The sequel to “The Simpsons Movie” has been theoretically happening since roughly the day the first one came out in 2007, which means it has been in the “any day now” column for the entire lifetime of a person who can now legally drink. On Friday night at D23, Disney finally did the two things that make a film real: it put a title card on screen and it put a date under it. The title is “The New Simpsons Movie.” That is not a placeholder. That is the actual name.
It arrives on September 3, 2027, which is twenty years and change after Homer rode a motorcycle around the inside of a dome. Disney also unveiled a poster carrying the new title, and Dana Walden brought an exclusive sneak peek of footage to the room — footage that has not gone online and, by the studio’s own framing, is nowhere near finished. It was shown as work in progress, in the rough, which is a rare and slightly charming thing for a studio to do in front of twelve thousand people with phones.
The title is “The New Simpsons Movie.” That is not a placeholder. That is the actual name.”
Let us deal with the title first, because the internet spent Saturday deciding whether it is lazy or perfect. It is perfect. “The Simpsons” has been making jokes about corporate naming conventions, franchise sequels and the exhaustion of intellectual property for three decades, and calling the follow-up “The New Simpsons Movie” is exactly the kind of flatly literal gag that show has always done best. It is the same instinct that gave us Radioactive Man sequels and Itchy & Scratchy reboots. Anything cleverer would have been less funny.
As for the footage, we did not see it, and neither did you, so here is what the people in the room reported rather than a description dressed up as a viewing. The sequence is built around a baseball game and a runaway ball, and it escalates in the way the best Simpsons set pieces always escalate — by refusing to stop. Homer chases the ball through the stadium hallways. Through the stands. Through a bathroom. Through the media boxes. Out of the stadium entirely and into Main Street.
And then it keeps going, which is the part that made the room laugh. The ball goes into a pickle jar at the bar. Then a bowling alley. Then a doctor’s office. Then the Duff Beer factory, and finally into an enormous vat of beer. That is a single gag extended across what sounds like most of Springfield’s civic infrastructure, and it is a structure lifted straight from the show’s classic era — the sustained chase where the joke is the sheer stubbornness of the escalation, not any individual beat.
The roughness is worth taking seriously rather than treating as a disclaimer. Showing unfinished animation to a room this size is a genuine risk, because rough animation looks bad in ways audiences are not trained to forgive — flat colour, missing effects, timing that has not been polished. Disney did it anyway, and the reason is almost certainly that the sequence plays. A gag built on escalation and geography survives being ugly, because the laugh is structural. If they had led with a character moment or a big emotional beat, the rough render would have killed it.
What is encouraging about that choice is what it is not. It is not a multiverse. It is not a legacy-character team-up. It is not a meta commentary on the show’s own longevity, which is the trap a project like this could very easily fall into after twenty years of the internet insisting the series has been bad since season ten. It is Homer chasing a ball through a town we know the geography of, and the comedy comes from the geography. That is a confident thing to lead your first footage with.
The 2007 film worked for the same reason. Stripped of the marketing, “The Simpsons Movie” was a small story about a man ruining his family’s life and having to earn them back, decorated with the biggest sight gags the budget could buy. It made over half a billion dollars, and then the follow-up simply never came, in part because the series kept running and there was never an obvious gap to make one in. Twenty seasons have aired since. That is the genuinely strange thing about this sequel — it arrives in a world where the show it spun off from is still on the air.
That longevity is the sequel’s real problem to solve. “The Simpsons” is past its thirty-fifth season, and the audience for a theatrical film includes people who stopped watching in 1999, people who never stopped, and a whole generation who found the show on streaming with no sense of eras at all. The 2007 film threaded that by being a very simple story told extremely well. Whatever “The New Simpsons Movie” turns out to be, the chase sequence suggests the team knows the assignment is craft rather than reinvention — and after twenty years, craft is the harder promise to keep.
The 2027 date is also worth reading carefully. September is not a blockbuster animation slot; it is the post-summer window studios use for films they expect to play long rather than open enormously. Given that Disney now owns this property outright and has a habit of putting its animation in July, a September date suggests a film aimed at the people who already love it rather than at a four-quadrant opening weekend. For a “Simpsons” movie, that is probably the correct instinct.
So the summary is short and the news is real: a title that is a joke about titles, a date two years out, a poster, and one very long chase sequence that at least sounds like the show at its best. We will hold the celebration until footage exists that we can actually watch, because rough animation shown to a friendly crowd is the easiest possible version of this to get right. But after two decades of vague noises about a sequel, a September Friday in 2027 is a lot more than we had on Thursday.
What Do You Think? Is “The New Simpsons Movie” the perfect self-aware title or a shrug the marketing team will regret by 2027? Does an extended Springfield-wide chase sequence prove the film is chasing the show’s classic era, or is that exactly the nostalgia play you would expect from a first-footage reel? And after twenty years and twenty more seasons, does a second Simpsons movie still have something to say?
Catch up properly: every episode and movie in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s Simpsons timeline.
See you on the next binge!
