Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: The New Simpsons Movie Brings Homer Back for Seconds in 2027

Twenty years is a long time to wait for seconds. The Simpsons is finally serving them. The New Simpsons Movie, the official title revealed at D23 this summer, arrives in theaters on September 3, 2027, from 20th Century Studios – the first feature film for Springfield’s first family since 2007’s The Simpsons Movie turned a dome over a town into 536 million dollars of worldwide box office.

Disney Entertainment co-chair Dana Walden introduced the project at the D23 Entertainment Showcase alongside an animated Bart, and the studio screened a work-in-progress animatic: storyboards and rough color animation set to temporary score cues borrowed, delightfully, from The Natural and Speed. The sequence is pure Simpsons architecture. Homer is at a Springfield Isotopes game with Lenny, Carl and Kirk Van Houten when a home run ball sails toward the stands. Homer lunges for it. The ball escapes, and the chase spills across the whole town – through Moe’s Tavern, a bowling alley, an emergency room – before ending at the Duff Brewery, where Homer lands inside a fermentation vat and gets launched back to the ballpark, where Bart casually picks up the ball.

A town-wide chase is exactly the right promise

Sequels arriving two decades late usually open with an apology or a legacy speech. This one opens with a sight gag that uses the entire town as its playground, which is the correct instinct. The Simpsons at feature length works when Springfield itself is the second lead – a place where a baseball can ricochet through a dozen beloved locations and every doorway hides a joke the TV show built over nearly forty years.

The date has its own story. The film was first set for July 23, 2027, almost exactly twenty years after the original, then moved to Labor Day weekend to step out of the path of Minecraft 2. The show’s own mythology winks at the delay: back in season 19, Bart’s chalkboard gag promised he would not wait 20 years to make another movie. He nearly kept the promise. Four days shy, technically, still counts as a joke the writers would happily take credit for.

What we do not know yet

The overarching plot remains under wraps, and the studio has not formally confirmed the voice cast, though the long-running principals – Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright and Yeardley Smith – are widely expected back; a Simpsons movie without them is unthinkable and nobody involved is pretending otherwise. What the animatic guarantees is tone: fast, affectionate, and built on physical comedy the series has refined for four decades.

Preview verdict: ay, caramba, in the best way. Animation nostalgia is a crowded market – this same slate includes Zootopia 3 heading into production and the Ice Age herd returning in February – but nobody else can offer twenty years of pent-up Springfield. If the finished film plays like its animatic, Labor Day weekend 2027 belongs to a man, a ball, and a vat of Duff.

Twenty years of Springfield, one big screen

The first Simpsons movie worked because it understood scale: the dome gave the whole town a single problem, and every citizen got a moment inside it. A chase structure promises the same democratic comedy – a ball rolling through Springfield is an excuse to visit everyone – and the animatic’s itinerary, from Moe’s to the brewery, reads like the filmmakers checking that the town is intact and in working order. It is. The other encouraging sign is patience. Disney moved the date rather than rush the landing, and the franchise’s stewards have protected this property’s quality on television for decades; a second feature arriving only when it is ready is the most on-brand decision imaginable. Fans have waited twenty years. The early word says the wait was the point – the town aged with its audience, and like the other animated institutions returning this decade, it is coming back to a generation that grew up inside it and now gets to bring its own kids.

There is a final, sentimental reason to be glad this film exists. The Simpsons is the rare American institution that grandparents and grandchildren can quote at each other line for line, and a feature film is the excuse for those generations to sit in the dark together and laugh at the same jokes at the same time. Television built that bond one Sunday night at a time. A movie, arriving twenty years after the last one, turns it into an event. September 3, 2027: bring your kids, bring your parents, and somebody please keep an eye on Homer near the refreshments.

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