Put those “Golden Popcorn” statues back in storage. The MTV Movie & TV Awards have been put “on pause” this year, and “will return with a reimagined format in 2025,” according to a spokesperson.
The show, originally dubbed the MTV Movie Awards, was a yearly fixture from 1992 to 2019, but has lost some momentum in recent years. The show wasn’t held in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, MTV aired MTV Movie & TV Awards: Greatest of All Time, a clip show hosted by Vanessa Hudgens, which featured highlights from past ceremonies.
The show took place in 2021 and 2022, but the 2023 show was stymied by the Writers Guild of America strike. Drew Barrymore was set to host that year’s show. Barrymore has achieved success in both movies and TV and would have been an ideal host, but when the WGA went on strike on May 2, 2023 – just five days before the show was set to take place at Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, Calif. – Barrymore and most of the planned guests dropped out. As a result, the traditional ceremony didn’t take place. It was replaced by a pre-recorded virtual ceremony with no host.
The MTV Movie & TV Awards were once a hot pop-culture show. Hosts in the show’s prime included such A-list stars as Eddie Murphy, Will Smith, Ben Stiller, Mike Myers, Jimmy Fallon and Sarah Jessica Parker, the latter at the height of her Sex and the City fame. But the show has lost some allure in recent years.
The two post-pandemic shows that made it to air were co-hosted by Leslie Jones and Nikki Glaser, followed by Hudgens and Tayshia Adams. No shade to these performers, but they’re not Eddie Murphy or Will Smith.
This isn’t the first time MTV has pulled the plug on a show. The 2023 MTV Europe Music Awards were scheduled to take place on Nov. 5, 2023 at the Paris Nord Villepinte in Paris. The ceremony was cancelled on Oct. 19 due to the Israel–Hamas war, becoming the first EMAs to be cancelled in its 30-year history. Despite that setback, voting remained open until Oct. 31. The winning artists were revealed on Nov. 5.