I'm Worried We're Never Getting the Sequel to Nicole Kidman's Viral AMC Ad

I thought we were coming back to this place for magic…

I don’t need a Big Little Lies Season 3; what I need is a sequel to the Nicole Kidman AMC advertisement that single-handedly put cinema on the map. This on the surface jejune ad managed to climb to a rarefied category on par with Dakota Johnson’s 2019 Ellen appearance: moments that capture the zeitgeist without an obvious reason as to why. “If you didn’t like the ad initially, you’ve probably been Stockholm Syndromed into enjoying it after being relentlessly bombarded by internet dummies referencing the fact that heartbreak feels good in a place like this,” Adam J. Moussa, who helped propel the ad’s initial virality, told BuzzFeed in an article examining the ad as a “camp cultural phenomenon.”

Heartbreak feels good in a place like this.

A few weekends ago, I was scrolling through the ‘gram when I situated my attention on a photo of Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon at a Nashville Soccer Club game. My first thought was: I need a ‘Rabbit Hole’ rewatch on the docket stat. My second thought: Wait, we’re fast approaching the one year anniversary of this important headline: “Nicole Kidman’s Amazing AMC Ad Is Getting a Sequel.” Where is it? Where’s the update? And then I had a most chilling thought, one I hesitate to even espouse in print: Maybe we’re not getting it.

“It’s already written,” the writer of the ad, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Billy Ray (The Hunger Games, Captain Phillips), told Vanity Fair almost a year ago. Weeks earlier, AMC CEO Adam Aron announced that the original campaign, which launched in September 2021, “was so effective that we signed her to be our spokesperson for another full year." And who wouldn’t? With her Little Red Riding cape and the ensuing monologue that spawned spoofs on Saturday Night Live, Bravo, Broadway, and an array of viral reactions (this Katya parody is my favorite), it might make total and absolute sense to get the gang, AKA Nicole and her black and silver rhinestone-pinstriped Michael Kors suit (FW21), back together.

Little Red Riding cape.

And yet here we sit, just past a year after that fated announcement, thumbs twiddling and brains rotting, wondering where our sequel is. “But what about the strike?” you might be asking. Valid! But with the strike only beginning in mid-July, one has to wonder why we’ve gotten neither our promised sequel or even, at the very least, any kind of update. And I get it: Nicole is a busy icon. She’s got four movies in various stages of production: Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Spellbound, A Family Affair (which will see her reuniting with Zac Efron, a decade after peeing on him) and Holland, Michigan. On the television side, she’s starring in and executive producing Special Ops: Lioness for Paramount+, Expats for Amazon Prime and The Perfect Couple for Netflix.

Part of me worries that this is part of a lineage of announced sequels (see: Legally Blonde 3 or Election 2) that simply sit in development purgatory. They’re announced to revive a heartbeat, dominate a news cycle for a stint and then are never to be heard from again. I deeply hope this is not the case. It’s been a great summer at the movies, thanks largely to Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan. We need to keep up the momentum. The only — okay, not only, but certainly the most stimulating — way to do that is by dusting off the sparkly suit and getting that PDF in Nicole Kidman’s inbox so that she can (post-strike, of course) start memorizing her lines and get to work.

Dust off the ol’ sparkly suit.

I want to know that somehow, still, heartbreak can feel good in a place like this.