25 fairly feasible pop culture predictions for 2025
Will Drake sue everyone? Will Taylor Swift ditch Travis Kelce for a kosher alternative? Will Larry David and Elmo have a rematch?
Drake, Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard and Bluey all have a big year ahead of them. Photo by Getty/Netflix/Canva
By PJ Grisar December 30, 2024
Every year, against my better judgment, I enter the prediction business — why stop now?
For 2024 I anticipated events that did not come to pass. Ariana Grande is still with Ethan Slater, yet to leave him for a CPA named Leonard Steinberg.
Drake did not end up endorsing prebiotic soda Poppi — but he did get into a vicious feud with Kendrick Lamar, which couldn’t have helped his gut health.
No, as far as my record last year goes, I can merely say the praise I projected for Timothée Chalamet’s turn as Bob Dylan — I thought he’d be heralded as an “easy embodiment of the freewheelin’ songwriter” — seemed to anticipate the words of Variety reporter Clayton Davis, who said, probably not meaning to sound suggestive, that Chalamet “slides into Bob Dylan with an effortless yet focused determination.”
I enter the new year humbled and unsure. As I stand in my kitchen, latke grease congealing in the pan, a copy of a 1972 Camp Ramah yearbook before me and Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’ sermons droning through my bluetooth headphones, I will try my best to see the signs in the drippings.
Without further delay, here are 25 fairly feasible predictions for 2025.
1. After closing out her landmark Eras Tour, Taylor Swift announces her next chapter: ditching Travis Kelce to date BYU quarterback and Manischewitz-endorsed Nice Jewish Boy Jeff Retzlaff.
2. Following a high profile lawsuit over his summertime beef with Kendrick Lamar, Drake will become increasingly litigious and paranoid, threatening action against, among others, the Drake’s line of gas station pastries;, the luxury Chicago hotel that shares his name; and a storefront museum dedicated to the naval career of privateer Francis Drake. The suits will be dismissed as frivolous.
3. The viral father-son duo the Costco Guys find their kosher equivalent in Moti and Ganze Mitzvah, frequenters of Bernstein’s Glatt Kosher Emporium on the Upper West Side. In their spirited TikToks, the Mitzvahs gain social media acclaim by ranking items like kasha varnishkes and double prune hamantaschen on a scale of one to five “bim bams.”
4. Timothée Chalamet wins the best actor Oscar for his turn as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. In a tribute to Dylan’s own controversial Nobel lecture, his acceptance speech is plagiarized in part from a Spark Notes summary of Ethan Fromme, with his remarks beginning “movies and literature both teach us that the sled is a potent metaphor.”
5. Season four of The Bear finds Carmy and crew, now backed by an Orthodox financier, fighting for kosher certification.
6. Moo Deng, the internet’s pygmy hippo darling, enters into hiding when biblical scholars realize that the red heifer sacrifice needed to inaugurate the Third Temple is a mistranslation, and the actual sacrifice requires a tiny, blemish-free behemoth matching her description.
7. The long-delayed Captain America: Brave New World debuts. After much fretting about the origins of Shira Haas’ character (canonically a member of Mossad in the Marvel comics) she is introduced listening to David Broza’s “Mitachat Lashamayim,” thus securing her Israeli bona fides in the role.
8. Wicked: For Good, the follow-up to 2024’s runaway hit, stumps fans with the inclusion of a new, klezmer number for Jeff Goldblum’s wizard. Jewish composer Stephen Schwartz and producer Marc Platt explain that their “great and powerful Oz was always Jewish.” This revelation launches a million thinkpieces and is the subject of countless sermons, as well as a Brandeis doctoral dissertation titled “The Being Behind the Curtain: The Holy of Holies and Wicked as Sacred Text.”
9. Newly-appointed ambassador to France Charles Kushner receives a cold shoulder in Europe. As Bernard-Henri Lévy explains in a column in Le Monde, “the ambassador must realize the French take a dim view of filming our brother-in-laws having relations with sex workers. We believe such extramarital affairs should be allowed to run their course without interference.”
10. Commuters in major cities are puzzled by cryptic subway ads and billboards displaying a date — “10/23/25” — bordered by wisps of white hair and red fur on either side. The viral campaign is soon revealed to be a Netflix livestreamed fight between Larry David (age 78) and Elmo (age 3.5), a rematch following the unprompted violence on the Today Show in February, 2024. After the bout airs, MMA site Bloody Elbow calls it “infinitely more engaging than the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson card.”
11. Chappell Roan converts to Judaism, and joins the Women of the Wall movement. Witnessing her dancing at the Kotel, rabbinic authorities proclaim “Hashem, what have you done?!”
12. Mark Zuckerberg’s underground Hawaiian bunker, which he calls just a “little shelter,” is revealed to be where he keeps the entirety of the metaverse. “It must be caged,” a sodden, scared-looking Zuckerberg says in an Instagram Live, before the feed abruptly cuts to black.
13. Michael Rapaport, the actor famed for his viral dubbing of cat videos and vocal support for Israel, is the new James Bond.
14. The 2025 Met Gala theme is “Be Kind, Rewind,” a retrospective tribute to character actor Richard Kind’s many roles. Kim Kardashian stuns red carpet reporters with her recreation of Arthur Gopnik from A Serious Man. Kind himself is seen at the fish counter at Zabar’s on the big night.
15. Finding little purchase with his legal battles, Drake resumes his musical sabbatical to pursue his Juris Doctor at the University of Toronto. “If the system can fail me, it can fail anyone,” the singer, whose legal name is Aubrey Graham, tells The Toronto Star.
16, Bluey, the titular blue heeler from the hit children’s TV show, enters into service as a shabbos goy for a family of observant Rhodesian Ridgebacks in an episode called “Light Switch.”
17. Billy Joel releases a new single, “Noshin’ Out (Joshua’s Song),” about an East Islip teen’s dead-end job at a Commack deli. While not his best work, reviews praise the lyrics, which rhyme “sable” with “Julian Schnabel” and “chicken in a pot” with “not the life he thought.”
18. Challengers scribe Justin Kuritzkes confirms a spiritual sequel set in the world of ultimate frisbee. The cast includes Alana Haim, Nat Wolff and Richard Gadd as Tulane University champions shattered to discover the sport’s limited career prospects in a postgrad world.
19. RFK Jr. confesses to having seized the body of a biblical Leviathan and left it in the reflecting pool by the Washington Monument.
20. Capitalizing on the 2024 celebrity lookalike contest trend, which saw a slew of Timothée Chalamets and even Drakealikes, Chabad holds an event at 770 Eastern Parkway to find the man who most closely resembles Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. The winner is Nikolai Agafonov, a bishop in the Russian Orthodox Church.
21. Barbra Streisand partners with Taylor Swift producer Jack Antonoff for her first album of new songs since 2018’s Walls, a response to Donald Trump’s first term. Titled Cheeto, it is a broadside of Trump’s second presidency and is notable for its use of a new-to-Babs instrument: the synthesizer.
22. A mixup at the Novo Nordisk factory causes shipments of the weight loss drug Ozempic to be replaced with Soy Vay Veri Veri Teriyaki.
23. Drake, who finishes his legal education in record time, discovers the Forward and its years of predictions about his year to come. Champagne Papi, please don’t sue!
24. The new Golden Bachelorette is a veteran JCC administrator named Mindy Azoulay. The man who gets the ultimate rose — Arnold Scheinbaum — is the only one who agrees to attend Yom Kippur services with her Sephardic family during filming.
25. Season Two of Nobody Wants This confuses fans by opening on the funeral of Rabbi Noah Roklov (Adam Brody). The rest of the season follows Joanne (Kristen Bell) as she falls for a dreamy imam (Ramy Youssef). The Forward writes a dozen articles about it.
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