Franchise criticism with sharp elbows.
Cult Popture is built around two-person film-franchise conversations that treat recap and reaction as the same act. Animated sequels, horror follow-ups, travel comedies, and chaotic action duologies all get pulled apart with brisk banter and very little ceremony.
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Cult Popture’s Film Franchise Fortnights is a movie-marathon review format with a loose mouth and a sturdy premise. Each installment takes on a film franchise, from animated crowd-pleasers to horror legacies, and follows the series far enough to notice the weird patterns that single-film reviews often miss. The show is casual, but it is not empty chatter. It pays attention to franchise logic. It notices when a sequel is coasting, when a villain has no shape, when a cartoon universe has rules nobody in the film wants to explain, and when a horror follow-up is more interesting as a detective story than as an exorcism movie. The How to Train Your Dragon conversation treats Hiccup and Toothless as more than plot machinery, then swerves into voice comparisons and side remarks without pretending the swerve is a problem. The Exorcist episode weighs reputation against actual sequel quality, giving room to both the first film’s stature and the uneven afterlife that follows it. The Despicable Me and Minions discussions are especially alive to design, casting, and the uncanny implications of little yellow comic relief becoming a whole mythology. The Trip episode shifts the frame toward performance, aging, entitlement, and the appeal of watching Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon circle each other. The Argento discussion brings in surreal atmosphere, incoherent plotting, credited and uncredited labor, and the strange production stories that cling to cult cinema. The Crank episode shows the format at its most gleefully compressed, treating a two-film series as a tiny laboratory for tone and excess. Conversation drives everything. The speakers joke, correct, interrupt, remember, and reframe. Sometimes the point arrives cleanly. More often it sneaks in after a detour through a date, a ranking, a bad bit, or a production fact. That is the appeal. Cult Popture makes film criticism feel like sitting near a fast table of friends who have actually done the homework.
Made for: Best for film fans who like completist franchise watching, sequel comparisons, cult-cinema tangents, and animated-film criticism with a dry conversational edge.
What sets it apart: The show’s strength is its mix of assignment-based structure and unruly rapport. It can rank, recap, joke, and analyze inside the same breath without sanding down the messiness.
If movies and TV mattered, we’d be talking about the issues that matter.Home of Film Franchise Fortnights, our podcast where we watch and discuss a randomly chosen film franchise every two weeks! LIKE US ON FACEBOOK ► goo.gl/9EFEIa FOLLOW US ON TWITTER ► goo.gl/tuixnW SUBSCRIBE TO US ON YOUTUBE ► goo.gl/ITdEhK SUBSCRIBE TO US ON ITUNES ► https://goo.gl/Auy4XB EMAIL US AT ► [email protected] FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM ► https://goo.gl/1rrpH7 VISIT THE WEBSITE ► www.cultpopture.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
AJ and Richard turn franchise rewatches into funny, specific arguments about how sequels repeat, distort and occasionally improve their source material.
Cult Popture turns whole film series into sustained arguments between AJ and Richard, with each sequel judged against what came before and what the franchise gradually became.
A leprechaun goes to space, and your real concern is where the 4 sits in the title.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A loose movie conversation finds real weight in Hiccup's injury.
The conversation finds its strongest shape around the first film's ending: Hiccup falling toward the flames, Toothless catching him, and the later reveal of the device replacing Hiccup's foot.
The Exorcist III gives Film Franchise Fortnites a strange franchise detour built around detective-story tension and one famous scare.
Film Franchise Fortnites finds a clean hook in The Exorcist series' uneven arc: the original sits near the top of horror, while The Exorcist III gives the hosts their real reason to revisit the franchise as the strong follow-up after the first film.
Auckland reunion energy turns the minions' missing origin story into a gleeful argument about cartoon logic.
Richard and AJ turn Cult Popture toward a nicely odd question: what are the minions supposed to be? The hosts use the films' vague mythology as an excuse to push at cartoon logic, landing on the weird thought that spotting a minion on an Auckland roadside would mean encountering…
AJ and Richard use a decade-long franchise check-in to weigh Minions, purple redesigns, weak villains, and what still gives "Despicable Me" room for argument.
The "Despicable Me" franchise becomes a ten-year check-in for AJ and Richard, who sort through what still gives these movies enough texture to talk about after years of franchise watching.
A crisp tour through Argento's mothers, cursed houses, production trouble, and one gloriously unruly horror story.
Cult Popture reads Dario Argento's mother mythology through its bleak central question: what does "mother" mean when these figures cannot create life and can only take it?
A loose dragon-movie rewatch finds real feeling in a debate over Hiccup, Toothless, and a missing foot.
How to Train Your Dragon gets a loose, lightly argumentative rewatch from hosts who start with an April Fool's can-opening prank involving oat milk mocha, wander through a new apartment and a Broadway Auckland run, then finally settle into the films.
A loose franchise conversation reaches orbit, then asks why some sequels chase space.
The episode settles on the franchise's most shameless swerve: Leprechaun 4 in space. It starts with a sideways run through an Australian politician's crocodile claims and "Let a Thousand Blossoms Bloom," then lands on Brian Trenchard-Smith's future-set sequel, where the…
AJ and Richard Martin introduce the Skyline film series on the Film Franchise Fortnights podcast, with AJ recording from Melbourne during the comedy festival.
Hosts AJ and Richard return to Film Franchise Fortnights to cover the eight-film Leprechaun horror series.
Hosts AJ and Richard of Cult Popture's Film Franchise Fortnights cover the four How to Train Your Dragon films.
AJ and Richard discuss the Babe film franchise while AJ shares his new apartment situation.
The hosts discuss recording a podcast early in the morning while one is leaving New Zealand, with a humorous ambush and a note about daylight savings.
AJ and Richard cover the Big Mama's House trilogy as the penultimate Film Franchise Fortnights entry, framing it as the kind of mid-budget 2000s comedy franchise the show was built on, alongside Bring It On and Beethoven.
Cult Popture's Film Franchise Fortnights episode covers the four current How to Train Your Dragon films, from the 2010 original to the 2025 remake.
Cult Popture's Film Franchise Fortnights covers The Exorcist franchise, from the 1973 original through Exorcist Believer and the delayed 2027 Mike Flanagan film.
Cult Popture's Film Franchise Fortnights episode covers "Minions" and "Minions: The Rise of Gru" with Richard and AJ recording in person.
AJ and Richard open Film Franchise Fortnights with Despicable Me, the Illumination series that will carry them into the final six months of the show and next week's 1,000th film.
The hosts discuss a potential Christmas Day release of a Home Alone episode segment, prompted by fan requests.
AJ and Richard introduce and discuss Michael Winterbottom's The Trip film series starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.
AJ and Richard open Cult Popture's "Film Franchise Fortnights" with Dario Argento's "Suspiria" (1977), the Three Mothers trilogy, and the 2018 remake directed by Luca Guadagnino.
Cult Popture’s Film Franchise Fortnights covers four Bridget Jones films, from Sharon Maguire’s 2001 debut to 2025’s Mad About the Boy.
The hosts introduce their podcast series covering film duologies, specifically discussing the 'Crank' franchise.