pitchforks to defend the good-hearted players from the evil ones, forgetting entirely that all of it was a fallacy orchestrated by the world’s most famous YouTuber and a multibillion-dollar corporation with a long track record of exploitation. 

Mr. Beast, famously uncharismatic, is useless when it comes to the task of comforting contestants who get booted off the show (or in some cases, dropped into an abyss); the scenes that require him to show human emotion are painful to watch, and not just because he spends the entire show wearing a hideous shiny suit over a black hoodie. 

His crew — Donaldson’s friends-slash-employees known as the “Beast Gang” — are worse. They are awkward, soyfacing bros who do nothing but attempt to emulate surprise about a game they designed while repeating whatever internet slang they think is most popular (drink every time they shout “Locked in!”). None of them are capable of interacting normally with other human beings, which I suppose is understandable when the only time you have to interact with normal people is when they’re begging you for money. 

This, again, is the logic of the Mr. Beast universe, composed of wealthy 20-something hustle-bro influencers in a variety of different flavors and their armies of wannabe copycats. Here, the sort of money jargon used by Mr. Beast and his contestants — “generational wealth,” “passive income” — amounts to gospel. Mr. Beast and his ilk are obsessed with rags-to-riches narratives, both their own and other people’s, and with dangling the dream of “financial freedom” to viewers by showing off Lamborghinis, Rolexes, and their success with women. To them, money is the key to all of it; it is the be-all, end-all of human life. As Katie Notopoulos wrote on Threads, “‘Beast Games’ is money-obsessed; the first ep challenges are mindgames about winning money, not physical challenges. It’s a game show where ‘wanting money’ is the entire entertainment.”

The nihilism at the heart of Beast Games is, of course, nothing new. As Emily Nussbaum catalogs in her history of the genre, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV, making poor people prostrate themselves in an attempt to win cash is older than color television broadcasting. 1945 saw the debut of Queen for a Day, a radio show in which working-class housewives competed to win a slate of prizes by sharing their sob stories to an audience, who would determine the winner via applause-o-meter. Crucially, she writes, “You couldn’t be queen if the prize was for you. It had to be for your preemie baby, your sick aunt — and the more showily self-abnegating you were, the more likely other women would let you win.”

You could argue that there are plenty of reality TV shows more diabolical than Beast Games — the 2000s alone saw such ethical disasters as The Swan, Kid Nation, Cheaters, The Biggest Loser, and Jon & Kate Plus Eight. As ugly as Beast Games is to watch, it appears to have been even uglier behind the scenes. Contestants reportedly had to sign contracts that acknowledged “I understand that such activities may cause me death, illness, or serious bodily injury.” In a lawsuit filed against the show, several contestants said they experienced sexual harassment, were “degraded” by the experience, and that they lacked access to food and medicine. (Neither representatives for Amazon MGM studios nor Mr. Beast have commented on the lawsuit.) A few of the contestants also left the arena in stretchers, while others were hospitalized. “We signed up for the show, but we didn’t sign up for not being fed or watered or treated like human beings,” one contestant told the New York Times.

Over the past few years, it’s begun to feel a little bit like many of us are contestants in a reality game show, one where our job is to sell sob stories to maximize the amount of attention and money we can squeeze out. It’s been illuminating to see which sorts of people thrive on this particular show, and watching Beast Games, at the very least, helped me understand better the dark, festering desires at the heart of the American id. It’s Mr. Beast’s world now. Game on.

Over the past few years, the public has stopped treating movie press tours like marketing fluff and started treating them like reality shows. These often tedious stretches of talk-show appearances, red carpets, and press junkets that have been part of the Hollywood grind for decades are suddenly getting as much attention on social media as the films themselves, with the stars’ interactions being picked apart by fans.

Since the social media frenzy surrounding the 2022 film Don’t Worry Darling, press tours have become sites of intense speculation often translating to full-blown scandals, from affair speculation from Anyone but You fans to the persistent rumors of everyone versus Justin Baldoni on the set of It Ends With Us.

It’s not surprising that this trend has struck the most anticipated (or unavoidable) movie of the year, Wicked. From its stars’ character-inspired outfits to the extremely sappy nature of their press junkets — including a now-heavily memed “holding space” moment — all eyes are on the Wicked cast. However, this attention has manifested in a more uncomfortable way than rumors about Harry Styles’s spit. Both Erivo and Grande have become subjects of rampant online theories and scrutiny regarding their red carpet appearances, adding an icky element to an otherwise wholesome movie rollout.

All of this press tour nonsense speaks to the free-for-all nature of the internet, particularly in the TikTok age. In its worst cases, this insatiable desire for controversy can override ethical or productive conversations. Inevitably, these narratives become seen as absolute truths. 

Wicked’s press tour got the internet’s attention, for better or worse

The promotion for Wicked dates all the way back to March when Erivo and Grande presented at the Academy Awards together wearing green and pink gowns representing their respective roles as Elphaba and Glinda. Since then, themed dressing, a la Margot Robbie for Barbie, has been a significant feature of the press tour. The two have also been keen on highlighting their close friendship, one of the overarching themes of the musical. They often hold hands on red carpets and in interviews, in addition to complimenting one another’s talents in interviews. In a now-viral interview with reporter Jake Hamilton, they were asked how they’ve been changed by one another, causing Grande to well up.

Both actresses’ tendency to cry and be overly sentimental while discussing a film about witches and talking goats has become a bit of a joke on social media. One interview in particular became a source of mockery and a viral meme over the past week. During an interview with Out, writer Tracy E. Gilchrist tells Erivo and Grande about the impact of the musical’s signature number “Defying Gravity” in the days following the reelection of Donald Trump, using popular therapy language to explain that fans are “holding space” for the lyrics. Gilchrist seems to be saying that the emotions in the song are resonating with fans after the election, but frankly her meaning is a little unclear. A solemn instrumental of the songs plays as Erivo responds meditatively, “That’s really powerful; that’s what I wanted.” Grande, welling up again, grabs her castmate’s finger for emotional support.

Still, not all the attention Erivo and Grande are receiving on the press tour is as light-hearted. Even separate from the press tour, Grande’s appearance was already being put under a microscope on social media. In April 2023, the singer posted a video on TikTok urging fans to stop speculating about her body weight after Redditors and other social media users expressed concern about her thinness. Grande told social media users to be “gentler and less comfortable” discussing people’s bodies. 

Her response did little to quell those public chatter. In fact, the speculation around a potential eating disorder has torpedoed into a weeks-long discussion among both fans and detractors on social media in the months since Wicked’s press tour began. Social media users have claimed Erivo also looks markedly thinner. Some have even accused the pair of costars of having competitive eating disorders.

Meanwhile, others have expressed concern about the effects over Erivo and Grande being so hypervisible at their current state. Some even suggested the two are promoting eating disorders, if not inadvertently triggering people who have them. Others have put the responsibility on their teams for not intervening. In an op-ed for the Standard, India Block writes that the conversation around their appearance is more so “an indictment of Grande and Erivo’s management, the Wicked team, and the entertainment industry as a whole.” 

In the wake of an Ozempic fad that’s taken over Hollywood and the concerns it’s raised, it’s not exactly a shock that we got here. Still, it’s unclear how this very public conjecture will benefit anyone. Maybe Grande and Erivo’s well-being was never really the point of the conversation.

How press tours became bigger than the movies

Considering the point of press tours is to generate press attention, Wicked’s was a massive success, despite the controversies that dogged the film along the way. Compared to the laundry list of other movies from the past few years whose press tours eclipsed the impact of the film itself, Wicked’s mess was positively tame. 

While the discourse around the Barbie press tour, perhaps the most famous in recent history, seemed solely focused on star Margot Robbie’s hyper-coordinated fashion moments and director Greta Gerwig’s techniques to bring Barbieland to life, there was juicier drama behind the scenes of other films. When Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney were busy promoting Anyone but You, their palpable chemistry didn’t go unnoticed. Both had partners going into filming, but Powell left single, after his girlfriend unfollowed Sweeney on Instagram and posted a cryptic breakup message (a source claimed they never hooked up). 

This, of course, is what press tours are designed to do: Make audiences believe that the heat between its leads isn’t just an act, that it’s real — and if there are real-world repercussions, welp, that’s showbiz, baby. (Who could forget Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s year-long lovefest to promote A Star Is Born?). There are some cases where the on-set chemistry is, in fact, real — whenever Zendaya and Tom Holland get to promote a Spider-Man movie together, the internet collectively squeals — and some cases where it’s so real that people’s lives get blown apart (like when Kristen Stewart, then dating Robert Pattinson, had an affair with Rupert Sanders, the married director of Snow White and the Huntsman). 

But the most compelling version of press tour drama is when the cast seems to absolutely hate each other. That’s what thirsty fans were treated to in advance of this fall’s It Ends With Us, in which star Blake Lively clashed with director and co-star Justin Baldoni. Though details were murky and mostly seemed to center on a difference in creative vision between the two (not exactly the stuff of soap operas), it snowballed into fodder for all kinds of other discussions on the controversial themes of the film, which dealt with domestic violence, Baldoni’s previous life as a self-identified “male feminist” voice online, and Lively’s husband Ryan Reynolds, who people tend to have strong opinions about. 

2022’s Don’t Worry Darling had both love and hate — buzz about an affair between director and star Olivia Wilde and her lead actor, pop megastar Harry Styles, and rumors of tension between everyone from Wilde and actress Florence Pugh, Pugh and one-time co-star Shia LaBeouf, and, potentially, Styles and co-star Chris Pine, with whom he was alleged to have spit on at the premiere. (The spitting was roundly denied.)

All of these films have been major box office successes, begging the question of how much the off-screen drama convinced people to buy tickets. This isn’t always the case; when Joaquin Phoenix caused controversy for his behavior on the 2008 press tour for Two Lovers, which he later described as “performance art,” it didn’t translate to tons of sales. 

Perhaps that’s because audiences’ relationship to press tours is extremely different than it was 16 years ago. Thanks to social media, people now have unprecedented access into the lives of celebrities and industry insiders to the point where they’re absorbing the jargon of the business and speculating on the career trajectories of their favorites. Normal fans now regularly discuss whether a certain star is sufficiently “media trained,” congratulating those who are able to sidestep uncomfortable questions and seem unflappable. You’d think it’s counterintuitive — don’t people want their celebrities to be unfiltered and entertaining rather than “brand-safe”? Instead, they cheer on the performance of celebrity rather than the celebrity herself. 

In other words, press tours aren’t for the press anymore. They’re for the general public, which has, in turn, become the press — or at least the press that matters. What would once involve a trip to a couple late night talk shows and a glossy magazine cover now mandates appearances on a laundry list of shows, many of them online-only, whether that means shoving down chicken wings on Hot Ones, flirting with Amelia Dimoldenberg on Chicken Shop Date, taking a Vanity Fair lie detector test, or gabbing about your must-have products with GQ. Footage from these shows and red carpet interviews are then clipped and optimized to go viral on social media and become inescapable whether you’re interested in seeing the film or not. 

Because so much of press tours now take place online, it’s even easier to feel like what you’re seeing is an authentic portrayal of actors’ lives. It seems less manufactured (though of course the celebrities are there to work). It’s easy to believe that Grande and Erivo really do share Glinda and Elphaba’s complex best friendship — or even, perhaps, that you’re their friend, too. A dramatic or intense off-camera dynamic among a cast now might be exactly what convinces audiences to shell out for movie tickets, because it feels like the stakes are immediate. Wait too long to see it, and you might have missed out on your chance to join in the discourse while it’s still fresh. 

In the case of Wicked, it’ll be interesting to see how Part One compares to next year’s promotional tour. How many more times can we see Erivo and Grande in theatrical green and pink gowns crying over how much they love each other? How much more — and please excuse the Wicked pun — popular could it even get? 

Update, November 25, 1 pm ET: This story, originally pushed November 22, has been updated with information about the Grande and Erivo Out interview.