Development on Hurry Up Tomorrow began in September 2022 after psychological stress resulted in Tesfaye losing his voice during a concert. Co-writers Tesfaye and Fahim served as the film's producers, alongside Kevin Turen and Harrison Kreiss: Hurry Up Tomorrow was one of the final films produced by Turen and is dedicated to him. The film was the source of a dispute between Turen and Tesfaye's previous collaborator, Sam Levinson. It also reportedly failed to initially attract distributors. Principal photography began by February 2023 and concluded by that July.
Hurry Up Tomorrow was theatrically released by Lionsgate in the United States on May 16, 2025. It received negative reviews and bombed at the box office, grossing $7.8 million worldwide.
Plot
Music superstar Abel Tesfaye warms up and performs at a headlining concert. Afterwards, he parties and does drugs with his manager, Lee. Despite encouragement from Lee, Abel does not want to perform due to growing depression after a recent break-up leaves him emotionally unstable. Meanwhile, Anima, a fan of Tesfaye's music, sets a house on fire before driving to Los Angeles to Abel's next concert, ignoring phone calls from her mother.
Before the concert, Abel is diagnosed with muscle tension dysphonia and considers cancelling, but is convinced to perform by Lee. Before embarking onstage, Abel leaves an emotional, foul-mouthed voicemail to his ex-girlfriend, blaming her for his depression. Anima attends the concert, where Abel loses his voice and abruptly walks offstage. Anima sneaks backstage and meets Abel. Intrigued, Abel waves away security and spends the night with Anima in Pacific Park and later, at a hotel. Anima cries after Abel plays a portion of the unfinished song "Hurry Up Tomorrow", relating to its themes of loneliness and abandonment.
The following day, as Abel prepares to return to his tour, Anima answers a phone call from her distraught mother, who demands that Anima explain herself. Anima tearfully apologizes, tells her mother that she loves her, and ends the call. As Abel prepares to leave, Anima accuses him of abandoning her and pleads with him to open up emotionally to her, but he refuses. Anima knocks him unconscious with a champagne bottle. Abel has a vivid nightmare in which he wanders from the hotel room onto the empty streets, then unwillingly rides the hotel elevator to an underground tunnel, where he flees from a shrieking young woman, and finally encounters his child self singing a portion of "Hurry Up Tomorrow" in Amharic beside a fire in a snowy field.
Abel wakes up tied to the hotel bed. Anima dances and sings along to his songs "Blinding Lights" and "Gasoline" and suggests that they were inspired by Abel's toxic relationships, drug addiction, and depression. Abel refuses to discuss the songs with her. Lee arrives to find Abel, having tracked his phone to the hotel. Anima tries to get Lee to leave, but he breaks down the door. After a violent struggle, Anima fatally stabs Lee in the neck. Anima douses Abel with gasoline, threatening to burn him if he will not be honest with her. Abel finally pacifies Anima by singing "Hurry Up Tomorrow". She releases him from the bed and sets the room on fire before she leaves. Abel exits the hotel room and walks down the hallway, which leads him directly backstage before a concert. He stares at his reflection in a mirror.
Tesfaye, Ortega, and Barry Keoghan signed on to star in Hurry Up Tomorrow. It marked Tesfaye's first film leading role, having previously made a cameo appearance as himself in Uncut Gems (2019) and starred in the HBO television series The Idol (2023); which he also co-created.[9] Although Ortega and Keoghan were weighing several offers following their respective breakthrough years, production was greenlit after they pledged their commitments.[6]Live Nation Entertainment financed the film on a budget of $15 million.[10]
The film and the album was inspired by a real-life incident at the After Hours til Dawn Tour show in September 2022 at SoFi Stadium, in which Tesfaye lost his voice while performing and was forced to stop the show, caused not by physical injury but from psychological stress.[11] The album track "I Can't Fucking Sing" also references this event with dialogue from the film.[12]
It's been reported that Turen's longtime relationship with filmmaker Sam Levinson, who also worked on The Idol, deteriorated after Levinson felt "betrayed" that Turen was attached to the project without him knowing.[10] Turen contended that he had told Levinson's wife, Ashley Levinson, about Hurry Up Tomorrow, but she expressed no interest and never mentioned it to her husband. Several of Masters' sources say Ashley denied knowing anything about the film.[10]
In April 2025, Tesfaye clarified that the film was conceived and developed before the album, which was produced and completed during the film's post-production scoring process.[14]
Hurry Up Tomorrow (Original Motion Picture Score) (2025)
The film's soundtrack, Hurry Up Tomorrow (Original Motion Picture Score), was released on July 11, 2025. Although it was initially slated for both digital and physical release, it ultimately became available only in physical format, on LP and CD. The soundtrack is a collaborative effort between The Weeknd and Oneohtrix Point Never, featuring 16 original instrumental tracks composed by the duo, alongside ten songs from The Weeknd's own Hurry Up Tomorrow (2025) album.[15]
Tracks 1–16 all written and produced by the Weeknd and Oneohtrix Point Never. Tracks 17–26 can be found on Hurry Up Tomorrow (2025) as tracks 2, 4, 7, 13, 15, 17 and 19–22, respectively.
"Cry for Me" contains a sample of "I Wanna Be the One", written by Curtis Fitzgerald Williams and Karen Patterson, as performed by The S.O.S. Band.[16]
"São Paulo" contains an interpolation of "Montagem Pidona", written by Flavio Seraphim de Almeida, Everton Ramos de Araujo, Marcelo Nei Leal, Tatiana dos Santos Lourenço, Agustinho Raphael dos Santos, Washington Luis Costa Vaz, and Andre Luiz Viegasand, as performed by Tati Quebra Barraco.[16]
"Without a Warning" contains a sample of "Hurry Up Tomorrow", written by Darryl Howard and Isaac Brown, as performed by The Nu'rons.[17]
Release
In November 2024, Lionsgate Films announced their acquisition of worldwide distribution rights to Hurry Up Tomorrow.[18] The film was released theatrically in the United States on May 16, 2025.[19]
It was subsequently released on premium video on demand services on June 6, 2025.[20]
Reception
Box office
As of July 11, 2025, Hurry Up Tomorrow has grossed $5.2 million in the United States and Canada and $2.5 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $7.8 million.[2][3]
In the United States and Canada, Hurry Up Tomorrow was released alongside Final Destination Bloodlines, and was projected to gross $5–9 million from 2,020 theatres in its opening weekend.[21] It made $1.65 million from preview screenings: $1.3 million on Wednesday and $350,000 on Thursday.[22] The film went on to flop at the box office, placing sixth with an opening of $3.2 million.[22]Deadline Hollywood noted that Lionsgate "really tried" to sell Hurry Up Tomorrow to exhibitors with an extensive marketing campaign, which included a strong presence at CinemaCon, but its box office performance was a "complete rejection" from moviegoers.[22]
Critical response
Critics dismissed the film as an "egomaniacal" and "navel-gazing" vanity project for Tesfaye,[a] and saw it as an extended music video created simply to promote its companion album.[27][28]On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 14% of 91 critics' reviews are positive.The website's consensus reads: "On second thought, let's fast-forward to the workweek."[29]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 29 out of 100, based on 25 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews.[30] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C-" on an A+ to F scale, while those surveyed by PostTrak gave the film an average rating of 1⁄2 out of 5 stars, with 34% saying they would definitely recommend it.[31][22]
Frank Scheck for The Hollywood Reporter found Hurry Up Tomorrow to be "unbearably pretentious" with a screenplay "so devoid of humor and self-awareness that it makes such similarly misbegotten musician star vehicles [such as] Renaldo and Clara (1978), Under the Cherry Moon (1986) and Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984) seem like masterpieces".[32]The Daily Beast's Nick Schager echoed his sentiments, writing that the "feature-length ego stroke of monumental hubris" instantly assumed "pole position in the race for the year's worst movie".[33]Jordan Hoffman of Entertainment Weekly described the film as "nearly plot-free, self-indulgent, overly serious, and, worst of all, just dull".[34] The Toronto Star's Alexander Mooney said the film was "remarkable in its ceaseless and shameless capacity for failure, constantly finding new and innovative ways to fall flat on its face".[35] In the headline for his CBC News review, Jackson Weaver wrote: "[Tesfaye] could've gone to therapy. Instead, he made Hurry Up Tomorrow".[36]
Scheck commended Ortega's and Barry Keoghan's "hard-working efforts" in investing their "thinly written" characters with "intense" energy.[32] Todd Gilchrist of Variety thought that although the film "bears all the signs of pop star hubris masquerading as artistic candor," Keoghan and Ortega delivered "game performances to prop up the budding thespian."[37]The A.V. Club's Jesse Hassenger found Ortega to be "the only person in the movie anyone would ever want to spend any time with." He complimented her erratic behavior and "wonderfully expressive" face, which he described as a "bold-lined comic-book drawing come to life; compared to the rest of Hurry Up Tomorrow, regarding images of Ortega shot on film is a splendid use of time."[38]IndieWire's Charles Bramesco, in a more critical analysis, wrote that Tesfaye and Ortega modeled two opposing modes of an "imitative, hollow performance" with "varying notions of good acting": Ortega "doesn’t understand how or why" to demonstrate stoicism and inexpressiveness while Tesfaye channeled Robert De Niro in Raging Bull (1980) "just without the Method behind his mannerisms."[24]
More positively, G. Allen Johnson of the San Francisco Chronicle described Hurry Up Tomorrow as "a risk-taking experience, a David Lynchianfever dream of a movie that's as visually marvelous as it is head-scratching". He considered the film to be a "Purple Rain for the Euphoria generation," acknowledging that the film is imperfect, but applauded the manner in which it "questions, probes and challenges" viewers.[39] Madison Bloom of Pitchfork, on the other hand, believed that Tesfaye was still "caught in the strangulating grasp of his self-made mythology." She compared Hurry Up Tomorrow to Misery (1990), "a film that raises complex questions about fame, pop culture, and the extremes of fandom. Unfortunately, these ideas are just kind of slapped on the surface of Hurry Up Tomorrow, which fails to penetrate deeper into the lives and motivations of its characters."[40]
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