Charli xcx is her own favorite reference. She’s kicking off her 2026 feature film acting run with a role she was born to play—herself. In the trailer released today for her upcoming movie The Moment, it was revealed that the plot will be heavily inspired—if not an almost exact retelling—of summer 2024, when Charli managed to take over the music industry and culture at large with her hit album Brat. The story will focus mainly on Charli’s preparation for her first headlining arena tour with real-life concert footage included.
But the Grammy winner has made it very clear that this is not a documentary—rather a mostly fictitious exploration of fame, “overnight” success, and the music industry. “It’s not a tour documentary or a concert film in any way,” she shared in a statement. “But the seed of the idea was conceived from this notion of being pressured to make one. It’s fiction, but it’s the realest depiction of the music industry that I’ve ever seen.” The trailer shows Charli in a number of satirical classic concert movie moments. Through this project, she and director Aidan Zamiri have clearly tapped into a widely recognized current truth: Not only are fans endeared by celebrities who poke fun at themselves, but those are also usually the ones we pay the most attention to.
The Moment’s (very flashy) trailer drop arrives on the heels of another widely circulated, well-received meta attempt: an 18-minute fake, quintessentially corporate Zoom call posted by Timothée Chalamet, in which he pitches an unimpressed (and likely also fake) marketing team a series of illogical ideas (like dropping ping-pong balls on a crowd of festival attendees) to promote his upcoming movie Marty Supreme.
Timothée’s unique approach to film promo has been an FYP talking point since his 2024 A Complete Unknown press tour (which took him everywhere from Brittany Broski’s Royal Court to ESPN’s College GameDay). Whether you find his efforts creative/cutting-edge or try-hard, that Zoom call dropped him deadset in on the joke and left less room for any naysayers to position Timmy as an out-of-touch movie star straining to seem relatable. The man’s on Zoom trying to tell an overworked group of marketers how to do their jobs—it’s by no means an overt bid for likability. But it yielded delighted fan responses (“This is the funniest thing and best movie ad I’ve seen in my life”) and drove way more attention towards Marty than an earnest IG Live Q&A might’ve.
The Moment’s cutting through noise in a similar way. While we only have the star-studded teaser trailer so far, responding to Brat Summer’s world domination with a standard concert film would’ve been easily forgettable. We’ve seen that time and time again (and Katy Perry’s Part of Me did it best, thanks to this scene alone, IMO). A 90-minute self-aggrandizing documentary showing how Charli poured her “blood, sweat, and tears” into the project would’ve only solidified any lingering Brat fatigue—true as that may be. But by parodying herself, Charli gets to ridicule celebrity, which, if the persistent success of tabloid culture is any indication, is literally America’s favorite pastime.
Timothée and Charli are nowhere near the first celebrities to play exaggerated versions of themselves onscreen. A-list SNL hosts do it basically every other week, and the enduring success of “celebrity playing themselves” projects like Spice World and This Is the End prove that it’s a forever-lovable genre. But there’s no more appropriate time for the whole meta method than right now.
The modern fan is consuming content at every waking moment, from the minute they grab their phones in the morning. They’re overly familiar with the structure and life cycle of the celebrity biopics, concert-movie trailers, and press-tour clips they’re served nonstop on their feed. The most successful (and charming) way to circumvent any exhaustion people have with traditional media is by all but outright saying, I get how annoying this is too!
By going meta, you get to play both fan and subject—you can subtly partake in discourse about how overexposed your album was or how outlandish your movie-promo efforts can be without seeming overly defensive or sensitive to fan feedback. It was funny back when Nicolas Cage did it in his meta biopic and surreal when Being John Malkovich dropped.
But today, there’s an actual necessity for stars to get a little subversive in their promotional and storytelling efforts. In the battle for our dwindling patience, a self-aware A-list celebrity sets off a signal in our brains that tells us a square peg is trying to fit in a round hole, and that’s something we should probably pay attention to.
